Lido DAO team address tanks LDO price with active selling

Lido DAO tokens returned closer to their three-month lows after peaking above $1.16 on May 14. On-chain investigators noted activity originating from Lido’s team wallets. 

Lido DAO (LDO) erased its recent gains, sinking to $0.87 from a local peak above $1.16 in the previous week. LDO was on a recovery arc, as the biggest liquid staking protocol and one of the key sources of value locked on the Ethereum ecosystem. 

On-chain data showed active selling originating from whale wallets. The seller addresses were identified as belonging to the Lido DAO team, extending a recent selling run with daily transfers of LDO to exchanges. The selling happened just days after the protocol suffered an oracle attack.

On Monday, one of the identified wallets sent out a total of 3.5M LDO to several leading centralized markets, with 2M of the tokens allocated to Binance. Arkham Intelligence does not flag the wallet as belonging to Lido DAO but as an Ethereum token whale. 

The seller paused over the weekend, after Friday’s deposit of 1.5M LDO to Binance. The selling streak was the major factor behind the LDO price slide. 

In total, the wallets identified as belonging to the team have transferred 21.31M LDO to exchanges, valued at $21.26M.

LDO tokens are 90% unlocked, with founders and initial developers holding around 25% of tokens. 

Lido DAO may also sell BLUR

The wallets identified as belonging to the Lido DAO team also sold BLUR tokens, contributing to the price drop. 

The seller deposited 34.2M BLUR valued at $4M to multiple exchanges. Later, the whale made a 4M USDT deposit on Kraken, putting the proceeds from the sale to work. 

As a result of the recent selling, BLUR also erased some of its recent gains, sinking from $0.12 to $0.10 with ongoing price pressure. 

The large-scale wallet still holds 9.21M LDO and 43.69M BLUR. Historical activity shows the wallet actively received new inflows, then sold the remaining balance. The same pattern applied to BLUR, where the whale wallet accumulated tokens, then rapidly sold them. 

Lido DAO retains leading position for ETH staking

Lido DAO retains one of the largest treasuries, with over $221M in reserves. The treasury holds over $91.6M in LDO tokens, one of its biggest holdings. The recent selling is only a fraction of all LDO held, and may be a part of short-term trading operations to grow stablecoin reserves for costs or other purposes. 

The protocol still sees limited outflows, despite most of the staked ETH being underwater. 

Only 2.8M of lsETH is in the money, with most ETH deposited at a higher market price. The top depositor held 280,100 ETH during peak demand for liquid staking.

Lido remains a leading liquid staking platform, locking in over $21.9B in total value, or 9.24M ETH. The protocol carries around 27% of staked ETH, with stETH trading at a slight premium above $2,400. The asset is still key for the activity of Curve Finance and is represented on Bybit and Bitget.

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