Lido dominates staked ETH market, but can it lift Ethereum’s price?

• Lido outperformed Ethereum in terms of fees earned in the last few days.
• Despite interest in staking growing, the price of ETH declined.

Lido [LDO] has managed to outperform Ethereum [ETH] in the last few days in terms of fees earned.

Lido showed growth

In the last month, Lido Finance collected $20.8 million in fees in just one week, which was higher than the fees collected by Ethereum itself, which collected $19.8 million during the same period.

This impressive performance placed Lido Finance as the second-highest fee earner within the cryptocurrency space for that week, behind only Tron [TRX], which had earned $33.7 million.

Lido Finance’s momentum continued throughout the month. Over the entire month, Lido generated $98 million in fees, representing an 8% increase compared to the previous month.

This strong fee generation is likely due to Lido’s dominance in the staked ETH market. At press time, Lido held over $33.4 billion in total staked assets, commanding a 29% market share in staked ETH.

Source: X

Lido’s total value locked (TVL) jumped 1.36% this week, reaching $33.48 billion. This surge was driven by a wave of new ETH staking deposits, with 95,616 net new ETH staked through Lido in the past seven days.

While the 7-day stETH APR dipped slightly by 0.04% to 2.96%, there were positive signs elsewhere.

Source: X

Wrapped stETH (wstETH) bridged to Layer 2 networks saw a significant rise of 7.19%, bringing the total to 141,586 wstETH.

Arbitrum [ARB] held the majority with 65,290 wstETH, followed by Optimism [OP] at 27,879 wstETH. Both networks experienced minor declines in the past week.

There was also a slight increase in wstETH deposited in lending pools and liquidity pools, reaching 2.70 million stETH and 83.5k stETH respectively.

Source: X

wstETH bridged to Cosmos networks also saw a small uptick, reaching 1,788 wstETH up 2.12% in the past week.

However, the 7-day trading volume for (w)stETH dipped 7.25% compared to the previous week, totaling $1.23 billion.

While Scroll saw a significant increase in wstETH up 86.26%, other networks like Base, Polygon, Linea, and zkSync Era experienced minor declines.

What happens next for ETH?

The popularity and growth of the Lido protocol hints at the fact that users are increasingly showing their interest in staking ETH.

Realistic or not, here’s LDO’s market cap in BTC’s terms

Even though ETH’s price may be stagnating at the time of writing, a surge in staking implies that existing users believe in the long-term potential of ETH.

At press time, ETH was trading at $3,336.23 and its price had declined by 3.15% in the last 24 hours.

Source: Santiment