Try Quests to earn cryptoLiquid Staking ETH Platforms Analysis
Overview
In this report, we are taking a look at the ETH staking platforms and their users’ behaviors. For that we are considering 6 platforms, namely, Stakewise, STKR, Cream, Rocket Pool, Lido and Direct Staking. Among these 6 platforms, Direct Staking has a different functionality, where if an identity deposits 32 ETH to, it can become an Ethereum validator. As a validator one will be responsible for storing data, processing transactions, and adding new blocks to the blockchain. So, it would not be a surprise that we almost always observe 32 ETH deposits into this platform.
Notes:
- Cream Finance uses two addresses, old and new for staking. For this analysis, we used them both.
- We removed those transactions where 0 ETH were staked.
- To plot the distribution of ETH deposits, we clipped the volume on 100 ETH.
Unique Users
The number of unique users of platforms has the same relative values as total ETH staked, with Direct Staking, Lido and Rocket Pool in the first to third places, respectively. This time, the Lido’s number of unique users is very close to Direct Staking, though for different purposes. Again, Cream has the lowest number of users, with only 332 overall stakers.
Maximum ETH Staked
Finally, the maximum value for each platform is shown below. We can see that Lido is in the lead with 62,000 ETH in at least one of its stakings. Stakewise is in the second place with 6,000 ETH and STKR is in the third place with maximum of 5,000 ETH. Direct Staking stays at 32 ETH, as speculated.
The Distribution of ETH Deposits
The figure on the right shows the distribution of ETH deposits. Note that we clipped the volumes on 100 ETH, since they rarely happen. We bucketized the range of 0-100 ETH to 5 ETH bins.
Our observations:
- First, because of the mechanism of Direct Staking platform (as seen before), no one has staked more than 32 ETH, and almost all users staked the same amount.
- As with all human performance on capital markets, the distribution for all if the platforms, are long-tailed, meaning as the volume of staking increases, the number of users that staked that much decreases exponentially (power-law rule).
- Lido, Rocket Pool, Stakewise, STKR and Cream have the most volume of stakes respectively.
- Lido dominated the staking platforms, so much that in the range of 0-5 ETH it had 10x more stake transactions than the second place which belong to Rocket Pool.
- The precedence of platforms stays almost the same through out different ranges of ETH, except in two places: once in the range of 0-5 where Stakewise is in the third place and STKR is in the forth place, and once in the range of 35-40 where STKR jumps to the second place.
ETH Staked over Time
The figure on the right shows the weekly staking volume of ETH onto these platforms. We can see that Direct Staking had two peaks, once in the beginning of 2021 and once from May to June of 2021. After that, Lido is the dominant platform for staking, with an all time high of 400,000 ETH staked on March of 2022. Other platforms activities were not significant, on a weekly basis, compared to these two.
The following figure, shows the same statistics but on a finer granularity of day by day. Though we can still see the dominance of Direct Staking and Lido, we can see the dynamic interactions between the rest of the platforms. For example, Stakewise was not always in the third place, and these platforms did compete with one another.
Single vs. Multiple Platforms Users
The figure on the left, shows the number of unique users that used a single compared to the number of users that used more than once platform for their stakings (keep in mind that the y-axis is log-scaled).
We can see that most users have only used a single platform to stake their ETH. About 3414 users used 2 platforms and 66 and 4 users have used 3 and 4 platforms, respectively.
Another point to mention is that no user have used all 6 platforms that we have analyzed.
Dollar Cost Averaging
In this section, we want to analyze whether the Ether stakers try to dollar cost average (DCA) their stakings or not.
What is Dollar Cost Averaging?
Dollar Cost Averaging is a strategy to average out the price of a an asset when buying/staking. Practically speaking, users divide their transactions into multiple small ones and execute them with different delays, so they can average out the price of their asset they buy. This way, they can obtain less risk of buying at a higher price.
The figure on the right shows the number of stakings vs. the number of users that performed those stakings (note that the y-axis is log-scales).
Our observations:
- We can see that most users only performed a single staking action.
- Most users with more than 1 transactions, performed less than 10 stakings.
- Though the number of users decreases as the number of stakings increase, there is an anomaly sport on 1000 stakings. We speculate that this can be imposed by robot stakers.
Conclusions
- Most users prefer using a single platform for their stakings.
- Some users do perform Dollar Cost Averaging on staking platforms, but they are not many who does.
- We have seen that in many parameters such as the number of users and the total volume of staked ETH, Direct Staking and Lido are the top performers.
- Cream, with a low number of users, has the maximum average volume of staked ETH.