Interactive Brokers has opened Ethereum staking to eligible Interactive Brokers LLC clients through zerohash. The launch caps a year in which the broker added stablecoin funding and wallet tr
Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ: IBKR) on October 13 began offering Ethereum staking to eligible clients of Interactive Brokers LLC, letting them lock up ETH from the IBKR Client Portal and collect rewards paid in additional ETH, with zerohash running the validator infrastructure behind the service. The launch removes one of the last practical reasons a broker client holding ether would keep a separate exchange account, and it arrives at the end of a year in which the firm has rebuilt its crypto offering almost from the ground up.
Clients reach the service through a Staking Dashboard in the Client Portal, where they can request to stake or unstake ether and follow pending transactions. Rewards, when earned, are credited as additional staked ETH, so they keep compounding for as long as they remain locked. Access depends on the client’s eligibility, the Interactive Brokers affiliate holding the account and the country of residence, and zerohash’s own staking product currently excludes California, Maryland, New Jersey and Wisconsin, with Washington also listed as restricted in its developer documentation.
What the announcement leaves out may matter more to an investor than what it includes. Interactive Brokers published no annual yield, no unstaking timeline and no figure for the share of rewards it keeps. When zerohash unveiled the underlying product in June, it said there would be no minimum staking amount, although IBKR has not confirmed whether that applies to its own clients.
CEO Milan Galik compared the feature with the Stock Yield Enhancement Program, under which the broker lends out clients’ fully paid shares and splits the lending income with them, and said the company wants clients “to earn more from the assets they hold.” The pitch is the same, income on assets a client already owns, while the risks differ considerably. Staking rewards come from the Ethereum network itself, where validators lock up ETH to confirm transactions and receive newly issued coins and fees in return, and those rewards can be cut by penalties known as slashing when a validator fails or breaks protocol rules. The zerohash client terms hosted on IBKR’s website describe reward rates as variable, warn that unstaking can be delayed by network or provider processing and set out the cases in which zerohash would replace slashed assets, along with the exceptions. A growing ETH balance also offers no protection against a falling ETH price.
zerohash’s technical documentation allows partner platforms to charge a fee calculated as a percentage of gross staking rewards, with a suggested range of 25% to 35%. On $100 of gross rewards, a platform charging 30% would keep $30 and pass $70 to the client. That describes zerohash’s general model, and Interactive Brokers has not disclosed what it actually charges.
The bigger incentive is retention, because an ETH holder who wanted rewards previously had a reason to keep part of a portfolio on an exchange, and every such account gives a competitor a chance to cross-sell. Interactive Brokers reported 5.576 million client accounts at the end of September, up 35% year on year, with client equity of $964.7 billion, a figure that reflects client assets and reveals nothing about how much of it sits in crypto or how many clients actually hold ETH.
Interactive Brokers’ crypto build-out in 2026Jan 15 USDC account funding Deposits outside bank rails, 24/7
Feb 10 Nano BTC and ETH futures Regulated hedging via Coinbase Derivatives
Mar 25 Inbound crypto transfers No need to sell coins to switch broker
Mar 31 Spot crypto in the EEA 11 assets under EU authorisation
Jul 14 12 new tokens, stablecoin withdrawals Funds can leave to personal wallets
Oct 13 · Latest ETH staking Rewards without leaving the platform
Source: Interactive Brokers announcements
The October rollout had been signalled months in advance, when zerohash launched on June 25 a staking service for banks, brokerages and fintech apps, naming Interactive Brokers, Public and BitMart as its first partners and taking over validator operations, rewards accounting and compliance behind a single integration. The relationship goes further than a supplier contract, since Interactive Brokers led zerohash’s $104 million funding round in September 2025, in which Morgan Stanley and SoFi also took part, which valued the company at $1 billion.
The same infrastructure powers Morgan Stanley’s E*TRADE, which completed its rollout of bitcoin, ether and solana trading in July at a 0.50% fee. Interactive Brokers charges 0.12% to 0.18% of trade value, with a $1.75 minimum per order and no added spread or custody fee, and says its costs can run up to 85% below some competitors, a comparison the company makes about itself. Whichever broker wins the client, zerohash still collects the business, and the demand data it cites backs that bet: a 2025 PwC survey found that 27% of retail crypto investors treated staking as a core part of their strategy.
Broker Latest crypto move Key detail Interactive Brokers NEW ETH staking, Oct 2026 20 tradable assets Robinhood UK crypto via Bitstamp UK, Aug 2026 Staking in US and EU since 2025 Charles Schwab Spot BTC and ETH, May 2026 SOL, AVAX and LINK planned E*TRADE BTC, ETH and SOL, Jul 2026 0.50% fee, zerohash backendSource: company announcements
Interactive Brokers Ireland began offering spot trading in 11 crypto assets to eligible EEA retail investors on March 31, through an entity authorised as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, the EU’s crypto rulebook. The staking announcement refers only to Interactive Brokers LLC clients, so a European account that can buy ETH should not be assumed to qualify for staking. Solana looks like the next candidate, since zerohash has named SOL as its next staking asset, although its own target dates for it have slipped more than once and IBKR has not committed to a date. For crypto exchanges the pressure is real yet partial, because brokers still list a fraction of the tokens exchanges carry and offer no route into decentralised finance.
The custody side of the arrangement is still unsettled. In March, zerohash applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter whose planned activities included custodial staking and validation, but the regulator has since returned the filing, and zerohash says it will resubmit a narrower application focused on core trust activities. Until a charter is granted, the company validating ETH for Interactive Brokers clients operates outside federal banking supervision, a point that broker compliance teams have to weigh whenever they hand client assets to a third-party staking provider.
The post Interactive Brokers Ethereum Staking Takes Aim at Crypto Exchanges appeared first on ETHNews.
