Crypto Is Quietly Becoming an Income Asset

WisdomTree argues that the most overlooked development in digital assets is not price appreciation, but the emergence of staking yield as a persistent second source of return. 

• Ethereum staking yields recently hovered around 2.7%, while Solana staking yields approached 6%, creating an income layer on top of pure price exposure.
• The paper frames staking similarly to dividends in equities: over longer horizons, compounded staking rewards increasingly shape total returns.
• More importantly for institutional portfolios, staking yields appear to have low or even negative correlation with traditional yield sources such as government bonds and equity earnings yields.

The interesting shift here is conceptual. Crypto is slowly moving from a speculative momentum trade toward something closer to a yield-bearing financial infrastructure layer