It seems that embattled crypto lender Celsius has taken action for Ethereum staking tokens. He wasted no time getting his ETH from Lido, the liquid staking platform that has just enabled withdrawals. Here are the details…
Celsius moves to buy ETHs on Lido
On May 15, a transaction was detected for 428,015 stETH (Lido staked Ether) from Celsius wallets to Lido staked Ethereum wallet. This huge cache, which some believe was in preparation for withdrawals, was worth $781 million at the time of transfer. On-chain data shows Celsius performing a test shot of 0.1 stETH a few hours later.
Bitcoin pioneer and Celsius creditor Simon Dixon also shared his thoughts on the matter. According to Dixon, Celsius “queued for direct staking without the Lido intermediary.” He also added that Celsius could be credit collateral for restructuring plans. Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence highlighted that Celsius transferred 40,928 ETH last week to a smart contract called “Figment ETH2 Beacon Depositor 1”. According to Etherscan, this was later moved to the Ethereum Beacon Chain deposit contract on May 12.
428k #Celsius $stETH on the move – likely lining up for staking directly without #LIDO in the middle. That’s the loan collateral proposed for NewCo. Should get an update during court hearing this week – 17th May – No court approval needed for this it seems https://t.co/pwT4fR1Qjt https://t.co/4tdSsMegA8
— Simon Dixon (@SimonDixonTwitt) May 15, 2023
Receiving a 10 percent staking commission, Lido enabled withdrawals on May 15 with a protocol upgrade to V2. Lido currently accounts for 29 percent of all staked Ether, as we reported on Kriptokoin.com. This amount points to 6.27 million ETH, which is worth around $11.3 billion. Meanwhile, according to on-chain analytics firm Nansen, there are currently 54,046 ETH in the withdrawal queue, not including the Celsius stash yet.
Pulling stETHs in LDO
According to data from Parsec Finance on May 15, the Lido liquid staking protocol has enabled Ether withdrawals for the first time. Over 260 Lido Staked Ether (stETH) withdrawn in the first three hours. Lido is a liquid staking derivatives (LSD) protocol that allows ETH holders to stake their coins with participating validators and earn additional ETH as rewards. When users stake their ETH with Lido, they get stETH in return. As users earn ETH by staking, their stETH increases in amount to reflect additional rewards.
stETH withdrawals dashboard:
– individual & aggregate withdrawal requests.
– current withdrawal queue.
– stETH large balance changes.https://t.co/HxZc2Izfax@parsec_finance @wilburforce_ pic.twitter.com/2ZBZWzcrTZ— mhonkasalo.lens (@mhonkasalo) May 15, 2023
However, prior to the April 13th Shapella update, Ethereum did not allow validators to withdraw their Ether held in the staking contract. Even after Shapella, Lido users could not withdraw their ETH because Lido’s software did not have a withdrawal function. But on May 15, the Lido decentralized autonomous organization voted to upgrade Lido to the second version and allowed withdrawals for the first time.
Data from Parsec shows that it takes about an hour for stakers to realize they can withdraw funds. Within the first hour of withdrawals, around 4 ETH ($7,308) worth of stETH went to users’ wallets. But the next hour, the withdrawals increased to around 227 ETH ($414,956). The speed of the Unstake process dropped to around 44 ETH ($80,388) in the next hour. As a result, $500,000 worth of ETH was withdrawn within the first three hours when withdrawals were activated.
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