The price of the Lido Finance (LDO) liquid staking platform management token has increased by more than 20% in a week. At the time of the offer, the coins exceeded $2.

The largest share of token trading turnover falls on Binance – 28% or more than $13.9 million in the day paired with USDT.

However, the LDO price is about 74% below its August 2021 high of $7.3.

Lido Finance allows users to earn by staking tokens such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Polkadot.

The most popular asset on the service is Ethereum. Instead of coins locked in the Beacon Chain, users receive stETH tokens that can be used in other DeFi protocols. The service is popular with retail investors who do not have enough money (32 ETH) and technical knowledge to work as a validator.

In June, the largest pool of ETH/sETH liquidity in the Curve protocol fell to $620 million, nearly seven times lower than at the beginning of May. This was against the backdrop of liquidation of positions in the asset by major crypto investors like Alameda. and Three Arrows Capital.

The price of tokenized ETH has split from the quotes of the underlying asset – the discount has reached 6%. At the time of writing, stETH is about 3% cheaper than the “original” Ethereum (CoinGecko).

Lido accounts for 30.6% of the second cryptocurrency with capitalization blocked on the Beacon Chain.

In August, Bitcoin exchange Coinbase launched a liquid staking service similar to Lido. The trading platform already ranks second in terms of the number of ETH blocked in the PoS version of Ethereum.

The mainnet merger with Beacon Chain is expected on September 15. The biggest upgrade of Ethereum, called The Merge, will transfer the blockchain to the PoS algorithm.

Recall that the Lido community does not support the proposal to limit the protocol’s stake in Ethereum staking.

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