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 Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Expenses measures the total cost incurred by Lido Finance to operate its liquid staking protocol. This metric is composed of the cost of revenue paid to node operators and token incentives distributed to liquidity providers. These expenses are denominated in assets such as Lido Staked Ether and Lido DAO, which are normalized by decimal precision and converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: ERC-20 `Transfer` events, `NewTransaction` events from `AragonFinance` contracts, and `DistributeRewardsEvent` events from `stMatic` contracts on Ethereum
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds and asset metadata

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Node operator cost of revenue tracking

- **Purpose**: Capture the fees paid to node operators for securing the protocol
- **Logic**: For data on or after May 16, 2023, ERC-20 `Transfer` events of Lido Staked Ether to designated staking module addresses from the null address or the accounting address are parsed. For historical data prior to May 16, 2023, the cost of revenue is calculated as 50% of the total protocol revenue. Total protocol revenue is derived from Lido Staked Ether transfers to the treasury address (which are doubled for the pre-Staking Router period) and MATIC rewards extracted from `DistributeRewardsEvent` events from `stMatic` contracts.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `to_address`, `from_address`, `token_address`, `value` (amount)

### Component B: Token incentives extraction

- **Purpose**: Capture Lido DAO incentives distributed to the rewards committee and curve rewards contracts
- **Logic**: `NewTransaction` events from `AragonFinance` contracts are filtered for transactions where the recipient entity matches the rewards committee or curve rewards addresses. These events are joined with ERC-20 `Transfer` events on the transaction hash, recipient address, and transfer value to identify the Lido DAO asset address and verify the transfer amount.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`, `entity` (recipient), `amount`

### Component C: USD conversion and aggregation

- **Purpose**: Normalize asset amounts and convert them to USD
- **Logic**: Node operator fees and token incentives are aggregated by day. Asset amounts are normalized by decimal precision using asset metadata and multiplied by end-of-day asset prices to calculate the USD value. The final expenses metric is calculated as the sum of the daily USD-denominated cost of revenue and token incentives.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `cost_of_revenue`, `token_incentives`, `price_usd`

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

Lido FinanceLDO

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown