Question:

Consider the liquid staking ETH derivates from ankr, rocketpool and lido(aETH , rETH and stETH ).

What are some trends around the price volatility for these tokens? Swap activity?

Overview of analysis:

This study contains the following investigations:

• Price analysis in detail in comparison with ETH
• Swap performance of mentioned tokens

Approach:

The data provided by Flipside has been used to handle this analysis. The ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices has been used to find out the price of mentioned tokens.

The ethereum.core.ez_dex_swaps table has been utilized to evaluate the swap analysis for tokens.

• The specification related to stETH: SYMBOL='stETH'

• The specification related to rETH: SYMBOL='rETH'

• The specification related to aETH: SYMBOL='aETH'

Time period of investigation has been selected to the past year.

Lido:

> Lido Finance is a staking system provider that provides services for Ethereum 2.0, Terra, Solana and Kusama. Users who stake with Lido are able to maintain the control and liquidity of their staked tokens. > > Lido is the second-largest (DeFi) platform, with over $15 billion in locked value. About $10 billion is on Ethereum, and $5 billion on Terra. > > LDO is the governance token of Lido DAO, allowing its holders to take part in community voting and other decisions for the protocol’s future. > > By CoinDesk

Rocketpool:

> Rocket Pool’s algorithm is constructed to cater to two specific user groups, those that wish to participate in tokenized staking using rETH and those that wish to stake ETH and run a node. In this manner, the Ethereum-backed protocol ensures that its network is not bound to any one party. Additionally, this allows participants to tokenize their staking with as little as 0.01 ETH among other benefits. rETH is rooted in Ethereum’s methodology allowing for a wide range of use cases; from lending, and markets to run validators more efficiently to composability for productivity. > > By Asiacryptotoday

Ankr:

> The staking tool kit connects to Ankr’s staking platform, which delegates tokens to validators and mints new liquid staking tokens that the stakers can claim for their personal wallets. They can then be used on other DeFi platforms to bolster earnings. > > Ankr will charge developers a cut of staking fees for providing the SDKs, and the staking revenue that comes to Ankr staking will be partially shared with all Ankr token stakers once it becomes possible to stake Ankr in August. > > According to Coindesk

Findings related to price volatility:

• The lowest volatile performance among these token belong to aETH as can be seen from the ETH/aETH graph.
• rETH has volatile performance in term of price comparison with ETH and most of the times its price was under ETH price.
• The price of stETH compared to ETH has been volatized mostly in June and specially on June 13 the highest difference occurred as can be seen from the related graphs.
• The biggest price difference among rETH and ETH occurred on November 8, 2021 with over 601 USD.
• The price of aETH was mostly bigger than ETH price over time and the largest difference occurred on January 17, 2022 with only 13 USD.

Findings related to swaps:

Now lets talk about the swap performance and application of these mentioned tokens.

• Most of the swaps of stETH and aETH belong to “Swap From” and these tokens swapped to another assets as can be verified by the volume of swaps.
• But for rETH the swap performance is different. The domination belong to “Swap To” and people swapped their assets to rETH.
• The highest swaps for stETH occurred on June 13, 2022. where the price difference of these token and ETH was at highest level and people seeks to obtain more money from arbitrage. The second date with most swaps belong to market crush on May, 2022.
• The count of swaps for stETH and rETH are high in comparison with swaps of aETH.
• The daily volume of swaps for these tokens has been dominated by stETH and the main reason of that is because of the highest popularity of LIDO platform.
• Because of the domination of WETH on both sides of swaps (swap to and swap from), the data related to the swapped assets has been displayed on the tables.
• For all of the mentioned token, the most popular destination and source of swaps is WETH token by far.

Conclusion:

In this part the conclusion of this analysis has been drawn.

Based on the outcomes of this investigation, the application of ==stETH== is more than other ones in term of swaps.

Also, the most volatile token from the price aspect is ==rETH== and as mentioned the price difference between this token and ETH was larger than other two.

People used the price volatility to find out the arbitrage opportunities.

The most popular pair of these token are WETH and people mostly swapped these assets to WETH or from WETH to these tokens.

References and useful links:

• Introduction to ETH 2.0 staking
• LIDO
• Rocket pool
• Ankr
• Github for ETH 2.0 staking

Author:

Credited by MZG

Discord handle: m.zamani#0361

Twitter handle: @GargariZamani