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In roughly three days Ethereum is expected to transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain network to a proof-of-stake (PoS) version via The Merge. Ahead of the transition, the liquid staking project Lido has seen a lot more activity as the value locked in the protocol increased by more than 13% this week. Moreover, the project’s lido dao governance token has increased 25.4% against the U.S. dollar during the past seven days.
Last week, Bitcoin.com News reported on the decentralized finance (defi) project Lido as the project started seeing more demand ahead of The Merge. Lido Finance is a liquid staking project that allows people to wrap their crypto assets in order to gather a staking yield, but the process also allows owners to hold the assets in a non-custodial fashion and be able to trade them as well.
Lido offers liquid staking solutions for blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, and Kusama. However, most of the value locked in Lido derives from locked ether, as ETH represents $7.61 billion of Lido’s $7.81 billion total value locked (TVL).
During the past seven days, metrics from defillama.com indicates that Lido’s TVL swelled by 13.08%, and the TVL has risen by 2.43% during the past 24 hours. While Makerdao is the largest defi protocol today, in terms of TVL stats, Lido is the second largest defi protocol on September 11.
The ether locked in Lido’s application alone represents 12.60% of the $60.38 billion TVL in defi today. Lido’s wrapped ether derivative token, STETH, is the 13th largest market capitalization out of the 12,907 tokens worth $1.1 trillion. Lido’s governance token lido dao (LDO) has increased 25.4% during the past two weeks.
Data from Dune Analytics shows Lido is the largest Beacon chain depositor with 30.3% of the deposits stemming from Lido Finance. Coinbase is second to Lido with 14.5% of the Beacon chain deposits and Kraken commands 8.3%.
Coinbase recently launched a liquid staking token called coinbase wrapped ethereum (CBETH), and in mid-August a JPMorgan market analyst said Coinbase could be a material beneficiary of Ethereum’s Merge transition. At press time, there’s 13,638,351 ether locked into the ETH 2.0 contract and there are 426,198 validators. 30.49% of the 13.6 million ETH staked is staked via Lido Finance.
Besides massive exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance, Lido competes with Stkr, Sharedstake, Stafi, Stakewise, Cream, Stakehound, and Rocketpool. Between Lido, Rocketpool, Stakehound, Stakewise, Stafi, Sharedstake, and Stkr, there’s approximately $8.11 billion in value.
While Lido commands 30.49% of the ETH staked, the aforementioned ETH 2.0 pools represent 33.11% of the staked ether today. There is 4,585,038 locked ether held between the eight ETH 2.0 pools today.
