Flash Bounty: Merge Staking Providers
Choose 1 liquid staking provider (Ankr/Lido/rocketpool, etc) and answer staking-related questions.
Introduction
There has been a lot of noise about Liquid Staking and its broad rewards lately. In this dashboard, I will investigate how popular three Liquid Staking platforms have been in the past few months, namely Lido, Direct Staking and Rocket Pool.
We will deep-dive into the following questions:
- How much ETH was staked?
- How many unique depositors are there?
- What is the avg/median/max/min/distribution of ETH deposits?
The data is set to refresh daily.
Feel free to change the parameters: analyse the data by day, week or month.

What is Liquid Staking?
When it comes to self-staking or exchange staking, there are certain limitations that are hard to avoid. Liquid staking comes as an innovative alternative to sidestep risks associated with illiquidity, complexity and centralization. Liquid staking is an alternative to locking up a user’s stake: it allows for users to stake any amount of Ethereum and to effectively unstake their ETH without the requirement of transactions being enabled. This is done through the issuance of a tokenized version of the staked funds — a sort of derivative — which can be transferred, stored, spent or traded as one would a regular token.
As an example, Lido allows users to stake any amount of Ethereum, issuing stETH in return, which can be used for lending, collateral and more, all the while still earning daily staking rewards. As a user’s staked ETH generates staking rewards, the user’s balance will increase once per day, allowing them to access the value of their staking rewards. Lido’s approach also allows users to unstake at any time through the use of stETH-ETH liquidity pools.
Liquid staking provides users with all the benefits of self-staking without the associated risks and complexities — it provides a viable alternative to both self and exchange staking.
Liquid staking manages to seamlessly balance risk, reward and сonvenience, allowing users to trade staked tokens without the firm requirements that prohibit stakers on the Ethereum network.
It’s quite interesting to see that there are more unique depositors on Lido than on Direct Staking, with Rocket Pool having the least number of depositors. The situation is almost the opposite when it comes to the number of staking transactions, with Direct Staking taking a lead with over 240k of staking transactions, at the time of writing.
The biggest volume of ETH staked can be found on Direct Staking, with over 13.5M ETH staked, whereas Lido constitutes of only 4M of staked ETH. Rocket Pool comes in the last place, with only 120k of staked ETH.
The average amount of staked ETH is the highest on Lido, and the lowest on Rocket Pool. We can see that users deposit a lot more on Direct Staking than on the other platforms, especially when we look at the median values. Lastly, the minimum and maximum amounts tell us just how huge the range of staked ETH is - it ranges from as little as practically 0 ETH to over 60k of ETH!
Conclusion
This dashboard has investigated how the three liquid staking providers have been doing in the past few months. We have looked into Lido, the platform with the biggest number of unique stakers, Direct Staking, the platform with the most ETH staked overall, and lastly, Rocket Pool, which seems to be the least popular out of these platforms. Even though the bounty states to look into one liquid staking provider, I thought it will be more insightful to compare three of these platforms and see how they rank against each other.
Overall, we can definitely see that liquid staking has picked up in popularity in the past few weeks, which is due to the Ethereum merge, which is right around the corner.
- Dashboard by -pine-nat-#4310
- Twitter:
- Refresh Rate - Daily
- Data from FlipsideCrypto
