PostFinance is moving its Ethereum staking product to flexible terms in mid-August 2026 and scrapping the twelve-week lock-up. Customers now trigger unstaking themselves, and the bank executes the resulting orders twice a week.

PostFinance is the retail bank of Swiss Post and serves around 2.5 million customers. In staking, investors commit their ETH holdings to secure the network and earn rewards in return, without operating validator infrastructure themselves. The institution opened its crypto business in February 2024, as the first systemically important Swiss bank to do so. Sygnum Bank has handled custody ever since. Ethereum staking followed in January 2025, originally with a fixed twelve-week term and weekly payout of earnings. Across the network, around 42.3 million ETH sit in staking, or 34.7% of circulating supply, while the base yield now sits at only about 2.7%.

Staking without a fixed lock-up

Until now, PostFinance locked staked ETH for twelve weeks. That lock-up period disappears without replacement. Customers decide for themselves when to close a position, so an unstaking order no longer hinges on a calendar date. The bank does, however, bundle staking and unstaking orders and executes them in two windows per week, meaning several days can pass between a customer's decision and execution. Incidentally, the old twelve-week lock-up period came from the bank's product design, not from the Ethereum protocol.

The second change concerns earnings. Staking rewards previously flowed to the account separately each week. From now on, the provider credits them automatically to the existing staking position, which creates a compounding effect, and the separate payout step falls away. For positions held over longer periods, reinvestment lifts the cumulative return, and investors no longer restake the credits by hand. The flip side is that users lose the regular payment stream: that money previously landed in the reference account without any action on their part.

Alexander Thoma, Head of Digital Assets at PostFinance, attributes the overhaul to customer expectations.

"With this development, PostFinance is responding to the rising expectations of crypto investors for more flexibility and a user experience that follows the standards of the Ethereum ecosystem." - Dr. Alexander Thoma, Head of Digital Assets, PostFinance

The announcement says nothing about terms. According to the bank's product page, the minimum amount is 0.1 ETH. In addition, the institution retains 20% of the rewards received, at least USD 1, and charges that amount to the reference account quarterly.

The Ethereum queue shows the limits of flexibility

Ethereum has allowed technical withdrawals from staking since the Shapella upgrade of April 2023. Before that, holders could not pull out deposited ETH at all. Since then, an exit is possible, but not immediate. A contractually fixed lock-up period does not exist in the protocol. Instead, variable queues govern the entry and exit of validators, and their length follows demand in the network. The new PostFinance model consequently moves closer to that protocol reality, though it stays bundled nonetheless, because two fixed time windows per week are not real-time execution.

Current utilization shows how far the preferred date and the actual waiting time can drift apart. On August 17, 2026, 2.23 million ETH stood in the entry queue, corresponding to roughly 39 days of waiting. The exit queue was practically empty at the same moment, with two validators and 64 ETH. Anyone entering currently waits far longer than anyone leaving. For bank customers, the internal execution window adds to this network waiting time, so a bank-side time window helps little when the chain itself is the bottleneck.

This demand carries a price. The base yield at consensus level has fallen to around 2.66% to 2.78% in 2026. Earnings from MEV come on top and vary; they are not guaranteed. The more ETH sit in staking, the more broadly the network spreads its issuance across validators, so a staking ratio of 34.7% is itself part of the explanation. For bank customers, the proportional fee additionally trims the net return, and flexibility alone does not solve that problem.

The FINMA framework behind bank staking

FINMA set the regulatory framework for bank staking in December 2023. Its supervisory notice 08/2023 names conditions for the custody of staked crypto assets. If a supervised custodian meets those criteria, the assets count as custody assets in a bankruptcy, a status the Banking Act sets out in Art. 16 no. 1bis. The liquidator then segregates them instead of treating them as a deposit on the balance sheet. Without those preconditions, however, it remains open whether the staked holdings enjoy protection in bankruptcy. The regulator itself calls segregability unresolved as long as legislation or case law has not settled the question. As a result, a residual risk remains for customers, and nobody can quantify it conclusively.

Criticism from the industry had preceded the notice. The Swiss Blockchain Federation and the Crypto Valley Association had warned against a blanket banking license requirement for staking providers. FINMA finally chose named criteria rather than a general licensing duty. The notice appeared on December 20, 2023, which cleared the path for regulated Swiss providers.

PostFinance used that opening as the first institution of this size. In February 2024, the bank launched trading and custody of cryptocurrencies, and custody remains entirely in Switzerland. The Swiss National Bank lists PostFinance alongside the Raiffeisen Group and Zürcher Kantonalbank as domestically systemically important. In July 2024, the bank added five cryptocurrencies to the original eleven. Ethereum staking followed later, in January 2025. Today the offering covers Bitcoin and 21 further coins.

Staking expansion to further networks announced

Ethereum will not be the end of it. The provider wants to extend staking step by step to further proof-of-stake networks. The bank has announced details for 2027, yet names neither concrete networks nor dates so far, leaving the announcement a statement of direction. A broader offering would reduce dependence on the Ethereum yield, especially since its base has slipped recently.

In the Swiss market, the institution is far from alone. By mid-2026, practically all larger cantonal banks also offer crypto services, including the Zurich, Lucerne and Zug cantonal banks. Furthermore, the crypto specialist banks Sygnum and AMINA, formerly SEBA, add to the field. With around 2.5 million customers, however, PostFinance reaches an audience that specialist banks do not serve, and a staking product without a fixed lock-up lowers the entry barrier for that group.