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 100 LDO holders and analyze how their got their LDO tokens: bought or airdropped.

Methodology

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 number of addresses in Aragon Airdrop: When the LDO token launched, around 100 addresses received LDO tokens from an organization called Aragon. According to the Lido Github, Aragon provides a full end-to-end framework to build DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Therefore, it looks like these addresses were airdropped LDO tokens to bootstrap the Lido DAO. In order to determine the number of addresses in the top 100 that received this airdrop, the table ethereum_core.fact_event_logs was used in combination with the contract address of the Aragon Token Manager: contract_address = '0xf73a1260d222f447210581ddf212d915c09a3249' and event_name = 'NewVesting'. This results in about 100 addresses that received this bootstrapping airdrop by Aragon. Next, we count the number of these airdropped addresses in the top 100 LDO holders.

3. We assume all other addresses in the top 100 bought their tokens.

Results

First, we give an indication of the top LDO holders by looking at the top 10. We can see that the top address holds around 70M LDO tokens.

Using the methodology above, we can see that 48 addresses in the top 100 LDO holders have received their tokens through the Aragon Vesting Airdrop. We assume that the other addresses, so 52%, have bought their tokens.

Conclusion

• The top LDO holder, excluding the Lido Treasury, holds about 70M LDO tokens.
• 48% of the top 100 LDO holders have received their tokens in the Aragon Vesting Airdrop. We assume the other 52% have bought their tokens.