Lido Finance, a liquid staking provider, became the largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL), a statistic that records the amount of assets invested in various DeFi initiatives. At the time of writing, it was in charge of $19.4 billion (approx) in cryptocurrency.
The Curve, a decentralised stablecoin exchange, had previously dominated this metric for nearly six months. Curve now has a market capitalization of $19.28 billion, behind Lido by only $120 million, implying that the two companies are currently neck and neck.
Anchor Protocol, MakerDAO, and Convex Finance are among the top DeFi projects in the rankings, with TVLs ranging from $11 billion to $17 billion.
The current dominance reflects Lido’s growing popularity as a prominent platform for liquid staking on blockchains such as Ethereum, Terra, and Solana. Liquid staking is a method of transferring tokens to a staking service while keeping the underlying value via derivative tokens.
This type of system is popular since it frees up users’ liquidity, which can then be employed in other DeFi protocols for extra profit. Lido users on Ethereum can, for example, exchange their ETH for Staked ETH (stETH), a derivative token that represents staked assets with the same value.
For Lido Finance, Ethereum is simply one blockchain. The team also provides a liquid staking solution for LUNA, the Terra blockchain’s native asset. stLUNA is a coin that represents staked Luna in Lido and contributes to the protocol’s worth of almost $7 billion.
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