Lido’s staked ETH has traded above Ethereum in the last month. This development could be attributed to the Merge’s success. It also increased investor interest in stETH as a result of the reduced risk and uncertainty surrounding PoS future rewards.
As seen in the image below, post-Merge stETH was found to outperform Ethereum in terms of price. Despite the fact that both assets were experiencing price declines, the fact that stETH was trading above ETH raised many eyebrows.
Source: Santiment
One of the reasons for this growth could be attributed to the influx of bulls that entered the market to support stETH. The addition of these bulls to the market could have had a positive impact on stETH.
Source: IntoTheBlock
Furthermore, another indicator for stETH’s growth could be seen from the growth in Curve’s stETH liquidity pool. Curve, the second-largest DeFi exchange, has one of the largest liquidity for the ETH-stETH pair exchange. As can be seen from the image below, the liquidity grew tremendously post the Merge and continued to grow over time.
Source: IntoTheBlock
Here comes the flipside
However, there were a few negative developments that were registered. The transaction volume witnessed a decline over the past month. Furthermore, along with the decreasing transaction volume, the average transaction size also witnessed a downfall in September.
Source: IntoTheBlock
According to IntoTheBlock, the number of active addresses also declined and depreciated by 56.18% in the last seven days. The number of new addresses being added to the network also decreased by 67.35% during the same time period.
Although the road for stETH growth had a few hiccups over the past month as well, it did not stop Lido from collaborating with a bunch of different protocols. Lido partnered with protocols, such as Beethoven X and Balancer so that users could get more value out of their staked ETH.
A “Whale” tale
Whales also took a keen interest in Lido and its development and according to the WhaleStats. LDO was among the top 10 most purchased tokens by Ethereum Whales. Furthermore, at press time, stETH was trading at $1,296.46 and had lost its parity from ETH by 0.15%. Its market cap had depreciated by 0.71%, however its volume witnessed an uptick of 36.48%.
