Lido DAO

Lido DAO is a decentralized finance application whose governance token is LDO. It addresses the problem faced by holders of proof-of-stake assets who want to earn staking rewards without locking up their tokens or running validator hardware themselves. Lido does this by pooling deposits and issuing liquid representations of staked assets, primarily on Ethereum but also across other networks including Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Users deposit assets such as Ether into the Lido protocol, which delegates them to a curated set of node operators who perform the actual validation work; in return depositors receive a liquid token representing their staked position and accruing rewards. LDO is the governance token of the Lido DAO, giving holders the ability to vote on protocol parameters, fee settings, and operator whitelisting. The token itself does not perform consensus or block production — Lido has no native blockchain and no block time, and it settles on the underlying networks whose assets it stakes.

The protocol earns fees by taking a share of the staking rewards generated on behalf of depositors; over the trailing 30 days gross fees collected were 52,119,324 USD, and annualizing those 30 days produces a fee run rate of 634,118,442 USD. Of that gross fee stream, Lido retains a take rate of approximately 6.17 percent as protocol revenue, with the remainder flowing to node operators and, in part, back to stakers; trailing 30-day protocol revenue was 3,214,865 USD, and the trailing 12-month figure was 35,117,147 USD. Holders of LDO received 2,252,874 USD in revenue over the trailing 30 days. Fee growth over the last 30 days was negative 0.63 percent and revenue growth over the same window was negative 2.39 percent.