Lido DAO’s LDO Token Goes on Rollercoaster Ride Following Binance Listing

Key highlights:

• Binance has listed LDO, the governance token of Lido DAO
• Lido is a very popular liquid staking service that allows users to retain liquidity while their crypto is earning staking rewards
• The Binance listing news brought a lot of volatility to the markets for LDO

LDO gets listed on Binance

The cryptocurrency market has seen substantial losses today, with the total market capitalization sliding 4.3% to hit $1.56 trillion. However, not all contenders in the cryptocurrency top 100 are down on the day. LDO, the governance token of Lido DAO, has seen a significant price increase in the last 24 hours thanks to a listing on Binance. Binance has made LDO available for trading against BTC, BUSD and USDT. 

Create Binance Account

LDO is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s used as the governance token in the Lido DAO, which is in charge of making changes to the Lido liquid staking protocols.

The Lido platform provides “liquid staking” services for various cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, Terra, Solana, Kusama and Polygon. When staking their crypto through a liquid staking service, users receive tokens that represent their staked cryptocurrency, and therefore retain liquidity even while their crypto is earning staking rewards. When staking ETH, Lido users receive an equivalent amount of stETH, and the token balances are also periodically updated to reflect the rewards earned by staked ETH. stETH tokens can be deployed in various decentralized finance protocols.

Lido is currently by far the most popular staking solution for ETH. According to data from Nansen, deposits from Lido account for more than 4 million currently staked ETH (over $9.6 billion). Kraken, which the second largest source of deposits for staked ETH, accounts for 774,144 staked ETH at the time of writing. 

The Binance listing has created significant volatility in the markets for LDO. The token’s price quickly jumped from around $2.76 to a local peak of $3.49. After approximately three hours, LDO was hit with a steep correction that brought the price all the way down to $2.25. After a bounce, the token is now changing hands at approximately $2.59. Despite the rollercoaster price action, the token is still up about 13.3% from where it was 24 hours ago.