What is Liquid Staking?

Liquid staking is the act of delegating your tokens to a service that stakes for you without losing access to your funds.

Liquid staking allows you to access your funds even when you’re staking them. The funds remain in escrow, but aren’t “locked” and inaccessible, as they would be with PoS staking.

When you stake coins you have to lock them up for a specified amount of time. During which you cannot sell or transfer your coins. If there is a market crash during your lock period, you won’t be able to act in a timely manner. With liquid staking, you can add and remove funds as you pleased (usually with a trade-off of lower APR)

Liquid staking offers the best of both worlds: a passive income and access to your staked funds.

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How ETH2 Staking Works

staking on the Beacon Chain (ETH2) is done via validators. A validator is a single ETH2 address, to which 32 ETH was deposited, which is now responsible for helping maintain the consistency and security of the Beacon Chain. They do this by listening for transactions and new block proposals, and attesting that the proposed block contains legal, valid transactions by doing some number crunching and verification behind the scenes. Occasionally, they get to propose new blocks themselves.

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Methodology:

Because the ratio of receiving tokens of each platform to Ethereum is not 1:1, so I only used the table Ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers to be able to explore the exact amount of Ethereum imported to each platform for the stake. I used all smart contracts below based on reliable sources.

I will analyze and compare all three platforms, Lido, Rocket pool, and stkr-ankr.

stkr-ankr

The Stkr platform enables ETH 2.0 staking for all parties — including those who don’t have the required amount of ETH. Moreover, Stkr addresses the illiquidity issue with a synthetic asset called aETH.

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contract address: 0x84db6eE82b7Cf3b47E8F19270abdE5718B936670

Rocket pool

Rocket Pool is a first of its kind ETH2 Proof of Stake Protocol, designed to be community owned, decentralised, trustless and compatible with staking in Ethereum 2.0. It was first conceived in late 2016 and has since had over 5 successful public betas over the life span of ETH2 development.

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contract address:

1. 0x2cac916b2a963bf162f076c0a8a4a8200bcfbfb4(new)
2. 0x4d05e3d48a938db4b7a9a59a802d5b45011bde58

Lido

Lido is a liquid staking solution for ETH backed by industry-leading staking providers. Lido lets users stake their ETH - without locking assets or maintaining infrastructure - whilst participating in on-chain activities, e.g. lending.

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contract address: 0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84

Observations:

• The process of growth and accumulation in the Lido platform looks excellent.
• total of 4.17 million Ethereum has been staked on the Lido platform.
• total of 260,000 Ethereum has been staked in the Rocket pool platform.
• total of 60000 Ethereum has been staked in the Ankr platform.

Observations:

The most significant amount of unique wallets is related to the Lido platform, with 78,630 thousand depositors. In second place is the Rocket Money platform, with 8657 unique depositors.

in third place is Ankr platform,with 3802 unique depositors.

Observations:

• The highest average Ethereum stake happened on the Lido platform, with the amount of 33.94 Ethereum.
• The highest average dollar price of Ethereum Stake happened on the Lido platform, with an average of 98355.
• The highest median Ethereum for the Rocket Money platform is 5 Ethereum.
• he highest median dollar for the money rocket platform by the amount It is 12975 dollars.
• The most significant amount of Ethereum stakes in one transaction on the Lido platform happened with 62,000 Ethereum.
• The most significant dollar amount of Ethereum Stake in a single transaction on the Lido platform was $2,005,2179.
• The lowest amount of Ethereum stake in a transaction in Plefterm Lido happened with the amount of 10 to the negative power of 18 Ethereum.

Observations: Most stakes are formed on the Lido platform every month, and the results are very satisfactory.

In March 2022, the Lido platform was staked with 944,000 Ethereum, while its closest competitor, Rocket Pool, was staked with 60,000 Ethereum in the same month.

How to classify:

WHEN amount<1 then 'Less than 1 Ethereum'

WHEN amount>=1 and amount<10 then 'Between 1 and 10 Ethereum'

WHEN amount>=10 and amount<50 then 'Between 10 and 50 Ethereum'

WHEN amount>50 then 'more than 50 Ethereum'

Observations: When we check the transactions above 50 Ethereum, we see that 3.75 million Ethereum has been staked in this category on the lido platform, which indicates the entry of serious and more clever market money into the lido platform. And this shows that the Lido platform has fans and non-users; just because it is possible to stake below 32 Ethereum, some users prefer the Lido platform instead of direct staking.

Conclusion:

The Lido platform has shown the best performance among the platforms I have analyzed and compared. Rocket Money is also a good competitor but lags behind the Lido platform by a large margin. The weakest platform among these three platforms was ankr, which may not be a good competitor for Rocket Money due to the limitations of the amount of stake.