Stakers deposit funds into Lido and receive a return on investment in the form of staking rewards (supply-side fees).

Lido is a non-custodial staking protocol built on Ethereum and other blockchains. Lido was founded by a pseudo-anonymous team and launched in 2020.

LDO tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total staking rewards earned by the protocol (revenue). Lido’s investors include ParaFi Capital, Bitscale Capital, KR1, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Liquid staking

Lido Finance

# Lido Finance Cost of revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

The expenses incurred by Lido Finance when outsourcing its core validation and node operations to third-party node operators are measured by the Cost of revenue metric. These payments are distributed to node operators as compensation for maintaining the protocol's validation infrastructure. For Lido Finance, the value of the Lido Staked Ether asset minted and distributed to staking modules to pay node operators is captured by this metric. Prior to the implementation of the Staking Router, these expenses are calculated as a fixed share of the total protocol revenue.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: ERC-20 `Transfer` events for Lido Staked Ether and `DistributeRewardsEvent` events from `stMatic` contracts, covering Ethereum
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds and asset metadata for Lido Staked Ether and MATIC

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Post-Staking Router node operator share tracking

- **Purpose**: Track the actual Lido Staked Ether minted to staking modules to pay node operators on or after May 16, 2023.
- **Logic**: ERC-20 `Transfer` events of the Lido Staked Ether asset are filtered where the recipient address matches designated staking module addresses (including curated, SDVT, CSM, and module 4) and the sender address is identified as either the null address or the accounting contract address. The direct minting of Lido Staked Ether to the modules for node operator compensation is represented by these transfers.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`, `token_address`, `to_address`, `from_address`, `value`

### Component B: Pre-Staking Router cost of revenue estimation

- **Purpose**: Estimate node operator expenses prior to May 16, 2023.
- **Logic**: Because node operators were not paid directly through module addresses before May 16, 2023, cost of revenue is calculated as 50% of the total protocol revenue. Total protocol revenue for this period is derived by doubling the Lido Staked Ether minted to the DAO treasury (to account for the 50/50 split between the treasury and operators) and adding MATIC rewards extracted from `DistributeRewardsEvent` events from `stMatic` contracts.
- **Key fields**: `revenue`, `timestamp`

### Component C: USD conversion and aggregation

- **Purpose**: Normalize and convert the calculated cost of revenue to USD.
- **Logic**: The extracted asset amounts from both periods are normalized by their respective decimal precisions using asset metadata. The normalized amounts are then multiplied by the end-of-day price feeds for Lido Staked Ether and MATIC to determine the USD value. The final values are aggregated to a daily grain using UTC day boundaries, and any missing days are filled with zeros.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `cost_of_revenue`, `price_usd`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Expenses paid to third parties to deliver core service output.

Lido FinanceLDO

Cost of revenue

Cost of revenue

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown