Liquid Staking ETH Platforms Analysis

Consider all possible liquid staking ETH platforms. Then, find out the following: - How much ETH was staked over time? - How many unique depositors are there? - How likely are depositors to use multiple platforms vs using a single platform? - Are depositors Dollar cost averaging their ETH into the platforms? - What is the avg/median/max/min/distribution of ETH deposits? Compare all the metrics above between the various ETH staking methods/platforms Date Created: 5/9/2022

INTRODUCTION

Liquid Staking on a platform is a way for everyone to be able to stake their ETH and earn a reward. With the Merge being only ~10 days away staking has increased in popularity in the last months.

METHODOLOGY

We will compare all the required metrics between the staking platforms.

Data Sources: The data are from Flipside’s tables:

==ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers==

==ethereum.core.ez_token_transfers==

1. ETH Staked Over Time.

Here we see that the total amount of ETH Staked is 16.8M.

Over 80% market share belongs to Direct Staking, Lido is second with 17.5% share.

On the top we see the weekly staking amount, Direct Staking dominates every week with the highest one having 556k ETH.

The total highest week was on Mar 14 with ~950K ETH deposited.
On the chart we can distinguish 3 cycles, Nov 2020 - Feb 2021, May 2021 - Sep 2021, Feb 2022 - May 2022.

2. Unique Depositors.

The total number of depositors on all platforms are 161k.

Direct Staking has the most with 76.6k users and lido is second with 75k. Rocket Pool is third with 7.8k users, almost 10 times less.

3. Users Using Multiple vs Single Platform.

Here we see that over 156k users use only 1 platform representing 96% of all users, 4.8k users use 2, 79 users use 3 and only 6 use 4 of them.

There is no single wallet using all 6 platforms and this is because people would use different wallets for different platforms for better security since they have better knowledge.

We see that most likely a user would use only one platform since all of them have very similar offerings.

4. Users DCA-ing their ETH deposits.

Dollar Cost Averaging is a method of buying a consistent amount of an investment at regular intervals (weeks, months, quarters).

With that definition in mind we can approximate the people who use DCA by keeping the ones with 5 or more transactions because these transactions are enough to happen with a lot of time between them.

We see that only 5.1k users are using a form of DCA out of the 160k representing just 3% of users

The amount invested by these users is 12.4M ETH more than 70% of total ETH staked.

This indicates that institutional investors with way more resources are using DCA or at least a form of it to stake their ETH.

5. Mean / Median / Max / Min / Distribution of ETH deposits.

We see that has the highest Mean Deposit of 82 ETH, Direct Staking has the highest median Deposit of 32 ETH, Lido has the max ETH deposit of 62k ETH, and Direct Staking has the min ETH deposit of 0.5 ETH.

We see that 80% of total deposits are between 10-100 ETH, and the ranges 0.1-1, <0.1, 1-10 have each ~6%. More than 99% of deposits are less than 100 ETH.

flipside