What is stETH and what is it good For?

These are two different questions. stETH stands for Staked ETH, but not any staked ETH on every protocol. It is Staked ETH from Lido Finance protocol; This is actually the main product that Lido is providing: You can stake You ERC-20 ETH token in Lido and get stETH in return. you asking why?

Because it's more capital efficient since you can use your stETH in variety of use cases across DEFI. You no longer are bound to a vault and it's ever decreasing APY. You can say you are leveraging you exposure to market volatility and opening the door to a verity of financial possibilities.

Now, what is actually good for?

Well, the whole point of this bounty is to find this out by checking what people are actually doing with their stETH. I hope we get a good answer by the end of this dashboard.

Data & Analysis

I'll start with charts that are informative in various aspects. Some notes that can be seen from next two charts:

• UniSwap and SushiSwap are only platforms that you can swap stETH (or at least only ones present in flipside database)
• Uniswap has much higher volume and number of transactions for stETH; first chart has been set in logarithmic scale otherwise it would be so hard too see SushiSwap's track!
• There are many other pools across DEFI that one way or another are being used to swap in and out of stETH
• Second chart show top 10 stETH Pool in terms of number of transaction which demonstrate the absolute dominance of WETH-stETH pair with more than 91% of all transactions
• You may notice that some of these Pools don't have stETH inside; the deal is that user actually interacts with some kind of an aggregator, for example 1inch which swaps USDC for WETH and then swaps that WETH to stETH.

I would like to Call the next chart "Strategic Map" since it actually shows where the stETH is going and can map our path if we ever decided to use stETH.

• Number 1? Well this one is to map where not to go! you will see why on the next chart. Anyway, it seems that anchor was the primary use case for stETH with around 285k Interaction over its short life course.
• People are also using stETH in protocols like aave, curve, ribbon, 1inch, etc

We will dig deeper into anchor and aave as two of most popular places to take your stETH.

Anchor was (Still is?) a lending protocol in Terra which accepted Luna and ETH as collateral. To deposit ETH as collateral you had to acquire stETH (by staking ETH on Lido or trading directly) and turn that into bETH. As you can see, After Terra crash May 9th it gradually slowed down in terms of ETH related transactions and suddenly dies.

Aave is another protocol which provides a wonderful use case for stETH which is similar to anchor. You basically deposit your stETH and can borrow up to 80 percent of its USD price from another asset.

There is no doubt that stETH is paving its way across various DEFI protocols and many users. Although crash of Terra was huge hit to stETH but if it's going to live and continue its way there should be more interoperable use cases for it; Not just with higher APY but with actual Demand for its useful function.