Lido’s stETH withdrawals went live today and in the first few hours just under 300 ETH has been initiated for withdrawal.
Celsius moved their 428k ETH ($785M) 10 minutes before withdrawals opened up and are expected to initiate the process soon. The ETH received here will be used in Celsius’ bankruptcy proceedings.
So far it’s been a complete non-event. In the Shanghai report we tried to hypothesize who would be waiting for Lido withdrawals to redeem instead of just swapping at the 1:1 peg. The only reasons we could really come up with were potential tax reasons (swapping tokens vs redeeming ETH, note this is unclear) or a big player trying to create a narrative around or just a desire to shift to a competitor. We’ll keep an eye on it, but for now there’s nothing interesting going on.
On a related note, the exit queue has been completely cleared out (could change a bit with stETH) while the activation queue is now up to ~50k validators. At 1,800 permitted new validators/day, the average wait time to stake has increased to around 1 month. It’s possible LST’s start trading at a slight premium in the coming months if the queue length keeps growing.
