Lido Liquid Staking Platform Hits 5M ETH Milestone Ahead of Reward Withdrawal Upgrade

The world’s largest liquid staking platform, Lido, has hit a new milestone for the amount of staked Ethereum. An upcoming Ethereum upgrade will allow the testing of staking reward withdrawals.

On Feb. 7, Lido Finance posted an analytics update that included a milestone for staked Ethereum. According to the Dune Analytics dashboard it cited, Lido crossed 5.05 million ETH staked on Beacon Chain. At current prices, this is worth approximately $8.26 billion.

According to DeFiLlama, Lido is the largest DeFi protocol, with a 14.38% market share. Furthermore, its total value locked is currently $8.43 billion, the vast majority of that being in ETH.

The protocol also noted that its February incentives of 1.95 million LDO tokens were now live.

Lido Narratives Strengthening

The platform noted that staking deposits grew across all Lido chains except Kusama. Deposits on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Polkadot all increased over the past two weeks.

Furthermore, Lido’s total TVL has increased by 43.6% since the beginning of the year. Its staking deposits are around a third of all ETH staked over the past week, it reported:

“Lido staking deposits increased by 47.1k ETH over the last week, capturing about 33.5% from ETH staked over the previous 7 days.”

Additionally, its new ETH/LDO factory pool has gained $24.4 million in TVL, an increase of 36% in the last week. Its wrapped staked token (wstETH) has also been used as collateral in DeFi lending protocols such as Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound.

The total amount of wstETH on layer-2 has reached a new all-time high of 40,442, up 8.47% in the last week, it noted.

The platform’s native token, LDO, surged 14% on the day. As a result, LDO was trading for $2.34 at the time of press. Furthermore, the liquid staking governance token has made 58% over the past month. However, it does remain 68.3% down from its peak of $7.30 in August 2021.

LDO/USD price one month – BeInCrypto

Ethereum Zhejiang Testnet Launched

The public Zhejiang testnet went live this week to enable trial withdrawals from the Beacon Chain. It follows the upgrade of the Shanghai and Capella testnets, which one developer dubbed “Shapella.”

Liquid staking narratives have surged in anticipation of the Shanghai upgrade, which will allow phased actual ETH withdrawals. This is expected towards the end of March, but withdrawals will not happen simultaneously for network security.

As explained by BeInCrypto, validators will need to go through a two-stage process to withdraw staked ETH.

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