Introduction

Liquid staking is a way to earn rewards for holding tokens. For example, someone can bet their tokens and then withdraw them easily if necessary with liquid staking.

This works by allowing users to bet their tokens in a pool. When someone do this, he/she gets rewards based on the amount of tokens he/she wagered. The more tokens he/she wagers, the more rewards he/she earns. And, if he/she needs to, he/she can easily withdraw his/her tokens at any time.

With $MATIC token, this option is available via different platforms offering different token derivatives. Which are available right now?

• stMATIC: Lido for Polygon is a liquid staking solution for MATIC backed by industry-leading staking providers providing stMATIC token. Lido lets users earn MATIC staking rewards without needing to maintain infrastructure and enables them to trade staked positions, as well as participate in on-chain decentralized finance with their staked assets. stMATIC is an ERC20 token that represents the account’s share of the total supply of MATIC tokens inside PoLido system. It is a non-rebasable token, which means that the amount of tokens in the user’s wallet is not going to change [1].
• xMATIC: StaderLabs is another platform that offers this service on Polygon. In this case, it provides xMATIC tokens [2].
• csMATIC: ClayStack is another decentralized liquid staking platform that enables MATIC users to unlock the liquidity of staked MATIC converting them to csMATIC. Users can stake their assets and use the issued staking derivatives across the DeFi ecosystem [3].

Methodology

The intention of this dashboard is to evaluate the different liquidity staking options based on the following different metrics:

• Staking actions
• Volume staked
• Transaction fee
• Total fees

All the metrics have been computed in a daily basis since March 1st 2022, when all the liquidity staking options become available. As well, the distribution of each metrics over time among these staking actions has been computed.

I have used Polygon Core ez_token_transfers table to track the transactions performed for each liquid token using the following token addresses:

• xMATIC: 0x3aD736904E9e65189c3000c7DD2c8AC8bB7cD4e3

• stMATIC:

  0x3A58a54C066FdC0f2D55FC9C89F0415C92eBf3C4

• csMATIC:

  0x7ed6390f38d554B8518eF30B925b46972E768AF8

Key insights

• The xMATIC is the dominant across all time in terms of staking actions.
• It seems that the announcement of a new increased APY on the Balancer xMATIC pools promoted a hype on the staking, as it can be seen on the right image.
• There is a lower amounts staked on StaderLabs in comparison to the other platforms.
• The highest percentage of >50k MATIC deposits are on Lido.
• The xMATIC tokens is the most expensive increasing its transaction fee from March to August from 0.015 MATIC to around 0.1 MATIC, which is a 10x increase.

In this first charts, we can see the daily number of staking actions by each liquid token. In the left image, we can clearly see how the xMATIC is the dominant across all time.

An important aspect we can observe as well, is the sudden increase on the number of staking actions during 21st and 22nd July on xMATIC. It seems that the announcement of a new increased APY on the Balancer xMATIC pools promoted a hype on the staking, as it can be seen on the right image.

To be able to track better how the other liquid tokens have been moving, I have plotted the distribution percentage of actions. In this case, we can see how in the major of the cases, more than 95% of the staking actions comes from xMATIC. stMATIC is being used practically daily and now their percentage increased in a constant manner at around 5%. csMATIC seems to have poor activity.

Regarding the volume staked, we can see how here the numbers are so different. In this case, the dominant token is the stMATIC. Again, the highest peak in volume was obtained near to July 21-22, in this case 23rd, with more than 6M of stMATIC staked. The difference between xMATIC and stMATIC in terms of volume is so high. The csMATIC demonstrates again a low activity.

In the other image, we can see how the distribution vary on the day. While during the initial days the dominance was in favor of xMATIC, since July 2022, the major of the days was practially 100% dominated by stMATIC.

Then, we can starting to corroborate that there is more activity on StaderLabs with xMATIC token but the users are depositing less xMATIC on it. For this reason, we are gonna track the distribution of amount of MATIC deposited on each platform.

This final part is about how expensive are each platform or in other words, how expensive is the staking of each liquid token. On the left side, we can see the amount of fees paid per transactions. Here we can see how the xMATIC tokens is the most expensive increasing its transaction fee from March to August from 0.015 MATIC to around 0.1 MATIC, which is a 10x increase. However, the other two tokens don’t present any fees, at least in MATIC. It seems that the other platforms are 0 cost fees or users pay the fees in another token.

The same occur with the daily fees paid in MATIC. For xMATIC, it seems that the daily fees paid decreased during the first month, but started to increase on July passing from lower than 1 daily MATIC to more than 20 MAITC. Now, it seems stayed at around 5 MATIC, which is a low quantity in USD.

In this final chart, we can compare the distribution of amount of MATIC deposited on each platform. As previously stated, we can corroborate how the distributions are so different among platforms, emphasizing the low amounts staked on StaderLabs in comparison to the other platforms.

In this case, we can see how the highest percentage of >50k MATIC deposits are on Lido.