ETH Derivatives

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

Daily ETH & derivatives token price

All data shown are taken since 2022-01-01.

ETH & derivatives daily peg ratio

For ideal case, ETH and derivatives must be pegged 1:1 . However, due to liquidity movement and other trading activities, those events will induce certain fluctuation in token price for ETH derivaties relative to ETH token.

The more stable the peg ratio, the better reflecting the health of the ETH derivatives. Usually the depeg situation may be both profit or loss for those holders or arbitragers. However, it may be concern if the peg ratio dropped below certain threshold. We able to observe that aETH has the most stable peg ratio among all derivatives. While rETH is performing very bad in maintaining the peg. stETH loses its peg lately beginning from May 2022 when the bear market starts.

🥇 : aETH

🥈 : stETH

🥉 : rETH

Derivatives & Moving Average

The 3 charts below showing the derivatives token price and 20, 50, 100 and 200 days Moving Average. Reader able to determine the token price of the derivatives using Moving Average indicator to predict the future price or understand how the derivatives performed in the past.

The daily token price is determined using average token price per day. It may differ from actual token price in hour and minutes timestamp.

Number of days derivatives depeg

The number of days depeg is determined by counting the day that derivatives having the peg ratio below 1 compared to ETH.

Although stETH has a stable peg ratio over the time. However, most of the days are still below 1:1 ratio. It has the longest depegging days among all 3 derivatives.
While aETH is the best performing among all, with only 79 days depegged.
rETH is having more than 200 days depeg from ETH.

Percentage of days derivatives depeg

stETH are almost close to 100% since Year 2022.
While aETH having only 31% for the Year 2022 up to the date of analysis.
rETH is having a high percentage as well with over 86%.

ETH derivatives Swap Trend

Platform for ETH derivatives Swap

ETH Liquid Staking Providers

LIDO

Lido providing a simple and secure way to earn interest on your ETH by staking to it. Stakers will have the advantage of remaining the liquid asset while their ETH being staked on LIDO by getting stETH in exchange and it can be used across a range of DeFi applications, earning extra yield.

Staking pool. Protocol to manage deposits, staking rewards, and withdrawals. A separate one for every supported network.
st[token]. Unlike staked assets, the Lido st[token] are freely transferable instead of locked as in the case of native staking. Lido lets users operate with staked assets to gain yield on top of yield by leveraging collateral, lending, yield farming, and other kinds of Defi protocols.
DAO. Lido liquid protocols management entity, responsible for picking node operators, configuring the protocol parameters and much more.
Node Operators. entities that manage a secure and stable infrastructure for running validator clients for the benefit of the protocols. They’re professional staking providers who can ensure the safety of funds belonging to the protocol users and correctness of validator operations.

Reference : LIDO docs

Rocket Pool

Rocket Pool a decentralised and trustless base layer protocol for Ethereum 2.0 staking.

it support stakers of all shapes and sizes, Rocket Pool was built with the intent to allow anyone to trustlessly stake as little as 0.01 ETH to a network of decentralised node operators with full autonomy underpinned by RPL collateral (a type of bonding or insurance that ensures good behavior). You can stake ETH by trading it for rETH, a token which gains staking rewards over time (opens new window) based on the performance of an entire network of decentralised node operators. You can also stake 16 ETH as a node operator in the protocol, earn rewards on your own stake fee free, plus earn commissions and RPL rewards from the network, generating a higher ROI by staking in the protocol vs staking outside of it as a solo node operator. The flexibility of the Rocket Pool provide in terms of amount of ETH stake on the site serve as the highlight for small users who only owns low amount of ETH.

Reference : Rocket Pool docs

Ankr

Liquid Staking aimed to solve the problem of loss of liquidity and capital inefficiency. Usually when ETH token staked are usually locked up on-chain helping to maintain the network. However, Liquid Staking provides instant access to Liquid Staking tokens that are equivalent in value to the stake in a 1:1 ratio. These portable Liquid Staking tokens e.g. aMATICb, aETHb, aETHc, aAVAXb can be utilized on additional DeFi platforms to earn further rewards.

