What is staking?

Staking is the act of depositing 32 ETH to activate validator software. As a validator you’ll be responsible for storing data, processing transactions, and adding new blocks to the blockchain. This will keep Ethereum secure for everyone and earn you new ETH in the process. This process, known as proof-of-stake, is being introduced by the Beacon Chain. Source \n

What are staking pools?

Staking pools are a collaborative approach to allow many with smaller amounts of ETH to obtain the 32 ETH required to activate a set of validator keys. Pooling functionality is not natively supported within the protocol, so solutions were built out separately to address this need.

Some pools operate using smart contracts, where funds can be deposited to a contract, which trustlessly manages and tracks your stake, and issues you a token that represents this value. Other pools may not involve smart contracts and are instead mediated off-chain. Source

Why stake with a pool?

• Low barrier to entry: Not a whale? No problem. Most staking pools let you stake virtually any amount of ETH by joining forces with other stakers, unlike staking solo which requires 32 ETH.
• Stake today: Staking with a pool is as easy as a token swap. No need to worry about hardware setup and node maintenance. Pools allow you to deposit your ETH which enables node operators to run validators. Rewards are then distributed to contributors minus a fee for node operations.
• Liquidity tokens: Many staking pools provide a token that represents a claim on your staked ETH and the rewards it generates. This allows you to make use of your staked ETH, e.g. as collateral in DeFi applications.Source

Staking pools

There are a variety of options available to stake ETH.

• Open source: Essential code is 100% open source and available to the public to fork and use

• Audited: Essential code has undergone formal auditing with results published and available publicly

• Bug bounty: A public bug bounty has been performed on any essential code to reward users for safely reporting and/or fixing vulnerabilities

• Battle-tested: Service has been available and used by the public for the indicated period of time

• Trustless: Service does not require trusting any humans to the custody of your keys or distributing rewards

• Permissionless nodes: The service allows anyone to join as a node operator for the pool, without permission

• Diverse clients: Service should not run more than 50% of their aggregate validators with a supermajority validator client

• Liquidity token: Offers tradable liquidity token representing your staked ETH, held in your own wallet

  Source

In this dashboard, I analyzed 5 different platforms plus direct staking.

Platforms (Contracts):

• Stakewise: 0xC874b064f465bdD6411D45734b56fac750Cda29A
• stkr: 0x84db6eE82b7Cf3b47E8F19270abdE5718B936670
• Cream: 0xcBc1065255cBc3aB41a6868c22d1f1C573AB89fd and 0x49D72e3973900A195A155a46441F0C08179FdB64
• Rocket_pool: 0x4D05E3d48a938db4b7a9A59A802D5b45011BDe58 and 0x2cac916b2a963bf162f076c0a8a4a8200bcfbfb4
• Lido: 0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84
• Direct staking: 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa

Platforms

In this section we have the following information about platforms:

• Daily number of deposits and depositors
• Daily Average - Median - Max - Min - Distribution
• The total period of Deposition
• The total number of deposits and depositors
• The total amount of staked ETH ( and its USD value )
• The average cost of staked ETH

Stakewise

stkr

Cream

Lido

Direct staking

Depositors

This graph shows the number of wallets that staked ETH on 1 or more platforms.

As you can see most of the wallets used only 1 platform (156,973 wallets), 5254 wallets used 2 platforms, 74 wallets used 3 platforms, and only 4 wallets used 4 different platforms.

No wallet used more than 4 platforms.

Cost of Staked ETH

Staked ETH

All The Platforms

Conclusion:

• Overall 162,305 unique wallets in 365,391 transactions, Staked 11,401,646.68 ETH with Average price of 2,430.41$
• The first stake transaction was with Direct staking and it was 671 days ago
• Most wallets used Lido to stake their ETH (78.514k)
• Most of Staked ETH was with Direct staking
• The lowest average ETH price is for Cream and the highest is for Stakewise