Mint Volume && Average Stake Size

Let's first explore the average mint volume of stETH as well as the average amount that gets minted/staked (ETH -> stETH).

When looking at the all-time graph for stETH mints we can see a few spikes around the month of September 2021 as well as a massive amount of ETH -> stETH volume around mid March (March 15th 2022). We can also see that post stETH-ETH de-pegging event there's not a that significant amount of mint volume, which is concerning.

33.5 ETH - stETH as an average amount of ETH staked is a quite high number as the ETH required to become a validator is 32 ETH which itself is quite significant.

Number of wallets staked

Let's now look at the number of wallets staked, as a bonus let's look at the average amount staked per unique wallet over time.

We can identify the same 2 peaks as discussed earlier, but what is interesting is that there's a 3rd one towards the de-pegging of UST and stETH/ETH which indicates users had high confidence of the pair re-pegging on that date. Maybe arbitrage bots are responsible for the majority of that volume (speculation), subsequently, the number of wallets talked drops back to average or just above.

In the case of the average mint volume per wallet, we can get a better indication of demand and maybe whale activity. In this view, we can see that there are about 3-9 spikes that are interesting, one of which coincides with the following identified spikes but the rest do not. It seems that the lowest staked amount for these bigger average mints per wallet(s) is ~ 300 ETH which indicates whale activity.

Let's look at another interesting but more creative visualization.

What we can see is that the majority of unique wallets transacted in the following two periods Feb 11 2022 and May 7-8th.

Average Stake Duration

For this, I will be referring to Zook#2707's query as I quite like the approach they took.

Amount in/out stETH

Not quite stake/unstake actions, but what's the % of stETH being swapped or staked into other tokens (out) or the reverse.

What we can see in the above table is the # of wallets currently holding stETH vs not holding stETH (that held in the past) and how long they held it for. It's interesting to see that the average stake duration is about 60 days (2 months).

A different and slightly less drill-down view comes from lunasg which I liked a lot more than anything I could come up with so I've used bellow:

What we can see on the daily is that it follows similar patterns to some of the spikes identified above, but that there's also an average trend that can be captured on the weekly (see bellow)

On the weekly, the pattern we can see, which is much more smoothed out is that these large spikes of inflows are increasing over time and that also there's some periodicity.

Using this visualization, we can see that anything above 10-1000+ stETH wallet has a very similar behaviour where the median days of holding value ~ 60 days (2 months) and the average value ranges above ~90-120 days (3-4 months). On the other hand, we can see that smaller wallet usually hold for a median of 40 days and an average of ~65 days.

Summary

Overall it seems that there are a lot of whales that have staked ETH -> stETH which was a big surprise for me, as I've not really been using Lido Finance beforehand and I was deterred by the current de-pegging of stETH/ETH. What would be interesting to see is maybe the staking/unstaking around the de-pegging event and the median time of the people that staked just 1 -2 months before de-pegging.

Other Motivations && Evaluation:

1. For the Average Mint Volume graph, I thought it'd be a good idea to add the average staked amount as a line at the bottom, but some may not prefer that as it may be deceiving or easy to misunderstand for something else.
2. For the Mint Volume (Scatter) graph it is noted that it's more of a "creative" graph than anything else which conveys similar information as the Average mint volume but in a more visual way that's maybe even easier to decipher.
3. I was not able to find much on unstaking stETH transactions and this is the biggest thing I've left out, instead I used a proxy measure which is swaps in and out of it, which gives us more of an idea for the demand than anything else.