Try Quests to earn cryptoPrice of stETH vs ETH
This dashboard aims to provide insight into price differences between stETH and ETH and what could have caused this.
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).
The price of stETH is pegged to the price of ETH, but because stETH is a token that can be freely traded, there is always a small price difference in price between the two. This dashboard aims to analyse these price differences and what could be the cause of this slight de-pegging.
Methodology
In order to find the prices of stETH and ETH, the ethereum.token_prices_hourly table was used. For stETH, the contract address 0xae7ab96520DE3A18E5e111B5EaAb095312D7fE84 was used, while for ETH the price was found by filtering by symbol = 'ETH'
First, we have the total price chart since the launch of stETH. We can see that there have been no major de-pegging events as the two charts almost perfectly line up.
Next, we will zoom in a bit more to the price chart since 2022 to see if we can find any major price differences there.
Even when zooming in and only focussing on 2022, there are still no obvious price differences. Therefore, we will now look at the same chart but with the stETH/ETH line plotted as well to make the difference more noticeable.
This chart makes it more clear when there were more differences in the price of stETH and ETH. Notice that stETH/ETH is almost always below 1, meaning that stETH is almost always slightly cheaper than ETH. We can see that there was a relatively large difference in price at the beginning of 2022. This is probably due to the volatility in the crypto market at the beginning of the year when Bitcoin went down from 47K to 35K. In this volatility, people want to be less exposed to risky assets and sell their stETH before selling their ETH. Therefore, this could be led to a relatively large price difference in stETH and ETH at the beginning of the year.