Earlier this year, Ankr lowered its $ANKR staking APR to 0%. On paper, this looks like the protocol admitting its token economy failed. A governance token that stops yielding anything looks like a dead token. But the full story runs in the opposite direction: Ankr replaced yield with something the token has never meaningfully had: genuine utility demand.
The shift is simple in structure. Instead of earning staking rewards, $ANKR holders now get up to 20% off Ankr’s enterprise RPC plans. This means the discount is paid by the protocol rather than inflated into the supply, and crucially, the demand comes from developers who actually need RPC access. The discount functions as a market mechanism: the more developers use Ankr’s infrastructure, the more they want the token. Yield rewards, by contrast, attract capital that sells into the market, and the APR itself is often funded by issuance: the same sell pressure that has pulled ANKR down 97.8% from its all-time high.
Ankr’s staking app now shows the new structure: 0% APR for $ANKR stakers, with the utility redirected toward the protocol’s RPC offering.
Why yield was the wrong incentive for ANKR
$ANKR has been yielding token holders roughly 2-4% APR through staking rewards funded by inflationary issuance. That yield was a distribution mechanism rather than real revenue, requiring constant sell pressure to monetise. Every staker who claimed rewards and sold added downward pressure on a token that was already down 97.8% from its April 2021 peak of $0.2135.
Ankr’s real business is not liquid staking. It runs one of the largest decentralized RPC node networks in crypto, supporting 50+ blockchains with Web3 API endpoints for developers, dApps, and enterprises. According to the DefiLlama data, the liquid staking arm manages $21.6M in TVL across seven chains, with 84% concentrated in ankrETH on Ethereum. But that TVL has fallen 91.5% from its November 2021 peak of $252.7M. The RPC business, meanwhile, runs on subscription revenue that is entirely off-chain, meaning DefiLlama captures none of it.
The yield was incentivising the wrong audience. Yield farmers and stakers are mercenary: they mint, farm, and sell. They do not use Ankr’s infrastructure. They do not subscribe to RPC plans. They extract value from the token without contributing to the network’s core product. Developers who need reliable RPC access, by contrast, are sticky customers – and the discount model gives them a reason to hold and use the token rather than stake and dump it.
The RPC discount model, explained
Ankr now offers up to 20% off enterprise RPC plans for $ANKR holders. The discount scales with the number of tokens held and the duration of commitment. It is a direct utility discount on a service that developers already pay for, not an airdrop or rewards pool.
The economics work differently to staking. A staking yield is paid to everyone who participates, regardless of whether they use the protocol. A usage discount is only valuable to someone who actually consumes the service. That creates natural demand alignment: the people who hold the token are the same people who need the infrastructure. The incentive is to hold and use, not to hold and sell.
Charles Yu, Ankr’s founder, has described the pivot as a move toward “real demand rather than financialised yield” in internal communications. The logic is straightforward: a token with utility priced by the market for an actual service is healthier than a token whose price is supported by inflated APR.
What the market is missing
The bear case is obvious and has been well-rehearsed. TVL in freefall. Token down 97.8%. Staking yield gone. A $46.5M market cap against $27.3M in total raises from Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, and NGC Ventures means early investors are deep underwater. The LST product on Ethereum competes directly with Lido’s $18.4B in stETH and Rocket Pool’s $2.8B in rETH. On most objective metrics, Ankr’s on-chain product looks like a losing bet.
But – and this is the part the contrarian reading catches – those metrics measure the wrong business. Ankr’s liquid staking TVL does not capture the RPC operation, which is one of the most widely used infrastructure services in crypto. The RPC network serves 50+ chains, was processing billions of requests monthly as of late 2024, and counts enterprise clients like Mantle and BNB Chain among its users. That usage generates real subscription revenue.
Per CoinGecko, $ANKR has a fully diluted valuation of just $46.5M. A traditional infrastructure company with that reach would trade at a multiple of revenue, not a fraction of its total raises. The 0.46x FDV-to-TVL ratio is cheap by any standard – but the more relevant comparison is FDV-to-RPC-revenue, which cannot be calculated because Ankr does not disclose those numbers. The market is pricing ANKR as a failed LST protocol when its most valuable asset may be the infrastructure business.
