INTRODUCTION

Lido, Ankr and RocketPool are three liquid staking ETH platforms where you can stake your ETH without being a validator yourself. Until the Ethereum merge is complete you cannot collect your coins so the platforms have issued their tokens (stETH, aETH, rETH) in 1:1 ratio with ETH which give to their users for proof of ownership of the staked ETH.

METHODOLOGY

We will look at the prices of the tokens compared to ETH their ratio and the amount of ETH Staked on the platforms trying to find any correlation between them.

Then we will see thee swaps volume on liquidity pools and try to find a connection between the volume and the price.

DATA SOURCES: The data were taken by Flipside’s ==ethereum.core.ez_dex_swaps,== ==ethereum.core.fact_token_transfers,== ==ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices== tables.

When we see the price of the tokens compared to ETH we see that rETH has the highest divergence followed by stETH and then aETH.

For stETH we note that after May the difference in price is higher as the two lines in the chart separate after May.

When we look at the ratio of coin/ETH we see that aETH is generally way more stable in the year despite dropping below 0.99 for a couple of days on the start of July.

stETH was stable until May where it dropped below 0.94 and it hasn’t overcome 0.98 since while being very volatile.

rETH has extreme volatility all year although it is the only one reaching almost 1.05 and being higher than 1 more than the other 2 pairs. On the other side on July it dropped to 0.82 and most of the year being less than 0.97.

Above we see the daily ETH Staked on the 3 platforms. Price is affected by many factors but the goal of these tokens is to be equal in value to ETH (peg).

And supply and demand play a crucial role in the price stability.

We see that on Lido - with the highest volume - after May the daily volume dropped by 99% and it was at the same time period where stETH lost its peg to ETH and it hasn’t reached it again ever since.

On RocketPool the daily eth volume is volatile but generally with a certain a range all year matching the continually volatility on the price of rETH.

Ankr on the other side has the lowest volume of all but it has the most stable coin, although it has the sharpest decline in price.

1. Prices and Staking.

2. SWAPS.

Since you can’t withdraw your ETH from the staking platforms directly until the merge is complete liquidity pools were created on various platforms as a way to cash out from staking coins and an opportunity to trade.

Swaps is a way to simulate the supply and demand situation and we will see if and how it affects prices.

Below we will see all daily swaps on the 3 tokens and we defined the actions as swap_from = sell token== AND ==swap_to = buy token.

The values on the charts are in ETH again.

We see that swap volume is pretty close to both actions (from/to).

The ETH price drop triggered the initial depeg to 0.98 ratio and the decline to stake new ETH and volume on swap pools increased by a lot - there was an arbitrage opportunity - which increased the depeg to 0.94 and stabilized it at 0.97.

On rETH pools again swap from / swap to is pretty close again.

There was an increase in volume on March but it didn’t have many effects as the staking was in the same range, there only was higher volatility on the price ratio after May but that could be contributed to the price drop or stETH volatility as volume there is orders of magnitude higher.

On aETH pools there is high volatility on swaps. They don’t seem to correlate with the price since there was an increase of staking on May and the price ratio dropped sharply on Jul and there isn’t an obvious link on these events between them but probably is random market fluctuation due to low volumes.

CONCLUSION.

stETH: The price de-pegged from ETH on May and it hasn't stabilized since, this could be contributed to the drop in ETH price the decline on staking volume and the volume increase on swap pools, the volume is the highest on all metrics.

rETH: The coin is de-pegged from the start of the year with higher price ratio volatility after May, staking generally dropped after May with some spikes and swap volume was increased from March to this day, the volume on the metrics is lower than stETH .

aETH: The token is pegged to ETH with an exception of a few days on Jul, staking volume is generally higher after May and swaps is a little lower after May with the least volume on all metrics compare to the other tokens.