Lido, the biggest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, closed 2025 with complete income of $40.5 million, down 23% from $52.4 million the 12 months earlier than, based on an execution report printed by the Lido Basis.
The DAO is now reviewing an automatic LDO token buyback mechanism, with the deployment focused for Q2 2026, as a part of a broader effort to align the governance token’s worth with the protocol’s monetary efficiency.
A Tough 12 months for Staking Income
Within the report, Lido famous that its important supply of earnings, staking payment income, fell from $48.5 million to $37.4 million. As well as, there was a drop in execution layer rewards because of the continued community scaling on Ethereum, in addition to a lower in consensus layer rewards that was constructed into the issuance curve, with each weighing on the protocol’s earnings.
In the meantime, gross staking rewards throughout your complete protocol fell 18% in greenback phrases, from roughly $1.03 billion to $846.7 million. There was additionally a decline in Lido’s share of the staked ETH market, with its holdings going from greater than 28% of all staked ETH in 2024 to only over 24% in December 2025.
In ETH phrases, complete worth locked fell from 9.63 million ETH to eight.81 million ETH, a drop of 8.5%. The report attributes the share loss to capital rotating towards alternate staking, institutional low-risk staking, and liquid restaking platforms that used their very own protocol tokens to subsidize returns.
Nevertheless, Ethereum’s staking surroundings has since improved, even taking the community to new exercise report highs in 2026.
Growth and Buyback Plans
Market information from CoinGecko exhibits the native LDO buying and selling at $0.27 as of March 27, down 7.3% over the previous seven days. The token has hovered close to its latest lows, with a 24-hour vary between $0.275 and $0.290, and stays near its all-time low of $0.2714 recorded on March 8, 2026.
In the meantime, the protocol is creating a possible LDO buyback plan that will function underneath the Community Financial Help Tokenomics (NEST) framework. As soon as dwell, the providing will allow customers to purchase LDO from the open market utilizing protocol-generated yields and place the tokens into an LDO/wstETH liquidity place managed by the platform.
As a part of this, Lido shared that it has already accomplished the event of a handbook module that will permit governance-controlled token swaps forward of a deliberate technical validation scheduled for Q2 launch. The agency added that any buyback mechanism solely prompts as soon as a real treasury surplus exists.
Final 12 months, the agency launched Lido Earn, a platform meant for high-yield stakers, that now holds greater than 77,000 ETH in TVL. It got here after WisdomTree launched the primary stETH liquid staking ETP in Europe. The product additionally contains integrations with BitGo, Hex Belief, Komainu, and Crypto Finance AG that present purchasers with extra custody and staking choices.
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