The Ethereum liquid staking derivatives finance (LSDFi) ecosystem has shown impressive growth. Since January 2023, the total value locked (TVL) of assets placed in ETH liquid staking protocols has surged nearly 60x to $919 million in August.
According to the latest report from CoinGecko, the TVL of ETH liquid staking protocols has grown by 5,870% over 2023.
Analysts report that most ETH holders, given the opportunity to withdraw assets after the Shanghai update in April 2023, chose not to withdraw them from staking or re-stake them. Since the unlocking of assets, the exit queue has remained at zero for most of the time. About 75% of the time there were less than ten validators in the queue.
By August 2023, the liquid staking protocol sector had already blocked about 43.7% of the total amount of staked ETH. According to Beaconcha.in, validators have blocked about 27.6 million ETH (~$43.4 billion) as of 13:00 (GMT+3), October 18.
Almost one-third of the blocked ETH comes from the Lido Finance liquid staking protocol. The report shows that the TVL of the top 10 LSD protocols exceeded $919 million in August this year.
Analysts also emphasized the growing popularity of the Diva liquid staking protocol, which Ethereum users consider to be Lido’s main competitor. So, Divascan data shows that the protocol’s TVL has grown by 650% since the beginning of October. At the time of writing, 920 ETH and 14,602 stETH have been staked via Diva.
Roughly $140 million worth of ETH is staked daily via LSD protocols, whose TVL accounts for about a quarter of the entire DeFi sector.
