ETH Staking

With ETH working on merging the PoS beacon chain and the PoW mainnet users are already encourage to lock up their ETH in a ETH validator. While you can already earn rewards on your locked funds you are unable to redeem your ETH till the merge happens. Moreover you need at least 32 ETH to activate your own validator which is a lot for the normal user.

Lido Finance

Lido is a staking pool for a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies

They deal with the complexities of running a validator and allow you to stake any amount of ETH, no mimimum required.

stETH

When you stake ETH in the lido staking pool you will get the same amount of stETH in return. All stETH holders will slowly accumulate staking rewards which can be claimed at any time. As soon as "the merge" will happen, stETH will be unstakable to receive ETH while currently only staking is possible.

Total stETH Supply

Before looking at what you can do with stETH we should look at how much stETH there even is. Remember that stETH can be minted by staking ETH but not destroyed yet. Therefore we do expect a steadily growing amount. As anyone can stake ETH at any time the amount of stETH entering supply depends on the utility the token provides.

Findings

• The stETH supply has been growing at a steady pace
• 2 Surges in supply
  • August 2021
  • March till May 2022

stETH on DEXes

With stETH being a tradeable asset there are liquidity pools available for it across many exchanges in the DeFi space. e.g. Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve, ...

Findings

• The volume of (w)stETH being swapped was quite low till August 2021
• After that many spikes but also drastically higher baseline volume

Amount of liquidity deposited in (w)stETH liquidity pools on UniSwap V3

Findings

• Very little to no liquidity till February 2022
• Huge spike in Mid May 2022 (Terra Collapse)

A few of the previously found dates relate to events in anchor protocol. Anchor is (or was) a saving & lending platform offering high APY on stablecoins as well as the ability for users to deposit collateral and borrow UST.

One of the accepted currencies as collateral is bETH which is nothing but a anchor specific version of stETH wrapped and bridged to the terra chain.

Before going into the specific dates lets take a look at bETH deposits on AnchorProtocol

Anchor Protocol

Findings

• The launch date and first deposits of bETH to anchor were in August 2021
  • From that time on swap volume increased
  • Around that time a lot of ETH was staked
• The peak was 650k bETH deposited into anchor, ~15% of the total supply of stETH at the time
• The surge in ether staking starting in March 2022 aligns well with the surge in bETH deposits
  • From 1st of March till collapse on 11th of May around 400k bETH were put into anchor
  • In the same time 2.2M stETH were created
  • => Around 20% of the stETH growth went into anchor