Introduction

Lido is a staking protocol that allows for liquid staking of multiple assets such as Ethereum, Terra 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).

There is usually a small price difference between stETH and ETH. This dashboard will analyse how much ETH was gained or lost when staking ETH (and receiving stETH which could be worth slighty less). We will also look at how much ETH was gained or lost when swapping back from stETH to ETH. Because stETH has seen a depeg from the price of ETH, we can expect significant losses when swapping from stETH to ETH.

Methodology

The amount of ETH that was lost or gained by staking ETH was calculated the following way:

• Retrieve staking transactions using the ethereum.udm_events in combination with the stETH contract address: 0xae7ab96520de3a18e5e111b5eaab095312d7fe84
• Using the amount_usd, calculate the difference in value after staking
• Multiply this difference in value by the average daily price of ETH to get the amount of ETH lost or gained. This was calculated using the table ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices
• Aggerate the transaction by day using the median (middle value when ordered). The average did not give reliable results because of outliers.

The amount of ETH that was lost by swapping stETH to ETH was calculated in the following way:

• Filter swap transactions using the ethereum.core.fact_event_logs table in combination with the contract address of the Curve liquidity pool for Lido: 0xdc24316b9ae028f1497c275eb9192a3ea0f67022. Then we further filtered the transactions by only looking at transactions where event_name = 'TokenExchange'.
• This table directly provides that amount of stETH that was swapped for what amount of ETH. Using this, we can easily calculate the amount of ETH that was lost or gained by swapping stETH for ETH.

Results

Using the methodology above, we can see that on most days since 2022, a slight amount of ETH was lost when staking stETH. The stETH/ETH peg is also plotted. We can see that the depegging of stETH has had relatively little impact on the amount of ETH lost when staking ETH. Only in the period between May 10-May 13 and June 12 & June 13 was there a relatively large amount of ETH lost when staking.

Next, we can see that the depegging has had more effect. There has been a significant amount of loss of ETH when swapping from stETH to ETH: between $60 (0.05 ETH) and $180 (0.15 ETH) for every ETH swapped.

Key findings:

• Even after depegging, users are losing a relatively small amount of ETH when staking stETH.
• The amount of ETH lost by swapping from stETH to ETH was greatly impacted by the depegging. The amount lost in dollars since May 7th was $30 for every ETH, with spikes up to $60 and $180!