Try Quests to earn SOLHello everyone! on this dashboard we are reviewing the most famous liquid staking tokens on Ethereum and Solana: Lido’s $stETH and Marinade’s $mSOL.
let’s get familiar with liquid staking:
What is liquid staking?
Liquid Staking provides flexibility and liquidity to the funds. For example, users deposit cryptocurrency through a third-party application into a smart contract. In return, they get an issued, tokenized version of their funds, a derivative or wrapped token. This minted token represents thier original asset. It can be used as collateral in other financial applications and traded freely on Dapps and even across blockchains for collateralization, lending, and much more. Liquid Staking makes interacting with DeFi more flexible.
The main advantages of liquid staking are:
- The ability to use the base value of locked coins
- Use coins in other projects
- Keep earning staking rewards from locked coins
After getting familiar with liquid staking, it’s time to know $stETH and $mSOL:
What is $stETH?
stETH is a token that represents staked ether in Lido, combining the value of initial deposit + staking rewards. stETH tokens are minted upon deposit and burned when redeemed. stETH token balances are issued 1:1 to the ethers that are staked by Lido. stETH token’s balances are updated when the oracle reports change in total stake every day.
Lido's stETH token lets users earn staking rewards for every day of holding these tokens in the wallet. As stETH tokens are fully liquid, so users can use them for thier needs at any time — trade, sell, exchange, invest in DeFi projects, etc.
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What is $mSOL
mSOL is a liquid staking token that you receive when users stake SOL on the Marinade protocol. These mSOL tokens represent staked SOL tokens.
They act as a receipt, allowing users to exchange them later on for their staked SOL and the earned rewards. Meanwhile, users can use mSOL in DeFi while enjoying their staking rewards.
The price of mSOL is going up each epoch relative to SOL as long as staking rewards are distributed for the SOL staked in the protocol. If you keep mSOL for a year, its value against SOL will have gained 5.72% (Marinade's APY at time of writing).
Just like stETH, mSol can be used in different cases like Defi, trading, exchanges,… too.
Now we have better vision about this research case, so let’s start:
Methodology
In this dashboard we are trying to find the volume of the minted stETH and mSOL tokens in recent 90 days (Users mint these tokens when thy stake $ETH (on Lido) and $SOL (on Marinade) ) on the reland their value in $USD and also the number of the wallets doing these transactions at first and after that find how these tokens are using in Defi platforms for swapping to other assets and also which Defi platforms are being selected for doing these swaps more.
In the next part we are going to see is there any correlation between the SOL and ETH price and mSOL and stETH minting or not?
The biggest spike in mSOL minting in recent 90 days belongs to 22th July 2022 which 373.86k mSOL minted on that date, if we check what happened at that time, we find out Marinade finance’s first proposal (Which was about their partnership with Lifinity) was published on 18th July and 22th July is the last day of voting period for the proposal, It seems This event caused more hype on Sol staking in Marinade and mSOL minting rate was increased as the results.
The second spike is likely related to mSOL-UXD pool opening in 15th August. in Fact this pool was the result of Marinde’s first proposal pass.
from these findings we can see the Lifinity partnership played important role in mSOL minting (and also SOL staking) in recent 90 days!
in stETH chart, it’s all bout the merge! the amount of minted stETH (and Staked $ETH) has highly increased after 15th September which was the Merge day.
(If want to get more information about the Merge, you can check here: )
The record of most minted stETH in one single day belongs to 20th September with 8736.5 stETH minting.
The second spike had happened on 16th July, Lido’s official twitter account has noted these on already and noted market excitement due to Merge news , increase in ETH price and finally increase in stETH/ETH rate as the reasons for this spike, you can see this tweet here:
In the first step, we are tracking the daily minting stats of stETH and mSOL
If we want to compare stETH and mSOL minting status, we should look at the minting values in $USD:
By looking at the $USD chart of ETH staking on Lido and SOL staking in Marinade, We can see the $USD value of minted stETH is more than minted mSOL in total.
The overall value of stETH minted in recent 90 Days is 95.5M $USD (1.06M per day on average) which is 29.5M more than the mSOL minted volume in the same period (66M $USD in total and 0.808 $USD per day on average)
Although we can see a increases in stETH minting in July as the ETH price was on rising rally but in other cases there was no special point to detect the possible strong correlation ,So for stETH the answer can be no!