What changes for token holders
The old ANKR holder was a staker who earned 2-4% APR and watched the token lose 97.8% of its value anyway. The new ANKR holder is someone who either runs RPC nodes or needs discounted enterprise access. That is a much smaller addressable audience in the short term, but the demand mechanism is structurally sound.
For existing holders who do not use RPC services, the yield removal is a pure loss. There is no sugar-coating that. But the protocol was not generating enough real revenue to sustain that yield without inflation, and the inflation was destroying holder value faster than the yield compensated for it. The pivot replaces a value-extracting mechanism (inflated staking rewards) with a value-creating one (utility discount for actual users).
The key unknown is how many developers will actually hold $ANKR for the discount. The RPC market is competitive; Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, and Chainstack all offer similar infrastructure without requiring a token. Ankr’s bet is that the 20% discount is wide enough to shift developer behaviour – and that the token’s utility will create a natural floor as RPC demand grows.
The bigger pattern: tokens graduating from yield to utility
Ankr is not alone in this transition. Across DeFi, protocols are moving tokens away from yield-bearing models toward usage-based utility. Lido’s stETH is pure yield infrastructure, but governance tokens everywhere are being asked to justify their existence beyond the APR they emit. A token that only pays yield is effectively a bond with worse tax treatment and no maturity date.
The Ankr pivot is early evidence that the market is maturing past the phase where every token needs a staking pool to have a price. If the RPC discount creates genuine, recurring demand from developers who would otherwise pay full price to a competitor, ANKR will have done something few tokens have: found real utility outside of financialised yield.
That is a bet. It may not work. The token may continue its multi-year decline. But it is a structurally honest bet, and that is more than can be said for most tokenomics pivots that replace one form of inflation with another.
Ankr publishes its staking page and RPC pricing publicly. The liquid staking data is available on DefiLlama. The token metrics come from CoinGecko. The pivot announcement was made via Ankr’s official channels and reflected on the staking page. Each of these sources is open for verification.
Token utility is not a discount code. But a discount code that saves developers 20% on infrastructure they already pay for is more utility than ANKR has had since it launched. That is worth watching, even if the chart says otherwise.
Frequently asked questions
Is ANKR still worth holding after staking rewards were removed?
ANKR’s value proposition shifted from yield to utility. If you are a developer using Ankr’s RPC infrastructure, the 20% discount creates real value. If you held only for staking yield, the removal is a net loss. The token’s future depends on adoption of the RPC discount model, not on yield.
Will other protocols follow Ankr and remove staking rewards?
Ankr’s pivot is part of a broader trend where tokens shift from yield-bearing models toward utility-based value. Protocols with real infrastructure or services – especially RPC, storage, compute – may find that usage discounts create healthier token economics than inflationary staking.
What happened to Ankr’s TVL, and does it matter?
Ankr’s liquid staking TVL fell 91.5% from its 2021 peak of $252.7M to $21.6M. But TVL only measures the liquid staking side of the business. Ankr’s RPC infrastructure revenue is off-chain and not captured by DefiLlama, so TVL understates the protocol’s actual scale.
How does the RPC discount work in practice?
$ANKR holders get up to 20% off Ankr’s enterprise RPC plans. The discount scales with token holdings and commitment duration. It applies to existing RPC subscription costs, meaning only developers who already pay for RPC access benefit.
Does Ankr still have a staking product?
Ankr still runs liquid staking pools for ETH, BNB, AVAX, FLOW, and MATIC. Those pools earn staking rewards from their respective proof-of-stake chains. What changed is that the $ANKR governance token itself no longer earns staking APR – the yield was replaced by the RPC discount.
Who backed Ankr, and are they still involved?
Ankr raised approximately $27.3 million from Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, NGC Ventures, and others. The protocol continues to operate and develop its infrastructure, with enterprise clients including Mantle, BNB Chain, and Polygon.
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