The native token of liquid staking protocol Lido Finance, $LDO, has been bucking the recent bearish trend seen in the cryptocurrency space, with a 45% rise over the past 30 days and an over 200% rise since the beginning of the year.
According to market data, $LDO is currently changing hands for around $3.06 per token up from around $1.08 at the beginning of the year, and from roughly $2.1 at the beginning of February.
Over the last few days, most digital assets have seen their prices plunge. Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, lost over 5% of its value over the past week, while ETH, BNB, XRP, and DOGE all fell between 3% and 5%. The same period saw Cardano and Polygon lose 8% and 12% of their value respectively, while LIDO surged 10%.
Liquid staking has emerged as a popular way to earn yield on crypto assets while retaining their liquidity. Staking involves locking one’s crypto assets for a fixed period in exchange for yields, but liquid staking for digital assets addresses the main drawback of locking tokens by allowing users to receive a tokenized version of their deposited funds on a 1:1 basis
With Lido, if a user stakes one Ether ($ETH) token, they are issued one stETH token which they can still use on other protocols if they wish to. Lido supports staking on Ethereum, as well as other layer-1 Proof-of-Stake blockchains like Polygon, Kusama, Solana, and Polkadot.
The protocol has been designed to facilitate decentralized protocol governance, and it launched a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to make all key decisions on the protocol’s operations.
Earlier this month, Lido recorded the largest daily stake inflow ever, with over 150,000 ETH worth almost $240 million being staked with it in a single day. The protocol has been seeing steady growth over the past few weeks.
The protocol has recently proposed its largest upgrade to date, Lido V2. The upgrade includes two major changes – Staking Router and Withdrawals – designed to create a more inclusive, open, and transparent platform while maintaining its core mission of making staking simple and Ethereum decentralized.
Staking Router will allow anyone to develop on-ramps for new Node Operators, increasing the diversity of the validator ecosystem, while Withdrawals will enable stETH holders to withdraw from Lido at a 1:1 ratio.
The upgrade is expected to increase the decentralization of the network and enable the long-awaited ability to stake and unstake at will, reinforcing stETH as the most composable and useful asset on Ethereum.
