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 historical balances of the top 5 LDO holders and their activity with the LDO token.

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 historical balances for the top holders: Again using the ethereum.erc20_balances, we filter for the LDO balance of the top 5 addresses in step 1 in order to get the daily LDO balance.
3. Find LDO transactions of top 5 LDO holders: For this the table ethereum_core.fact_event_logs was used to find all transactions involving the top 5 addresses. We filter origin_from_address and origin_to_address for the top 5 LDO address and select event_name = 'Transfer'

Results

In the graph above, we can see the historical LDO balances of the current top 5 LDO holders. As can be seen, 4 addresses all started with about 50M LDO tokens. It looks like these LDO tokens were airdropped to these addresses by an organization called Aragon:

According to the Lido Github, Aragon provides a full end-to-end framework to build DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Therefore, it looks like these addresses were airdropped LDO tokens to bootstrap the Lido DAO.

We can also see that the largest LDO address (apart from the LDO treasury) was also airdropped 70M LDO tokens by Aragon about 5 months later:

In the historical balance graph, we can see that from 2022 two addresses decreased their LDO balance. On January 20th, address b42da transferred 1M LDO tokens to another address. On May 9th and May 12th, the address 44e33 transferred a total of 4M LDO tokens to another address. The other addresses did not perform any actions with their LDO tokens.

LDO Actions

Below we can see all LDO transactions of the top 5 addresses:

Conclusion

• The top 5 LDO holders hold a total of 265M LDO tokens.
• These tokens were airdropped by the Aragon organization to most likely bootstrap the Lido DAO.
• Three of the addresses in the top 5 did not perform any actions with the LDO after receiving the airdrop.
• Two addresses transferred a total of 5M LDO to other addresses.