Ethereum has switched to a proof-of-stake blockchain after its Merge event in September, with validators staking their Ether to confirm transactions. The Shanghai upgrade in March allowed stakers to withdraw their locked Ether and introduced fixed-income assets to the network.

The Shanghai upgrade may have improved the state of crypto forensics by enabling the detection of unusual activity through the systematic analysis of financial behavior, with Ethereum's staking yield serving as the "risk-free rate" of the crypto ecosystem.

Detecting financial crimes in decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems is challenging, but establishing a benchmark rate for Ethereum could help establish baseline rationality for fund flows and thus spot outliers.