Unpacking Lido Finance’s [LDO] holders’ commitment after this big move

• LDO recorded one of the largest transfers ever since it launched in the market.
• Lido Finance continues to lead the DeFi TVL standings by a large margin.

For the first time in two years, Lido Finance [LDO] recorded the largest movement of the token, Santiment revealed. The transaction, which was worth $135 million, happened on 6 May. According to Santiment, it was the eighth-largest LDO transfer since its inception.

How much are 1,10,100 LDOs worth today?

But one notable part of the action was that the tokens were not sent into an exchange. Instead, they were moved from a self-custodian address to another address with the same feature.

😮 #LidoDao, the #35 asset in #crypto by market cap, has just seen its largest transaction in 2 years as over $135M worth of $LDO moved from one self custody address to a new one. The 70M coin transfer is the 8th largest move of all-time on the network. https://t.co/16DGERnaxo pic.twitter.com/16P2zN6FLW

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) May 6, 2023

Firm in conviction with the protocol

Typically, a situation like this implies that holders of the assets had resolved to stick to LDO for the long term. And as such, they were not willing to budge on the resolve. The decentralized liquid staking protocol for Ethereum [ETH] has been gaining momentum for a while.

And it is not a new development that the protocol housed a large percentage of all the staked Ether [stETH] deposited before Ethereum’s activation of withdrawals. It has continued to maintain a significant lead over its counterparts.

But before the latest token transfer, on-chain data showed that there has been a minimal movement of long-term holdings. According to Santiment, the 90-day dormant circulation was 18,300. 

Although it was important to point out that there was a spike in the metric on 2 May as well. However, for most of the last three months, LDO was idle in the bags of these holders. This suggests that many holders align with the decision to keep their tokens.

Source: Santiment

Furthermore, the Realized market capitalization HODL (RHODL) waves had substantially increased at press time. This metric adopts the HODL waves by evaluating the number of LDOs held with a long-term view. But here, it also considers applying the realized cap as a ratio. By doing this, the metric is able to deduct when there is euphoria in the market to sell.

Thus far, it’s not yet the top

Although the RHODL waves skyrocketed to 22.05, LDO’s price did not follow in the same direction.

Therefore, this implies that long-term holders were not willing to part ways with LDO on the macro time horizon. But in a situation where the metric increases with the price, it could suggest the opposite.

With respect to its Total Value Locked (TVL), Lido’s worth had diminished from the highs registered in the first few months of the year. The TVL acts as a strong indicator used to measure the growth of a protocol. 

Read Lido DAO’s [LDO] Price Prediction 2023-2024

The TVL achieves this by considering the rate of deposits in smart contracts related to the project. At the time of writing, the Lido TVL was $12.22 billion — 2.22% down in the last 24 hours.

Source: DeFiLlama

Still, it represented an increase on a Year-To-Date (YTD) basis, only that user liquid input had slightly reduced. Lastly, this level of engagement from LDO holders is a positive indicator of the community’s strength and its collective belief in the project’s long-term value proposition.