Liquid staking: Assessing the lay of the land

• Lido Finance led per market cap, active addresses, and development activities.
• Ankr, SSV, and Frax Share also made their marks known.

If there has been one segment of the crypto industry that has emerged as a promising trend, it’s the liquid staking sector. By definition, liquid staking enables users to share in the rewards of staking on a protocol without engaging in maintaining any infrastructure.

How much are 1,10,100 LDOs worth today?

While the activity has been popular for a while, the rise in interest in the bear market has been somewhat bewildering.

At the same time, it might not be completely surprising that investors decided to go through this route considering how inauspicious token prices and the broader market have been.

Lido leads, others follow

Without any dispute, one project that has repeatedly proven to be relevant in the liquid staking sector is Lido Finance [LDO]. Although more projects have explored this innovative space, facilitating the activity has put Lido in the spotlight.

And with Ethereum’s [ETH] completion of the Shapella upgrade, it seems that it has become difficult to ignore the Lido protocol. For starters, no project in the sector has a market cap close to that of Lido.

At press time, Lido’s market cap was $1.72 billion. Second on the list is Rocket PooL [RPL] whose market cap is $587.86 million.

Source: Santiment

An overview of the metric connected to these projects showed that those connected to Ethereum lead the pack. However, Ankr, which operates on the BNB Chain, came close to the others.

Benqui, the algorithmic liquidity market protocol on Avalanche [AVAX] also fell in the top 10.

Inevitably, Lido recorded the highest number of daily active addresses in the last 30 days.

Active addresses show the number of unique users participating in the transfer of assets on a daily basis. But that was not a noteworthy observation in the sector.

Surprise additions to the flock

Closely following Lido is Frax Share. Launched in 2020, Frax Share is an open-source fractional algorithmic stablecoin system. Furthermore, the function of the protocol is to provide scalable and decentralized money in place of fixed assets like Bitcoin [BTC].

At the time of writing, Frax’s 30-day active addresses were 3,969— less than 2,000 addresses from reaching Lido’s 5,668. Therefore, this implies that Frax was another liquid staking project that has gotten market participants interested.

Source: Santiment

Again, Lido led in development activity. The development activity considers the public GitHub repositories linked to a project. At press time, Lido’s development activity was 10.98. This suggests that dedication to upgrades and polishing on the Lido network was all-pervasive.

Like Lido, another project—SSV.Network also had an impressive performance with this metric. As a decentralized staking infrastructure, SSV enables distributed operation of Ethereum validators.

So, the impressive state of its development activity means that validators’ keys are consistently distributed between nodes. Because of this, active failovers between nodes and validators are rare.

Not an exciting time for prices

Interestingly, the growth of the BNB Chain reflected in Ankr’s volume. Despite decreasing by 54.71% in the last 24 hours, Ankr’s volume was still higher than other liquid staking projects bar Lido Finance.

Realistic or not, here ANKR’s market cap in RPL terms

This value means that the project could boast of an impressive asset transfer from exchanges to other sources, including distributed ledgers.

Concerning their token prices, CoinMarketCap showed that LDO has lost its bullish momentum. At press time, the token value decreased by 5.95% in the last 90 days.

Other liquid staking tokens, including RPL, ANKR, and FXS, all fell by 36.60%, 19.15%, and 24.31% within the same timeframe.