Can You Stake Crypto in Maryland? The Honest Answer

If you have opened Coinbase, Kraken or Crypto.com from a Maryland address and found the staking option greyed out or missing, you are not doing anything wrong. It is a state restriction, and it has been in place since 2023.

On 6 June 2023, the Maryland Securities Commissioner — an office within the Maryland Office of the Attorney General — issued a summary order against Coinbase relating to its staking-as-a-service programme. Maryland was not acting alone: the action came from a coordinated task force of state securities regulators led by California and including Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. The regulators' position was that the staking service, as marketed and operated, constituted an offering of unregistered securities.

Coinbase suspended its staking programme for Maryland residents. The restriction has not been lifted. Kraken and Crypto.com list Maryland alongside California, New Jersey and Wisconsin among the states excluded from staking or on-chain earn products.

It is worth being precise about the scope, because it is narrower than people assume. The order concerned a custodial service marketed to retail consumers — the platform takes your assets, stakes them, and shares the rewards. It did not address the underlying protocol, the act of staking itself, or an individual running their own validator infrastructure.

The distinction matters, so here it is plainly.

In practice, for the overwhelming majority of Maryland readers, the answer is: you can own the asset, you cannot earn the platform yield. If your investment thesis depended on four or five percent on a staked position, that thesis needs rewriting at this address.

This is the part that could change, and it is being fought out in Annapolis right now.

In the 2026 General Assembly session, companion bills were introduced in both chambers under the banner of the Maryland Financial Innovation Act of 2026 — Senate Bill 759 and House Bill 859. The core provision would clarify that providing digital asset staking as a service is not the sale of an investment contract or a security under the Maryland Securities Act, and is therefore outside certain filing and registration requirements.

Importantly, the bills as introduced would not strip away other protections. They expressly preserve the Commissioner of Financial Regulation's authority to regulate digital assets under the Maryland Money Transmission Act, and they leave the Division of Consumer Protection's ability to enforce the Maryland Consumer Protection Act intact. In other words, the proposal is narrow: it addresses the securities classification of staking services, not crypto regulation generally.

Coinbase has run a visible campaign in support, meeting Maryland legislators and registering lobbying activity — reporting on that campaign has been public. The measure would, in effect, undo the practical consequence of the 2023 order from the Attorney General's securities division.

Until something is enacted and in force, and until the platforms actually re-enable the feature for Maryland addresses, plan on no staking yield.

It is easy to frame this as a technicality. For some Maryland households it is not.

Long-term ETH holders are the most obviously affected group. Staking is the native mechanism by which Ethereum holders earn a return for securing the network, and exchange staking is how most retail holders access it. A Maryland resident holding ETH is, functionally, holding a non-yielding version of the same asset that a Virginia resident can stake.

Technically literate buyers in the Baltimore–Washington corridor feel this most. Our Columbia and Howard County readers raise it more than any other subject — this is a population that works in cybersecurity and federal contracting, understands exactly what staking is, and finds the restriction irritating precisely because they understand it.

Anyone who moved here recently tends to discover it by accident, after updating their address. Our Frederick readers, in the fastest-growing county in the state, hit this constantly.

What it does not do is prevent Maryland residents from participating in crypto. Buying, holding, selling and self-custody are entirely unaffected. And it is worth noting the regulators' side of the argument honestly: retail yield products in crypto have an unhappy history, and the 2022 cycle destroyed several large platforms offering fixed returns, leaving ordinary customers as unsecured creditors in bankruptcy. Whether staking-as-a-service belongs in the same category as those products is precisely the question the 2026 legislation is trying to settle.

We are not going to recommend a workaround, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. Here is a factual description of what people actually do.

Most simply hold. The asset still appreciates or depreciates identically; only the yield is missing. For a long-horizon holder, the practical difference is a few percent a year on one part of a portfolio.

Some run their own infrastructure. Operating your own validator is a materially different activity from buying a packaged custodial service, and it was not what the 2023 order addressed. It is also genuinely demanding — capital requirements, uptime obligations, slashing risk, and real technical skill. We are not going to tell you whether it is permissible in your circumstances, because that turns on facts a website cannot know. If you are considering it at scale, that is a conversation with a securities lawyer.

Some use decentralised protocols directly. The legal analysis here is unsettled and differs from the analysis of a registered company marketing a service to consumers. It also carries technical risk that has nothing to do with regulation — smart contract failures have destroyed more retail crypto than regulators ever have.

Nobody sensible lies about their address. Misrepresenting your state of residence to a regulated financial institution is a bad idea for reasons that go well beyond crypto. It also does nothing about your tax position, which follows where you actually live.

Worth understanding in case the restriction lifts, and directly relevant if you are running your own infrastructure.

The general federal position is that staking rewards are income when you receive them — or, more precisely, when you gain dominion and control over them — valued in US dollars at that moment. That amount then becomes your cost basis in the reward tokens, so a later sale produces a separate gain or loss measured from there.

Maryland starts from your federal adjusted gross income, so that income flows through. It is then taxed at Maryland's ordinary rates, up to 5.75%, plus your county piggyback rate. There is no long-term treatment to hope for later, because Maryland gives no preferential long-term rate on the eventual disposal either.

The practical consequence is a familiar one: rewards create a tax liability in the year received, in dollars, whether or not you sold anything. If the token price then falls, you can end up owing tax on income that is now worth less than the tax bill. That is not a Maryland-specific problem, but Maryland's ordinary-income treatment on both legs makes it slightly sharper here.

Record-keeping for staking is unusually demanding — rewards can arrive frequently and each receipt needs a dollar value and a date. If the restriction lifts and you intend to stake, set up proper tracking before you start rather than after.

Full mechanics on our Maryland crypto tax page. As always, this is information rather than advice; a Maryland CPA with crypto experience is the right person to ask.