Lido is a liquidity pool staking solution. Lido allows users to bet on the PoS public chain with compound returns while participating in on-chain activities (such as lending, trading), without requiring a minimum deposit or maintaining infrastructure. Currently it supports ETH2.0, Terra, Solana, and it may be extended to other POS public chains in the future.
Take Ethereum 2.0 as an example. For pledgers, they can pledge any amount of ETH to Lido’s contract account, and Lido will distribute the corresponding amount of stETH (an ERC-20 token) to users. The balance of stETH will be updated at 24:00 UTC every day to ensure that stETH is consistent with the total amount of ETH on the Beacon Chain of Ethereum, so as to realize real-time acquisition of pledge income every day. Stakers can get 90% of the ETH pledge income on the beacon chain.
Every time 32 ETH is accumulated on the Ethereum smart contract, the DAO will select a new validator from the list of validators. Then call the deposit contract and allocate 32 ETH to the validator. There are currently 9 verification nodes, including P2P Validator, stakefish, blockscope, etc. They are selected by Lido DAO after verification, and are responsible for obtaining the ETH deposited by the pledger according to the pledge contract for every 32 deposits into ETH2.0 income. Validator nodes need to bear hardware costs and bandwidth costs, and they currently get 5% of the total revenue. The last 5% of the income is controlled by Lido DAO, which is currently all allocated to the insurance fund. The insurance fund is mainly used to make up the user's income and even the principal when the ETH2.0 verification is punished.
Since the balance of stETH changes every day, it is not conducive to the combination with some DeFi protocols, so Lido also launched wstETH, an encapsulated version of steh. After being encapsulated, the balance of wstETH will not change again, but the income during the encapsulation period is still Continue to accumulate and will be recalculated when unsealed back to stETH.
The full application of stETH in DeFi enables users to maintain the stability of ETH2.0 (and obtain income), while the ETH (actually stETH) pledged by users can still be used in various DeFi applications, which makes Lido truly provide "Liquidity staking solution": Users can participate in staking with almost no loss of liquidity. Due to the liquidity moat of stETH and the network effects associated with it, stETH's derivatives pledged on ETH will very likely "winner takes all". As such, stETH has the potential to replace ETH in many use cases, and possibly even completely. At present, stETH only needs to be integrated by Maker, Aave and Compound, the three most important lending products, and it is not much different from ETH. We predict that this process will happen at the latest when the transfer function of the beacon chain is enabled (ETH can be retrieved with stETH), and whether it can happen earlier depends mainly on the market's confidence in ETH2.0, the degree of participation, and the continuation of Lido effort.
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