After posting heavy gains last month, bears took over the price of Lido Finance (LDO), posting double-digit losses.
Ahead of Ethereum’s biggest upgrade ever, the leading staker’s native token was in worrying territory.
At the time of writing, LDO was trading at $1.78 after declining by nearly 10% in the last 24 hours. It lost more than 40% of its value over the past month as well.
LDOUSD. Source: TradingView
The token had been on a consistent uptrend leading up to the event but failed to hold momentum since mid-August as a result of slow demand for staking and mixed expectations for the Merge. Since then, its price movement has been rangebound.
But many industry experts believe that the Merge could potentially become a “sell the news” event, further extending its downtrend.
Lido happens to be the most popular Ethereum 2 staking-as-a-service provider. In fact, 31% of the entire amount of ETH staked is via Lido, according to a recent report by Nansen.
Stats also reveal that Lido has deposited more than 4.14 million of the ETH into the Ethereum 2.0 smart contract on behalf of its users.
The decentralized online liquid staking protocol was initially established as a counter-risk to centralized crypto exchanges raking in the majority of staked ETH, considering that these platforms are required to comply with jurisdictional regulations.
However, Lido’s dominance became a bone of contention within the Ethereum community as fears of centralization emerged.
The report highlighted the need for the staking pool to be sufficiently “decentralized” in a bid to maintain its position as censorship resistant as LDO ownership was observed to be concentrated.
