Liquid Staking

when you stake your ETH in any platform, you don’t have access or any proof that you have that amount of ETH but staked, liquid staking helps you to solve this. after you staked your ETH, it gives you back equivalent tokens which are your ownership proof.

Ankr, Rocketpool, and lido are Ethereum's popular liquidity staking platforms, and we will look at their tokens by swap volume and peg to ETH over time, to see which one was more stable and pegged to ETH.

Scopes

1. Peg to ETH
2. Peg and Price Volatility over time in Percentage
3. Borrows and Repays
4. Sell and Buy Swap Volume

🟠 Observations

• aETH (ankr) has the lowest price and this difference price was even higher in Q1 2022

• rETH always had a higher price than the ETH price itself.

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Volatility

• the most volatile token is aETH
• aETH volatility in each hour is about 5 percent which is too high
• also in Feb and March 2022, it declined about 15-20 percent lower than the ETH price, but it could back although it’s still unpegged and above 5% lower than 1 ETH
• stETH (Lido) was the most pegged token until May 2022, but it got depegged and couldn’t back to 100% peg again
• the most stable token was rETH(rocketpool) which on most days was about 2% higher than ETH price.

🟠 Observations

• in Swaps, the stETH is the most popular one. the cumulative charts show that the total Buy Volume for stETH is $5.2B, while the other two tokens only have $205M and $37M. this applies to total Sell volume too.
• the weekly volume charts show that by the crashing market in May, the Buy and Sell volume spiked which caused the stETH price to drop and become depegged
• As the Ethereum Merge time approaches, the number of swaps for rETH increased in the last weeks and even could go higher than stETH

💡 Conclusion

• aETH (ankr) has the lowest price and in Q1 2022 it dropped about 20% under the ETH price

• the most stable token was rETH(rocketpool) which on most days was about 2% higher than ETH price.

• the most volatile token is aETH and the volatility in each hour is about 5 percent which is too high

• stETH (Lido) was the most pegged token until May 2022, but it got depegged and couldn’t back to 100% peg again

• the stETH is the most popular one. the total Buy Volume for stETH is $5.2B, while the other two tokens only have $205M and $37M.

Method

we will look at three ETH liquid staking platforms Tokens by metrics like swap volume and peg to ETH coin over time. by looking at transfers to the platform’s contract addresses we can track the staking and deposit activities.

Peg and stability: these tokens are your ownership proof, so they must remain pegged to ETH, it means if you stake 1 ETH, your token should be worth exactly 1 ETH.