Lido DAO (LDO)

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Historical price evolution of Lido DAO

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Lido was born in October 2020 from the identification of structural inefficiencies in the Ethereum staking system. Konstantin Lomashuk, founder and CEO of P2P Validator (which managed more than 4,000 million dollars in assets in 2020), together with Vasiliy Shapovalov, former CTO of the same company, and Jordan Fish (known as CryptoCobain, DeFi investor), announced the project through a blog post that described the main obstacles of staking on the Beacon Chain: the minimum requirement of 32 ETH (approximately 15,000 dollars at that time), the illiquidity of locked funds and the technical complexity of managing a validator.

On 18th December 2020, Lido was deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, strategically coinciding with the launch of the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain. The protocol raised 2 million dollars in its initial round and allowed users to deposit any amount of ETH to receive stETH in a 1:1 ratio, functioning as a liquid token that represents staked ETH plus accumulated rewards. In January 2021 the LDO governance token was launched with a total supply of 1,000 million tokens, distributed as follows: 36.32% to the DAO treasury, 22.18% to investors, 20% to initial developers, 15% to founders and future employees, and 6.5% to validators.

On 19th February 2021, Lido deployed wstETH (wrapped staked ETH), a non-rebasing version of stETH designed to facilitate its integration into DeFi protocols that are not compatible with rebasing tokens. During 2021, the protocol expanded its services to Solana, Terra and Polygon, whilst the liquidity incentives implemented on Curve Finance for the stETH/ETH pool massively accelerated its adoption. By 2022, Lido had reached 30% of all staked ETH, becoming the largest Ethereum staking provider, although this dominance generated debates in the community about potential centralisation risks.

In May 2022, following the collapse of Terra, the Lido DAO voted to discontinue staking on that blockchain and the associated stLUNA token. Ethereum's Shapella upgrade in April 2023 activated ETH withdrawals from staking on the Beacon Chain, eliminating the illiquidity restriction that had been the main justification for Lido's service. In response, on 15th May 2023 Lido V2 was launched, which incorporated a dashboard to redeem stETH for ETH directly through the protocol and a new modular Staking Router to distribute stake amongst different node operators.

In 2025, Lido reported a 23% drop in its total revenue, registering 40.5 million dollars compared to 52.4 million in 2024. The Lido DAO initiated debates about a one-time LDO buyback programme worth 20 million dollars using stETH from the treasury, in a context where LDO was trading near historic lows of approximately 0.27 dollars. In January 2025, the protocol launched Lido Impact Staking, a programme that allocates part of staking rewards to social and environmental causes.

Lido operates as the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, allowing users to participate in staking without the traditional requirement of locking up 32 complete ETH. The process works in a straightforward manner: the user deposits any amount of ETH into the protocol and receives stETH in return at a 1:1 ratio. Lido pools these deposits into batches of 32 ETH which it distributes amongst a curated network of professional node operators, who run the validators on the Ethereum network. stETH is a rebasing ERC-20 token whose balance increases automatically each day as staking rewards accumulate, always reflecting the original ETH plus the gains generated.

For users who require compatibility with DeFi protocols that do not support rebasing tokens, Lido offers wstETH (wrapped stETH), an alternative version where the balance remains constant but its price in ETH increases over time. The protocol's economic structure establishes a 10% commission on staking rewards, which is divided between the node operators and the DAO treasury. Governance lies with holders of the LDO token, who make decisions on node operator selection, commission parameters and protocol upgrades.

The main risk inherent to the system is slashing, an Ethereum penalty mechanism where validators that act maliciously or negligently can lose part of their staked ETH. In Lido's context, these losses are socialised amongst all protocol participants, which means that all stETH holders proportionally share any penalties applied to validators managed by the network's node operators.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.