Key facts:
Lido has deposits of more than 4 million ETH, a third of the coins in staking.
The total value locked on the Binance blockchain is on the decline.
Deposits from the Ethereum 2.0 network through the Lido Finance staking pool have already reached $8.49 billion. As such, they come very close to matching—and eventually surpassing—the total value locked in the 387 protocols of Binance’s network, BNB Chain.
According to the block explorer etherscan, Lido is the Ethereum 2.0 staking pool with the most deposits, with 4,105,120 ether (ETH). The amount is equivalent to USD 8,324 million, according to the CriptoNoticias price index.
That amount of deposits in Ethereum 2.0 is almost equal to the total value locked (TVL) of the Binance network, BNB Chain (formerly called Binance Smart Chain). This is a blockchain with a varied ecosystem around it, including decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, decentralized applications (dApps), games, non-fungible token (NFT) markets, among other platforms.
According to data from defillama.comthe current TVL of the Binance network is $8.56 billion. That is, “only” USD 236 million more than Lidowhich is just one of the Ethereum 2.0 staking pools.
Considering the trend dragged by BNB Chain and Lido, it is to be hoped that this difference will end soon. As can be seen in the graph below, the Binance Blockchain TVL has dropped in recent months.
For its part, deposits in Ethereum 2.0 continue to grow by thousands of ethers every day. While the chart below from the site beaconcha.in includes the entire network and not only the Lido pool, it can receive a good part of the future deposits in the smart contract of the so-called consensus layer (Ethereum 2.0), considering that it is the most used pool today .
Some specialists point out as dangerous the centralization that Lido is achieving in Ethereum. It is that with such a large percentage of the validator nodes of the network (currently, 32.5%), they could have enough power to decide which transactions to validate and which not. In other words, Ethereum 2.0 would become a reprehensible network..
What are Ethereum staking pools for?
The staking pools allow multiple Ethereum users to pool their funds to be validators for version 2.0 to which the network will transition soon. The minimum requirement is 32 ETH (USD 65,000 at the time of writing this article), but since many private users do not have that amount, joining a pool allows them to participate in the validation of network blocks, while generate profits with your contribution.
Lido, for example, offers an annual return of 3.7% for users who stake their ethers in that pool. In addition, it provides them with the token Lido Staked ETH (stETH), which can be exchanged for locked ETH after the Ethereum chain merger is officially completed. Meanwhile, stETH can be traded on exchanges, so that pool users, whose ETH is locked in the Ethereum 2.0 contract, do not lose liquidity should they need the funds.
On the other hand, the token can also be used in protocols decentralized finance such as Curve, Yearn, Sushiswap and 1inch. Thus, it is possible to generate interest from the deposit of funds in these protocols, as described in previous CriptoNoticias articles.