Lido Finance’s LDO token is up by almost 8% in the past 24 hours, reaching a weekly high of $1.26 earlier today.
LDO's price surge comes after the liquid staking protocol overtook DAI creator MakerDAO to become the largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL) earlier this week.
Over the past month, MakerDAO’s TVL has slipped by over 8% to $5.93 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. In the same period, Lido Finance’s TVL retreated by around 2% and now stands at $5.99 billion, resulting in Lido Finance taking the top spot in terms of TVL.
According to data from CoinGecko, LDO is currently trading at around $1.24 after retreating from its weekly high.
TVL is a transparent on-chain measure of the total funds held in the protocol’s smart contracts. The higher the TVL, the more popular the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol is.
Lido Finance offers liquidity for illiquid-staked proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum 2.0, Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM).
Following the Ethereum merge, the popularity of liquid staking protocols such as Lido Finance has increased. The total ETH staked on Lido has also increased 10% from 4.43 million ETH on September 15, 2022, the date of the merge, to 4.9 million ETH today.
Lido’s rally
Lido’s LDO has staged an impressive rally in recent days, and is up almost 20% over the past week. On Monday, the cryptocurrency also saw its market capitalization reach $1 billion for the first time since November 2022.
It has been a choppy day for LDO short traders. Nearly 91.78% of LDO short trades totalling almost $420,000 have been liquidated over the past 24 hours, according to data from Coinglass.
Despite its recent positive price movement, LDO is still down over 83% from its historical all-time high of $7.30 in August 2021.