• Dune data shows that 28.5% of staked Ether is on Lido Finance.
  • Staking becomes more accessible for customers with low funds using liquid staking protocols.

As the biggest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, Lido Finance has achieved one million Ethereum validators. The most liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, Lido Finance, revealed the milestone in a X post on April 29th.

Staking becomes more accessible for retail customers with low funds using liquid staking protocols such as Lido Finance. Without these protocols, running one’s own validator nodes on Ethereum would need 32 Ether.

Dune data shows that 28.5% of staked Ether is on Lido Finance and 13.6% is on the Coinbase market. The amount of Ether being staked right now exceeds 27% of the total supply.

Substantial DeFi Growth

Because they provided users with liquidity advantages, liquid staking protocols like Lido witnessed fast expansion. Users may earn Lido Staked ETH (stETH), a token that can be used in other DeFi protocols, when they stake their Ether via the Lido protocol.

Regular staking would render the staked Ether tokens useless during the staking duration. After hitting a low of $36 billion in Q4 of 2023, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols soared to a high of $97 billion in Q1 of 2024. As of right now, DefiLlama estimates that the total value of DeFi TVL is $92.32 billion.

The on-chain analytics firm Messari ascribed the 65.6% quarter-on-quarter spike in DeFi TVL growth to liquid staking protocols like Lido. Lido has accumulated almost $29.9 billion in TVL, putting it in first position among liquid staking protocols. Rocket Pool comes in second with $3.86 billion in TVL, according to DefiLlama.

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