What hildobby reported a few days ago on Twitter is really curious: Tron founder Justin Sun reportedly put 150,000 ETH in staking on the Lido crypto platform.
Today, @justinsuntron staked 150k $ETH through @LidoFinance (~0.9% of all staked ETH) 🤯
This is now the highest week by staked amount in almost a year 🥩
Source: https://t.co/pHVPwKxIvC pic.twitter.com/n2lREjiHF4
— hildobby (@hildobby_) February 25, 2023
With this move, the week that began 20 February became the week with the most ETH put into staking since March 2022.
Indeed, as Lido reports, Justin Sun’s 150,000 ETH is the largest single daily inflow ever on the platform.
Lido protocol has registered its largest daily stake inflow so far with over 150,000 ETH staked. 🎉
Upon reaching this number, a curious (but important) protocol safety feature called Staking Rate Limit was activated.
Here’s how it works🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/ngBtWz7q18
— Lido (@LidoFinance) February 25, 2023
It is worth mentioning that for now the ETH staked cannot yet be withdrawn, and that so far a total of more than 17.3 million have been staked.
Thus to date more than 14% of all ETH are staked, with a total value of more than $28 billion, and of these, 150,000 were staked in a single day by Justin Sun, with a counter value of more than $245 million.
Summary
Crypto: Justin Sun (Tron) chooses Lido for Ethereum staking
Not surprisingly, Justin Sun chose Lido for staking his ETH, both because it is by far the largest pool for staking ETH and because it is a DAO.
To date there are nearly 164,000 validators on Lido with a total of more than 5.2 million ETH in staking, which is 30% of all staked ETH right now.
It is enough to think that the second pool for ETH in staking, that of Coinbase, has less than half (2 million), and the third (Kraken) has less than 1.5 million.
In fact, the first three pools after Lido in total have only 4.2 million ETH in staking, which is significantly less than Lido.
The reason for this is that Lido is a DAO, while Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance are centralized exchanges, so it should be more than obvious that it is preferred by those who do not want to leave their ETH in the custody of a centralized broker indefinitely.
Thanks to these numbers, Lido is now the top decentralized finance protocol with the highest TVL, surpassing even Maker DAO.
In total, the dollar value of the more than 5.2 million ETH locked in staking is more than $8.5 billion, while Maker DAO stands at $7.2 billion. With these numbers, Lido’s dominance of the overall DeFi TVL rises to almost 19%.
Thus right now not only is Lido literally dominating ETH staking, but also DeFi itself. In light of this data, it is quite clear why Justin Sun has chosen this very platform for staking such a large number of ETH.
The Tron ecosystem
It is worth noting that the news had only a small impact on the price of TRX, i.e., the native cryptocurrency of the Tron ecosystem founded by Justin Sun, because its price in fact continued to follow the general trend of the crypto market.
For example, comparing it with that of ETH, on 25 February when the news was announced, the price of TRX rose only 1.3%, then lost 2.6% the next day, for an overall loss of 1.3% in two days.
In the same period, ETH lost 1%, so even slightly less than TRX.
In the following days, the price of TRX then rose 2.5% and ETH 4.4%.
Thus the two trends, with the exception of 25 February, turned out to be very similar, only with a slightly lower performance for Tron.
It is worth noting that today, while the price of ETH appears to be up compared to the same time yesterday, Tron is losing, perhaps also due to the spread of this news.
It is important to remember that Justin Sun has always been active on other blockchains as well, so it is not at all surprising that he has 150,000 ETH, or that he has chosen to put them in staking, especially since they should theoretically be unlocked in March.
If nothing else, this news sounds like a kind of endorsement not only of Ethereum, but more importantly of crypto staking, and in particular of the decentralized Lido protocol.
