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Lido, with liquid staking ownership of over 28.5%, is the largest layer-1 Ethereum liquid staking protocol, making the DeFi ecosystem the largest protocol category. As the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol on Ethereum, Lido breached 1M validators.

Lido’s liquid staking dominance

On April 29, Lido Finance, Ethereum’s largest liquid staking platform, announced that it had surpassed the milestone. The liquid staking protocol allows common investors with restricted capital to partake, surpassing the barrier of staking requiring 32 Ether.

$3,163 Alongside liquid staking protocols, many examples of prominent liquidity advantages are given to the users, such as Lido provided. Users of Ether who place their ETH with Lido become the owners of Lido-staked Ether (ETH), which could be further used in other DeFi protocols.

The Ether tokens locked up for staking would only become available during its duration. Cumulatively, the staked ETHs during this period are said to have created a network effect that resulted in the immense growth of the cryptocurrency universe, with close to a hundred billion dollars already locked into the DeFi protocols and about 90 billion dollars worth of TVL being in the decentralized finance platforms. Total DeFi TVL stands at 92.32 bn$ and is completely backed up and shown up by DefiLlama.

Driving DeFi growth and accessibility

The growth in DeFi TVL, which increased by 65.6% quarter-on-quarter, was largely attributed to liquid staking protocols like Lido, according to on-chain intelligence provider Messari. “This upward trend was mainly due to the asset price appreciation for liquid restaking, which grew by around 70.9%, led by Ethereum’s TVL rise of about 71%.” 

To date, according to DefiLlama, the liquid staking protocols with the highest TruTVL amounts had more than $47.7 billion in accumulated TVL by June 2023, the Lido pool had over $29.9 billion, and the Rocket Pool boasted about $3.8 billion of TVL in Second Place. 

Lido Finance is the largest individual pool, representing 28.5% of the total amount staked. After Lido Finance, Coinbase is the second largest pool, with 13.6% of the total amount of ETH staked on the network. Nearly 27% of the Ether investors have staking accounts for now.