2026-10-08T14:20:37Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:24728 2026-01-21T08:56:10Z ddc:004 open_access

Money in Motion: Micro‑Velocity and Usage of Ethereum’s Liquid Staking Tokens Kraner, Benjamin Pennella, Luca Vallarano, Nicolò Tessone, Claudio J. DeFi Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Liquid Staking Money Velocity Inflation We introduce a micro-velocity framework for analysing the on-chain circulation of Lido’s liquid-staking tokens, stETH, and its wrapped ERC-20 form, wstETH. By reconstructing full transfer and share-based accounting histories, we compute address-level velocities and decompose them into behavioural components. Despite their growing importance, the micro-level monetary dynamics of LSTs remain largely unexplored. Our data reveal persistently high velocity for both tokens, reflecting intensive reuse within DeFi. Yet activity is highly concentrated: a small cohort of large addresses, likely institutional accounts, are responsible for most turnover, while the rest of the users remain largely passive. We also observe a gradual transition in user behavior, characterized by a shift toward wstETH, the non-rebasing variant of stETH. This shift appears to align with DeFi composability trends, as wstETH is more frequently deployed across protocols such as AAVE, Spark, Balancer, and SkyMoney. To make the study fully reproducible, we release (i) an open-source pipeline that indexes event logs and historical contract state, and (ii) two public datasets containing every Transfer and TransferShares record for stETH and wstETH through 2024-11-08. This is the first large-scale empirical characterisation of liquid-staking token circulation. Our approach offers a scalable template for monitoring staking asset flows and provides new, open-access resources to the research community. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Benjamin Kraner and Luca Pennella and Nicolò Vallarano and Claudio J. Tessone 2025 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.9 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247285 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.9 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode