The Shanghai upgrade is scheduled to take place on April 12th this year (2023). This is an important network upgrade for anyone who has staked ETH in the past. While not all staked ETH will become available, a large chunk of it will be. This will in turn increase the selling pressure of ETH. With around 17 million ETH being staked the rewards sold could be worth around a few billion dollars.
Celsius:
One company in particular that has around 1.3 million ETH, $2.4 billion dollars, will likely sell as soon as possible due to their bankruptcy in July 2022. This is due to the crushing amount of money owed to its users and the pressure to pay back what they can.
Currently as of 4/10/2023 1 ETH is worth $1,911.72 and the total market cap is $230,344,917,901 and a total circulating supply of 120,438,691 provided by Coingeko. If Celsius were able to sell every last ETH they had, it would be about 1% of the total supply. I believe due to Celsius we can expect a 1% drop in price overall, if they were able to sell all their staked ETH.
Beacon Chain:
Beacon chain has had nearly 18,000,000 ETH staked on the platform. This is substantially more than Celsius, but they have not declared bankruptcy and therefor do not have to sell ever ETH that is held. While the entire balance can't be sold right away, we should expect nearly 1,100,000 ETH to be unlocked immediately after the upgrade goes live.
With the stat provided by Coingeko, if we were to assume all of the earned rewards were to be sold immediately we could expect close to another 1% drop in price.
Kraken:
Kraken will be forced to unstake all ETH that was put up by stateside investors. This is due to the exchange failing to register the offer and sale of its crypto-asset-staking-as-a-service program. Currently Kraken has around 1,200,000 ETH staked on the platform.
Again with the statistics provided by Coingeko we can assume if Kraken was able to sell all of its staked ETH, which would be more than just U.S residents, this would drop the price by close to another 1%.
What this means for ETH:
If we total up the amount of ETH held by these exchanges, we are fairly close to 5 billion dollars. Given that Kraken and Celsius will have to sell immediately after the staked ETH is unlocked it is fair to say 2.5 million ETH will hit the markets ASAP. Again not all of the ETH held will be available on day 1 which will help keep the price a bit more stable.
While the situation Celsius and Kraken are in, compared to the current market cap of ETH this will likely not have a huge impact on the price.
