BlackRock Taps Figment to Power Ethereum Staking Engine Inside ETHB ETF
The quiet part about crypto going institutional is that it is no longer about coins. It is about pipes, pressure, and who gets trusted to keep the system breathing when the capital shows up in size. On March 12, 2026, BlackRock put that thesis on the tape with the launch of the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF, ETHB, now trading on Nasdaq with a structure that does more than track Ethereum. It works it. Roughly 70%–95% of the underlying ETH is staked, turning passive exposure into yield bearing infrastructure, and that decision forces a sharper question. Who do you trust to run the engine when the stakes are this high? That is where this chapter of startup news starts to separate signal from noise.
Figment answered that question before most people even realized it was being asked. Selected by BlackRock to provide validator infrastructure for ETHB, Figment is now operating inside one of the most scrutinized vehicles in the market, running the validators that process transactions and secure the network on behalf of the trust. Alongside Galaxy Digital and Attestant, Figment is not holding the assets, that role sits with Coinbase and Anchorage Digital, it is doing the work that keeps the system honest. Blocks proposed, attestations signed, uptime maintained. The kind of responsibility that does not trend on social but compounds in credibility, the kind that quietly anchors the most important startup news stories before they ever break wide.
The company has been positioning for this moment in plain sight. Business Wire and partner releases consistently frame Figment as a leading independent provider of staking infrastructure, with around $17B in assets under stake and more than 1,000 institutional clients spanning asset managers, exchanges, custodians, and large token holders. Figment itself goes further, calling its platform the world’s largest independent staking provider, a claim repeated across credible press channels and now pressure tested in a BlackRock product where performance is not a tagline, it is a requirement. In the rhythm of today’s startup news, scale is easy to say and hard to prove, and Figment just moved that proof into production.
That positioning did not go unnoticed on the capital side. C1 Fund Inc. made its move earlier, investing in Figment through a secondary transaction that reads a lot cleaner today than it did at the time. Elliot Han, CIO of C1 Advisors LLC, put it plainly in the announcement, pointing to Figment’s leadership in institutional staking and node infrastructure. That statement now sits next to a live case study with ETHB, where theory meets flow and infrastructure meets expectation. It is one thing to underwrite a category leader. It is another to watch that bet plug directly into BlackRock’s distribution machine and start compounding in real time.
Zoom out and the signal gets louder. A BlackRock ETF that stakes the majority of its holdings is not just a product decision, it is a market statement about where value accrues in this stack. Not at the edges, but in the operators who can run continuously, compliantly, and without error when billions are on the line. Figment is now wired into that reality, not as a spectator, but as part of the system itself, and in a cycle defined by credibility, this is the kind of startup news that does not fade, it builds.