Lido Finance’s liquid staking protocol has seen impressive growth in Total Value Locked (TVL) over the past 30 days, up 10.57%, with 7.56% of that growth happening over the past 7 days. The protocol has also achieved dominance in the decentralized finance (defi) space, accounting for 19.08% of the $49.66 billion locked in defi today. A spike in the price of ethereum was a contributing factor, but the scheme also received a massive deposit of 303,000 ether from Tron founder Justin Sun.
According to the Lido portal, the liquidity staking protocol has a TVL of $9.48 billion as of March 2, 2023, of which $9.3 billion is in Ethereum deposits. The total value locked in Lido, including assets such as SOL, MATIC, DOT, and KSM, accounts for almost one-fifth of the total value locked in DeFi today. Lido is now the largest defi protocol in terms of TVL, followed by Makerdao, Curve, and Aave.
Lido’s success in the liquid staking space is due in part to the fact that it currently accounts for 74.87% of the total value locked in liquid staking platforms, with 7,607,536 ETH ($12.44B) locked in the protocol. This is followed by Coinbase’s Wrapped Ether protocol, Rocketpool, Frax Ether, and Stakewise. While a 3.8% rise in ether-to-dollar price boosted TVL, on-chain data suggesting Sun deposited at least 303,000 ether with Lido also pushed up the protocol’s value.
Bitcoin.com News previously reported that Sun initially deposited 150,000 ether into Lido. The deposit prompted further deposits from addresses bearing Sun’s name, leading some to speculate that the Tron founder’s inflow to Lido totaled 210,100 ether. However, transaction data from on-chain analysis tool Arkham Intelligence suggests that Sun’s total staked Ether could be far more than that, with a total of 303,660 STETH worth $494 million based on the STETH exchange rate on March 2, 2023.
In addition to STETH, the address marked by Sun also holds 25,657 ether (ETH), worth $41.64 million. Lido provided an estimated annual yield (APY) of 4%, meaning that if those addresses did belong to Sun, the Tron founders would earn 4% interest on nearly $5 billion worth of staked Ethereum.