[Lido DAO surpasses Ethereum (ETH) fees and joins the “fat application” trend ]
Lido DAO remains the leading liquid staking application, absorbing over 40% of staked ETH and driving fee increases, boosting the popularity of Lido’s heavily collateralized token. This has brought about the season of "fat apps", where the main cost comes from the application itself, not the blockchain.
These fees translate into revenue for the protocol, part of which will be redistributed to token holders. Fat apps attract users to specific DeFi hubs, providing maximum returns and a good risk profile. Users who are unable to stake 32 ETH alone can join multiple projects, such as Rocket Pool, to obtain staking APR and corresponding tokens for further use in DeFi protocols.
With over $32 billion in value locked, Lido DAO becomes one of the largest DeFi protocols with annual revenue of $1.22 billion. Reasons for its growth include simplicity and first-mover advantage, as well as support from DappRadar. Lido DAO has approximately 9,000 monthly active wallets.
Lido DAO revenue peaked at more than $115 million in March and has remained between $79 million and $90 million in recent months, bringing in between $2 million and $5 million per month after fees. Lido DAO also supports Curve, a protocol that hosts over 40% of stETH trading volume and allocated $3.9 million in token incentives last month.
Lido DAO has more value locked than all other staking and re-staking protocols combined. Only about five protocols have more than $1 billion in value locked. Lido DAO starts a native heavy-staking program, using stETH as security for new applications, directly competing with EigenLayer.
Lido DAO announced its partnership with Mellow Finance to build a dedicated stETH vault and issue a new Liquid Restaking Token (LRT). Lido Finance hopes to expand the number of functional validators, with most tokens currently supporting only around 40 full-fledged validators. stETH is concentrated in a few protocols, with a supply of 9.6 million, and recent inflows into RestakeFi have been slower than EigenLayer.
LDO token is trading at $2.09, still above the bear market baseline. The price of stETH is $3,372.11, which is in line with the ETH market price and has been trading at a slightly lower price than ETH most of the time.
