Liquid staking has managed to garner a fair amount of traction over the past few months. Recently, the sector overtook DeFi lending in terms of the number of assets locked up. Data revealed that the combined value of assets deposited in liquid staking protocols stood at $14.09 billion. The combined TVL of DeFi’s lending assets, on the other hand, stood at $13.67 billion. Thus, after DEXs, liquid staking is currently the second-largest sector in the ecosystem.
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A recent tweet from PeckShield revealed that a wallet address labeled “JustinSun” staked around 88k Ethereum tokens worth $143.9 million via Lido Finance. The blockchain security and analysis firm further revealed that the wallet staked more than 200K Ethereum tokens worth $318.7 million over the past 24 hours.
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Lido is up 225% YTD
Lido has also been in the news for another reason of late. It recently activated a protocol safety feature called “staking rate limit.” This was done after more than 150,000 Ether tokens were staked on the protocol in a single day. As such, the “safety valve” intends to put a cap on the amount of staked ether that can be minted during high inflows. Doing so, in turn, would help address any potential negative effects like reward dilution.
For context, Lido is a liquid staking protocol. It allows users to stake ETH without locking their tokens. It does so by issuing a liquid variant of ETH called staked ether on a 1:1 basis. These tokens depict the user’s stake and can be used to generate additional yield across DeFi protocols.
Parallelly, Lido’s native governance token, LDO, has appreciated by more than 225% since the beginning of this year. At press time, it was trading at $3.09.
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