The clear benefits of Ankr Liquid Staking are:

Minimum commitment costs
Immediate access to liquidity
Transfer of risks to Ankr experts

Reference : Ankr docs

Methodology

In this dashboard, each of the ETH derivatives will be analyzed.

Token price action
Token price peg
Daily Swap Trend
Swap Platform

There are several tables used for analysis. ethereum.token_prices_hourly is used to determine the ETH and ETH derivatives token prices. While ethereum.core.ez_dex_swaps is used for swap analysis. In order to obtained ETH derivatives, I’ve used several symbol to filter them. For example,

For Rocket Pool : SYMBOL IN ('rETH', 'rETH2')
For LIDO : SYMBOL IN ('stETH', 'wstETH')
For Ankr : SYMBOL IN ('aETH')

Derivatives Swap Volume

The charts above showing the daily swap from , swap to and net swap volume for ETH derivatives and finally the total swap volume (without considering swap direction) in USD.

Swap From → Meaning that ETH derivatives is used to swap to other digital assets.

Swap To → Meaning that other digital assets are swapped to ETH derivatives.

Net volume → Net volume respective to the swap direction

Total volume → Total ETH swap volume in USD disregard swap direction.

There is always a constant fluctuation between swap in or swap out of ETH derivatives. No definite trend for this swap behavior by swappers.

While for total swap volume there is always particular pool dominate among others for swapping activities. For example, WETH - stETH curve pool dominated in stETH derivatives.

Daily swappers count on respective pools

The charts above showing the daily amount of swappers performing swap activities on respective pools. I will only do a champion pools for each ETH derivatives in here. For more trend of each pools, reader may observe from the charts yourself.

🏅

stETH : WETH - stETH curve LP

aETH : WETH - aETH 3000 60

rETH : rETH - WETH 500 10

stETH pools are having the most swappers on daily. Whereas the rest derivatives only having tens of swappers daily.

Cumulative data for derivatives Swap activities

The popular pools for each ETH derivatives are similar to the analysis above. (under swappers analysis)
As what I mentioned, most of the derivatives having 1 or 2 pools dominating the swap activity.
Following by is the swap volume (in USD) with more swappers, then comes with larger volume.
stETH has the highest cumulative swap volume over 9 Billion USD in it’s popular pool. While the aETH only having above 50 Million USD and rETH having around 240 Million USD.

stETH and aETH has higher net Swap Out volume lately, while rETH only having lower swap out volume as compared to them.

More swap out volume meaning that the users are running away from the liquid staking from each of the providers as they exit from their derivatives.

Or it can be interpret as stakers are swapping the derivatives received to take profit. Hence, there is always net swap out volume.

Derivatives Swap Platform Preference

I have done the analysis based on swappers and volume in USD for the volume involved for each ETH derivatives in swap activity.

stETH and aETH having a more evenly distributed aggregation based on swapper metric for each platform. Common platform between 2 derivaties are uniswap-v2 and curve.
While rETH still dominated by single platform which is uniswap-v3
The rest platform are : sushiswap, balancer, curve and etc.
While for USD volume metric, it shows a very different scenario.
All ETH derivatives are mostly dominated by 1 particular platform.
- stETH : curve
- aETH : curve
- rETH : uniswap-v3
This meaning that swappers for the derivatives usually swap a large amount in particular platform while the other platform only having small swap volume with high swapper rate.
The regular swappers on the dominating platform are usually swapping in greater amount I would say.

Conclusion

stETH having the highest swap volume. However with the minimum of depeg ratio, it recorded the longest days of depeg among all derivatives.
aETH has been performing very well in peg with ETH native token. However, the swap activity based on USD volume is largely smaller than other derivatives.
rETH is the middle among 3 derivatives for all the metrics measured.
I guess the stability of the peg condition is so much rely on the size of the usage. With larger usage and community, it will tend to be more fluctuation.
While swap pools for each derivatives tend to popular for particular pool. This may due to the liquidity depth provided by the pool . Larger liquidity depth = less slippage = less lose = more swappers and swap volume incurred.

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Appendix

Author : 𝐑α𝔪αʰαʳ#4167

Date of Analysis : 12 ~ 14th September 2022

Refresh Rate : None

Database : FlipsideCrypto

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