Liquid Staking Token $LDO Bucks Bearish Trend After Rising 45% This Month, Over 200% YTD

The native token of liquid staking protocol Lido Finance, $LDO, has been bucking the recent bearish trend seen in the cryptocurrency space, with a 45% rise over the past 30 days and an over 200% rise since the beginning of the year.

According to market data, $LDO is currently changing hands for around $3.06 per token up from around $1.08 at the beginning of the year, and from roughly $2.1 at the beginning of February.

LDOUSD Chart via TradingView

Over the last few days, most digital assets have seen their prices plunge. Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, lost over 5% of its value over the past week, while ETH, BNB, XRP, and DOGE all fell between 3% and 5%. The same period saw Cardano and Polygon lose 8% and 12% of their value respectively, while LIDO surged 10%.

Liquid staking has emerged as a popular way to earn yield on crypto assets while retaining their liquidity. Staking involves locking one’s crypto assets for a fixed period in exchange for yields, but liquid staking for digital assets addresses the main drawback of locking tokens by allowing users to receive a tokenized version of their deposited funds on a 1:1 basis

With Lido, if a user stakes one Ether ($ETH) token, they are issued one stETH token which they can still use on other protocols if they wish to. Lido supports staking on Ethereum, as well as other layer-1 Proof-of-Stake blockchains like Polygon, Kusama, Solana, and Polkadot.

The protocol has been designed to facilitate decentralized protocol governance, and it launched a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to make all key decisions on the protocol’s operations.

Earlier this month, Lido recorded the largest daily stake inflow ever, with over 150,000 ETH worth almost $240 million being staked with it in a single day. The protocol has been seeing steady growth over the past few weeks.

? Lido Analytics: Feb 20 – 27, 2023

TLDR:
– TVL is up +3.27% thanks to a surge in deposits on Ethereum & Polygon.
– Lido had a 71.6% share of weekly ETH deposits.
– On Feb 25 Lido surpassed 5m ETH Beacon Chain deposits.
– wstETH continues to grow on L2, up +11.26% this week. pic.twitter.com/SZISkyYRCz

— Lido (@LidoFinance) February 27, 2023

The protocol has recently proposed its largest upgrade to date, Lido V2. The upgrade includes two major changes – Staking Router and Withdrawals – designed to create a more inclusive, open, and transparent platform while maintaining its core mission of making staking simple and Ethereum decentralized.

Staking Router will allow anyone to develop on-ramps for new Node Operators, increasing the diversity of the validator ecosystem, while Withdrawals will enable stETH holders to withdraw from Lido at a 1:1 ratio.

The upgrade is expected to increase the decentralization of the network and enable the long-awaited ability to stake and unstake at will, reinforcing stETH as the most composable and useful asset on Ethereum.

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