Just like ETH chart, there is no notable correlation between mSOL mints and SOL chart, some times, the mint amount had increased after SOL price rise and sometimes it went on in opposite way!
This part is about wallets activity on minting these assets:
2 different type of behavior can be see in above charts, In the left chart we see wallets minting stETH are increasing trough the time (specially after the merge) but in right chart we can see a decreasing trend in daily unique mSOL minters.
22K wallets has tried minting stETH by staking ETH on Lido in recent 90 days and 95.5 $USD is their staked value in total (which we found earlier in this dashboard)
In Marinade, 3800 different wallets have staked SOL and received mSOL instead, and the value of their staked assets is 66M (can be seen in the first part).
The other notable thing here is about the staked value of each user, A Lido user in Ethereum has staked 4300 $USD of his/her ETHs on average while a Marinade user on Solana has staked 16.26k $USD of his/her SOLs on average in the same time. So in recent 90 days the average amount of mSOLs minted by each user is 3.8x more valuable in $USD than the average amount of stETHs minted by each user on Lido
How stETH and mSOL are swapping? which tokens are purchasing with them? let’s see:
Total 45.4k (49.6M in $USD) of mSOL tokens has been swapped to other assets in recent 90 days and USDC has the highest share of these swaps with 505k mSOL swapped volume.
And its interesting mSOl token itself is in the next stage with 432.9 mSOL volume!
This means many mSOl token is the popular case in making profits with arbitrages ( you can learn more about arbitrages here: )
Jupiter Dex is the favorite DAPP for making mSOL swaps for the holders, With having 708% share of the total swaps.
It seems in stETH the conditions and the usage cases are a bit different!
stETH is not directly swappable with other tokens and users must swap it with WETH at first on Curve’s stETH/WETH pool at first if they want to converts thier staked ETHs to other tokens.
So almost 99% of all 0.71M (1.02B in $USD) stETH swaps are WTH Swaps happening on the Curve.
The other swaps are related to arbitage based swaps happening mostly on Uniswap v2.
On the final part of this dashboard we are tracking daily amount stETH and mSOL swaps ther assets and thier possible correclation with ETH and SOL price:
In stETH chart we see a spike on the swaps, happing exactly on the Merge date, Except for this case the swaps volume have nit any special trends, and no special correlation can bee seen with the ETH price can be detected
in mSol swaps chart we can see a decreasing trend through time, but a no there is no strong correlation between mSOl swaps volume and the SOL price.
Conclusion
- Ethereum’s Merge had high effect on minting sETH, the amount of minted stETH (and Staked $ETH) has highly increased after 15th September which was the Merge day and the record of most minted stETH in one single day belongs to 20th September with 8736.5 stETH minting.
- Both of the two big spikes in daily mSOL minting chart was related to Marinade’s partnership with Lifinity partnership, the higher one with 373.86k mSOL minting on 22th July 2022 was happend on the during Marinade’s first proposal publishing wchihc was about thier partnership with Lifinity and the second one was related to Lifinity ‘s mSOL-UXD pool opening in 15th August.
- The overall value of stETH minted in recent 90 Days is 95.5M $USD (1.06M per day on average) which is 29.5M more than the mSOL minted volume in the same period (66M $USD in total and 0.808 $USD per day on average)
- 22K wallets has tried minting stETH by staking ETH on Lido in recent 90 days and 95.5 $USD is their staked value in total.
- In Marinade, 3800 different wallets have staked SOL and received mSOL instead, and the value of their staked assets is 66M.
- The average value of mSOLs minted by each in $USD user is 3.8x more than the average value of stETHs minted by each user on Lido, A Lido user in Ethereum has staked 4300 $USD of his/her ETHs on average while a Marinade user on Solana has staked 16.26k $USD of his/her SOLs on average in the same time.
- Total 45.4k (49.6M in $USD) of mSOL tokens has been swapped to other assets in recent 90 days and USDC has the highest share of these swaps with 505k mSOL swapped volume and 70.8% of total mSOL swaps are happening on Jupiter DEX.
- Almost 99% of all 0.71M (1.02B in $USD) stETH swaps are WTH Swaps happening on the Curve.