Untitled Board

In this dashboard we are gonna analyze the ETH staking deposits on the all possible platforms such as Stakewise, Ankr(stkr), Cream Finance, Rocketpool and Lido.

Introduction

This dashboard has been created with the intention to analyze the ETH staking deposits on the all possible platforms. Currently, there are the following active platforms that avoid that:

Stakewise: is available on the MEW web interface where users have the option to stake any amount of ETH and begin earning rewards. In order to participate, users need to deposit ETH in exchange for sETH2, which is the Stakewise pool token used to represent users’ staking deposits. Each ETH deposit into the Stakewise pool mints sETH2 in a 1:1 ratio to ETH (1 ETH = 1 sETH2).
Stkr: is a DeFi protocol for Ethereum 2.0 staking and liquidity. 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.
CREAM Finance: is a decentralized lending protocol for individuals and protocols to access financial services. The protocol is permissionless, transparent and non-custodial. Users can stake their ETH which will be automatically switch to crETH2.
Rocket Pool: is Ethereum's decentralized set of next-generation Proof of Stake (PoS) in alpha and created to be compatible with Casper, the new consensus protocol expected in 2018. Unlike traditional centralized Proof of Work (PoW) clusters, Rocket Cluster uses the power of smart contracts to create a self-regulating and decentralized smart node network. Rocket Pool is composed of 3 primary elements; Smart Contracts, smart nodes, and minipools. All three integrate with each other to provide a new type of network that can automatically scale, load balance, and self-monitor across multiple cloud hosting providers in any region of the world.
Lido Finance: is a popular "liquid" staking service. Users can deposit tokens such as Ethereum, Polygon, Polkadot, and other proof-of-stake (PoS) tokens using the protocol to earn an attractive return on their holdings. In exchange for the deposit, users earn a low-staking version of their holdings. Depositing Ethereum, for example, earns "staked Ethereum" or stETH. This deposit token can be used elsewhere to earn more yield within the (DeFi) space.

Sources:

Methods

In this dashboard we are gonna track several interesting metrics about the liquid staking ETH through this platforms. In order to perform a good analysis, we will consider the following metrics:

Amount of ETH staked over time in a monthly basis
The number of unique depositors over time in a monthly basis
How likely are depositors to use multiple platforms vs using a single platform
The Dollar cost averaging (DCA) of their ETH into the platforms since the beginning
The average/median/maximum/minimum of ETH deposits through each platform
The distribution of ETH deposits

To be able to track the deposits into these platforms, I have used the Ethereum ez_token_transfers, except for the Cream Finance direct staking for which I used the Ethereum fact_transactions table. The different contract addresses I used to filter the data have been the following:

Stakewise: '0xC874b064f465bdD6411D45734b56fac750Cda29A'
Ankr(stkr): '0x84db6eE82b7Cf3b47E8F19270abdE5718B936670'
Cream Finance staking: '0x49D72e3973900A195A155a46441F0C08179FdB64' and ‘0xcBc1065255cBc3aB41a6868c22d1f1C573AB89fd’ (previously hacked)
Rocket_pool: '0x4D05E3d48a938db4b7a9A59A802D5b45011BDe58'
Lido: '0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84'

Results

In this first charts we can see global metrics like number of staking actions, number of depositors as well as how much ETH have been deposited on each platform. All the metrics have been shown in a monthly basis.

In terms of staking actions, Lido leadered from the beginning until th end, passing to be the leader one with around 10k daily deposit actions. The rest of the platforms have been lower numbers, but Rocketpool seems to be increased during the last month reaching more than 4.5k staking actions on the past month. In terms of depositors occured the same. Looking at the cumulative chart, we can see how the crossline between Rocketpool and Stakewise on July 2022. Finally, in terms of volume, Lido leadered all the months, being the top one from the beginning until the end. But the activity seems to be reduced during the past month.

Below, we can see the distribution of users across the different staking plarforms, as well as the deposit metrics per each group. On the left side, we can see how the major of the users (>85k) only joined one platform (we need to take into account that the y axis of the chart is in a log scale to be viewed more precisely). A little bit more than 5k users joined 2 of the platforms, 52 three of them, while only 5 joined more than 3 platforms.

Among these aforementioned groups, we can see how the behavior of the users differ. For example, users that join 1 or 2 platforms usually deposit in average less amount of ETH than those users who join more than 2 platforms. As well, the number of deposits per user is higher in these other groups. The group with the highest number is the users who join 4 platforms who do an average of around 522 deposits and deposit an average of more than 4.8k ETH.

Another important metrics to analyze is the Dollar Cost Average (DCA),

an investment strategy that consists of entering the equity or bond markets periodically, i.e. little by little, and always with the same amounts of money, regardless of how the markets move.

In this case, I have considered all deposits since the beginning to each platform and calculate the DCA if any of the users were removed their ETH from the platforms, considering the current price of the Ethereum token. The inclusion criteria have been the following:

Minimum 7 days between deposits
The amount deposited is similar on all the deposits (max +-20% of the average deposited)
Minimum 5 deposits

With this assumptions in mind, we can see how the major of the users were found on Lido, while in the rest of the platforms only a few DCA users appeared. In Cream Finance there is no DCA users detected that met this conditions.

The evaluated metrics differ between platforms. While Lido are the most active in terms of average deposits and number of users, Stakewise register the highest average deposited volume. The better performance of DCA deposits considering the ETH price during the deposits and the current ETH price, Lido remained at the top but with negative values as of the rest of the pools.

Regarding the average, median, maximum and minimum deposit metrics, we can see how there are some differences again ebtween platforms.

While Rocketpool has similar metrics, the rest of the platforms register higher differences between maximum and minimum ETH deposit volume as well as between the average and median ETH deposited.

The major differenced values are in Lido, where the maximum ETH deposited is 62k, and the minimum is below 0.0001 ETH. There is an important difference as well between the median of ETH deposited (0.95 ETH) and the average ETH deposited (~45 ETH).

Finally, in the charts above we can observe the number of ETH deposits by the range of amount deposited per platform as well as the distribution of these deposits among each platforms.

On the one hand, we can see the difference in deposits from Lido and the rest of the pools. Looking at the chart situated on the right part, we can see how the distribution of deposits differ depending on the platform. While the distribution is more ethereogeneous on Ankr, in Stakewise the major of the deposits involve less than 1 ETH.

Conclusions

In this dashboard we have studied the Liquid Staking ETH deposits on each different ETH staking platforms available right now. The analysis takes a look into different metrics like the globals one: users, depositors and volume, as well as some other more specific ones like distribution of users joining 1, 2, 3 or 4 different staking platform and its behavior.

The key insights found are: