Liquid Staking ETH Platforms Analysis

    Consider all possible liquid staking ETH platforms. Then, find out the following: How much ETH was staked over time?

    Introduction

    With the ETH merge right around the corner, users have been speculating quite a lot about liquid staking of Ethereum. What it really is, and how popular it has been over the past few months? This dashboard will tackle these questions, as well as the following:

    • How much ETH was staked over time?
    • How many unique depositors are there?
    • How likely are depositors to use multiple platforms vs using a single platform?
    • Are depositors dollar-cost-averaging their ETH into the platforms?
    • What is the avg/median/max/min/distribution of ETH deposits?
    • Compare all the metrics above between the various ETH staking methods/platforms.

    The data is set to refresh daily.

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    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.


    Methodology

    In order to analyse all of the Liquid Staking platforms, I have used the following information to start with:

    • Stakewise: '0xC874b064f465bdD6411D45734b56fac750Cda29A'

    • stkr: '0x84db6eE82b7Cf3b47E8F19270abdE5718B936670'

    • Cream: refer to Cream's docs: https://docs.cream.finance/eth2/ethereum-2.0-contract-address

    • Rocket_pool: '0x4D05E3d48a938db4b7a9A59A802D5b45011BDe58'

    • Lido: '0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84'

    • Direct staking: '0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa'

      I have then researched each platform to make sure there are no other contracts associated with it. In some cases, such as Cream, there was an additional contract address which also had to be included in the analysis.

    Liquid staking ETH platforms: How do they compare against each other?

    Firstly, let’s look at the overall picture for all of the Liquid staking ETH platforms that will be analysed in this dashboard, namely Stakewise, Stkr, Cream, Rocket Pool, Lido and Direct Staking.

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    Key insights:

    • As we can see, the biggest number of users can be found on Lido, followed very closely by Direct Staking. Both of these platforms have attracted over 70k users, which is quite a high number! It is very interesting to see that the number of staking transactions on Direct Staking is double the number found on Lido, meaning that Direct Staking users stake more frequently than on Lido.
    • The biggest volume of staked ETH can be found on Direct Staking, followed by Lido, whereas Cream comes at the last place, with less than 36k ETH staked overall.
    • When it comes to the averages, it is quite counter-intuitive to see Cream as the platform with the highest average ETH amount, with users staking over 45 ETH on average. In the second place, we can see Direct Staking with 32 ETH staked on average, and in third, Lido with just over 29 ETH staked on average.
    • The minimum and the maximum staked values tell us which platforms have seen the least and most generous users, and the winner with the biggest maximum amount of ETH staked seems to be Lido with 62k ETH staked in one transaction!

    Daily staking habits on Liquid Staking ETH Platforms

    The next step is to look at how the platforms compare on a daily basis.

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    Are users dollar-cost-averaging their ETH into the analysed platforms?

    Lastly, the final section will investigate whether users are DCAing their ETH in order to stake it on the platofrms.

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    Click play to view the above animation

    Key insights:

    • It is pretty clear that a lot of liquid staking depositors are dollar-cost-averaging their ETH. What does this mean? Users are buying ETH at regular intervals, such as once a week or once a month, regardless of the price of the asset (although some advisors recommend buying more of the asset at lower prices). However, given the current state of the market, it looks like a lot of users took advantage of DCA and bought ETH at a lower price and then deposited it into the liquid staking platforms to receive even more staking rewards - good strategy!
    • This is evident, especially on Lido, where there were over 30k depositors who DCAed their ETH, followed by Direct Staking with over 7k depositors who DCAed.
    • This part of the dashboard has been forked from @aimancrypto, thank you! 🥳
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    Conclusion

    This dashboard has investigated some of the key metrics when it comes to liquid staking Ethereum based on some of the most popular Liquid Staking platforms. We have seen how popular Lido and Direct Staking are, with over 13.5M ETH staked on Direct Staking and over 4M ETH staked on Lido, at the time of writing. We have also asked the question of whether users are using several platforms, and have seen that certain wallets prefer to use a few staking platforms, whereas others stick to just one. Lastly, we have looked into the idea of DCAing ETH before staking it on the platforms, and have seen that a big number of users chooses this strategy to maximise their profits.

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    • Dashboard by -pine-nat-#4310
    • Twitter:
    • Refresh Rate - Daily
    • Data from FlipsideCrypto