Introduction

Lido is a staking protocol that allows for liquid staking of multiple assets such as Ethereum and Solana. Normally, the coins that you are staking are locked and cannot be used for anything else. With Lido, users are able to stake their assets and get a token in return that can be used to redeem their staked assets. This is called liquid staking as this new token can be used freely. For Ethereum, this token is called stETH (staked ETH).

Lido also has a governance token called LDO. This token can be used to vote on governance proposals See the introduction blog for more information about the LDO token.

In this dashboard, we'll look at the top holder of LDO and look at their other holdings and what they do with their LDO tokens. We'll analyze what percentage of the top LDO holder also hold stETH and wrapped stETH (wstETH). Finally, we'll analyze what percentage of the top holder have deposited their tokens into liquidity pools for extra yield on their LDO tokens.

Methodoly

1. Determine top LDO holders: Use table ethereum.erc20_balances in combination with the contract address of LDO: 0x5A98FcBEA516Cf06857215779Fd812CA3beF1B32. Then filter for balance_date = current_date() and order by balance. We exclude the Lido Treasury.
2. Determine stETH and wstETH holders among top LDO holders: For this we select the top 200 LDO holders and use the same ethereum.erc20_balances table to determine the balances. For stETH we use contract address 0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84 and for wstETH we use 0x7f39C581F595B53c5cb19bD0b3f8dA6c935E2Ca0. We then filter for the current date and filter for users that are in the top 200 LDO holders.
3. Determine percentage of top LDO holders that are LPers: First we collect the pool address of all LDO pools across Ethereum. This was done using the ethereum_core.dim_dex_liquidity_pools table in combination with the filter where pool_name like 'LDO%'. Then we count the number of users that are in the top 10k holders of LDO and count how many of them currently hold LP tokens for one of the LDO pools.

Results

As can be seen, most of the top 200 LDO holders do not hold any stETH or wstETH. Only about 9.5% hold stETH and about 2.5% hold wstETH. This is quite surprising as LDO is used for governance on the Lido platform. Therefore, there is no benefit in holding a large amount of LDO when you do not hold any stETH.

Finally, we'll look at the number of top LDO holders that provide liquidity in LDO liquidity pools to earn extra yield. As can be seen, almost non of the top LDO provide liquidity. We had to select the top 10k holders before we could find about 11 wallets that provide liquidity. This is also a surprising result as providing liquidity is the only way to earn some yield on your LDO tokens. LDO cannot be staked.

Conclusion

• The majority of the LDO whales (88%) does not hold stETH or wstETH
• Almost non of the top LDO whales provide liquidity for the LDO pools