Money in Motion: Micro-Velocity and Usage of Ethereums Liquid Staking Tokens

TL;DR

This paper introduces a micro-velocity framework to analyze the on-chain circulation of Ethereum's liquid staking tokens, revealing high activity concentrated among large addresses and a behavioral shift towards non-rebasing tokens, with open-source tools provided for reproducibility.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of liquid-staking token circulation and offers a scalable, open-source methodology for monitoring staking asset flows.

Findings

High velocity of stETH and wstETH tokens indicates intensive reuse in DeFi.

Activity is concentrated among a small number of large, likely institutional, addresses.

A gradual shift towards wstETH aligns with DeFi composability trends.

Abstract

We introduce a micro-velocity framework for analysing the on-chain circulation of Lidos 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.