Lido now has the highest TVL in DeFi after overtaking MakerDAO

Lido has overtaken MakerDAO in TVL in DeFi by $0.05 billion.
At press time, Lido had $5.96b DeFi TVL.
Lido seems to be benefitting from Ethereum’s merge upgrade.

At press time, Lido which specializes in liquid staking had a total value staked of $5.96 billion which is $0.05 billion higher than MakerDAO’s TVL of $5.91 billion according to Defillama. MakerDao has had the largest DeFi TVL for many years and the overtaking means Lido is gaining ground despite the ongoing crypto winter.

Besides, the increasing staked digital assets, the price of LDO, Lido DAO’s native token, has been on a consistent rise having gained over 18% in the past 7 days. It had surged by 14.67% in the past 24 hours at press time.

The rise of interest in Lido among decentralized finance participants is highly thought to be due to the increased demand for Ether staking solutions since Ethereum shifted to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism after the merge upgrade in September 2022.

Digital assets staked on Lido

According to Lido Finance’s website as of January 2023, Ether (ETH) was the largest staked digital asset with over $5.86 billion worth of staked ETH tokens. Solana follows closely with over $26.087 million worth of staked SOL tokens.

The other notables tokens staked on Lido include Polygon’s MATIC with over $45.093 million worth of staked MATIC tokens, Polkadot’s DOT with over $11.395 million worth of staked DOT tokens, and Kusama’s KSM with over $2.238 million worth of staked KSM tokens.

No 32 ETH min. needed to stake Ether on Lido

Lido’s model allows users to access Ethereum staking without having to commit the traditional minimum of 32 ETH to be allowed to stake Ether. This has greatly increased the number of people choosing to stake ETH on Lido compared to other DeFi staking platforms.

According to Lido’s staking model, users stake any amount of tokens including Ether and access daily staking rewards. In addition to the daily staking rewards, the users also receive liquid stTokens that can be used across DeFi to compound more to the daily staked rewards.