With the next Ethereum upgrade scheduled for April 12, staked ETH will be officially un-lockable. Those of us who have been brave enough to ape into Ethereum and defi have been staking ETH for a year or more at around 5% APR. For those of us you have wanted to wait until unlocks are confirmed, your time is coming soon.

If you’re just now getting into ETH staking or have been staking for a while and may be looking for a change, here are the most popular options at present and a little bit of info about each one. Please note that this is not financial advice. I’m just here to educate you about the current options. Please do your own research.

Currently the top players in the Ethereum liquid staking derivative space are these 3; Lido staked ETH (stETH), Coinbase staked ETH (cbETH), and Rocket Pool staked ETH (rETH). Though each has been averaging 5% APR over the past year, there has been volatility as of late that you should be aware of.

Lido stETH has of the time of writing is leading the pack at 7.1% APR. Lido stETH also has the largest total value locked (TVL) at over $10 billion dollars. Though all 3 staking derivatives were created in quick succession, Lido was the first to have a tradable liquidity token. I think this has greatly effected their TVL. You’ll need to have you ETH on the Ethereum network to stake it in the Lido stETH contract at https://stake.lido.fi/, but you can also trade ETH for stETH on multiple chains including Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum.

Coinbase cbETH is falling behind currently at 3.76% APR, but I’ve seen it as high as 7% in the last couple weeks. It’s TVL has been growing and is currently at $2B. If you are a Coinbase user, you can stake your ETH on their exchange site. If you hold it on Coinbase it will show up in your asset screen as Ethereum 2. You can then create cbETH on Coinbase and move it to your ethereum wallet if you’d like. You can also trade on chain ETH into cbETH via Uniswap or my favorite Defillama’s swap aggregator.

Last but not least is Rocket rETH. Rocket is technically the most decentralized option. Lido is somewhat decentralized at it operates on chain and has a governance token (LDO). Coinbase is a centralized exchange and is a NYSE traded public company. Both run their own validators on the Ethereum chain. Rocket is a pool of individuals that run their own validators that use the Rocket Pool interface https://rocketpool.net/ to pool, but ultimately are much more decentralized than the others on this list. Rocket rETH has the smallest TVL of the top 3 at $770 million and currently yields 6% APR.

I think these three options are the most user friendly and have the greatest amount of support and stability. I look forward to seeing how ETH LSDs thrive after the April 12th unlock. I do think we’ll see more institutional and retail participation with this Ethereum upgrade!

For more ETH related content, follow me on twitter @AllThingsETH or on YouTube where I go into more depth about defi projects and Ethereum yield!

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Filed under: Bitcoin - @ March 18, 2023 2:33 pm