Fidelity has written in a revised submission to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it wants to offer its potential Ethereum fund traders the ability to pledge a portion of their assets. The asset management company applied to launch an Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF) in November last year. Other potential issuers include BlackRock, Ark Invest, and Grayscale.

Exploring the pricing, liquidity and collateral dynamics of liquid staking tokens (LST's)

Many thanks to Anders Elowsson for initial discussions prompting these series of posts and for his many helpful comments on the text. Thanks also to Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Julian Ma, Thomas Thiery, Davide Crapis, Mike Neuder, Drew Van der Werff, Kydo and many others for discussions and comments on the text.Cover photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.

According to an official announcement, Chainlink Staking v0.2 has been opened to the public. Due to the community pool being filled during the early access period, anyone can stake LINK as long as existing stakers complete their withdrawals and pool space is available.

Web3 startup Lantern Finance has launched a user-friendly staking platform in 15 states in the United States, including major markets such as California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, and Massachusetts. According to the team, "Lantern aims to redefine the cryptocurrency landscape with a focus on clarity, security, and regulatory compliance. The platform's goal is to democratize cryptocurrency banking services, making complex tasks such as staking and lending simple and intuitive for everyday users, while adhering to the highest standards of security and compliance."

According to a report by RedStone Oracles, the total TVL of liquidity collateral agreement accounts has reached 26.8 billion US dollars. Liquidity collateral agreements issue tradable digital assets in the form of LiquidS tokens (LST), providing users with a convenient way to participate in cryptocurrency collateral without the complexity of running validator nodes and managing hardware. The report states that LSTfi is a subset of decentralized finance (DeFi) that uses liquidity collateral tokens such as stETH, rETH, WBETH, or cbETH to achieve innovative yield strategies and maximize returns.

Lido DAO has approved the deployment of the Simple Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) module, which is a step towards quickly diversifying Lido node operators and promoting innovation within the Ethereum staking ecosystem. DVT is a system that operates similarly to a validator running a multi-signature setup, relying on multiple NOs rather than a single node operator. Each NO manages different nodes, which communicate and work together to fulfill the responsibilities of the validator.

On November 12th, liquidity collateral platform ether.fi announced the launch of liquidity collateral token eETH on the mainnet. The first batch of whitelisted users can now mint eETH.

DefiLlama data, Binance's total locked value (TVL) for Ethereum in their liquidity pool has reached $1.2 billion. In April of this year, Binance launched an upgraded version of BETH called WBETH, which is a liquidity staking derivative that allows investors to use tokens to lend and borrow on decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols outside of Binance, while also earning staking rewards. When users stake ETH by locking it in Binance, they receive derivative tokens that represent their staked assets. According to 21Shares' Dune dashboard, Binance has 1.2 million staked ETH, making them one of the largest participants in the Ethereum staking network, second only to Lido Finance and Coinbase.

On September 6th, according to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, 8 hours ago, two GMX whale addresses (possibly belonging to the same individual/organization) deposited 54,607 GMX (approximately $1.78 million USD) into GMX staking. Among them, address 0x856 deposited and staked 28,385 GMX (approximately $920,000 USD), and address 0xacc deposited and staked 26,221 GMX (approximately $850,000 USD).