Top 8 Liquidity Staking Programs to Watch [Updated March 2022]

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Liquidity staking is a very powerful opportunity in decentralized finance. Instead of traditional staking, users can retain liquidity and explore additional revenue generation opportunities. Finding the right program that fits your needs is crucial, and exploring multiple revenue streams through one provider can unlock tremendous returns.

What is liquid staking?

Unlike the traditional concept of staking crypto assets for a period of time, liquid staking offers a welcome change. Banning crypto assets for a period of time prevents users from trading or selling them until that period ends. Liquid staking provides users who contribute liquidity to the protocol with a liquid asset that allows them to explore other opportunities in the DeFi space.

Another advantage of liquid staking is that it bypasses all staking guidelines. Traditional staking allows users to cancel the stake before the period expires, but forces them to pay the penalty. Additionally, it can take days or weeks for users to recover their initial deposit. A liquid bet can be converted back to the original deposit at any time and often with no fees.

Lido (Ethereum, Terra, Solana)

The Lido ecosystem has gained tremendous momentum since the launch of ETH 2.0 staking. Although Ethereum is not yet a Proof-of-Stake network, users can pre-stake their Ether to earn rewards. Lido provides these services and controls nearly $6 billion in staked ether. Users earn an APR of 4.6%, but that’s not the essential part.

Users receive cash based on their stake when they stake Ether, Terra or Solana via Lido. The cash funds can be used for other decentralized protocols and projects, giving users additional revenue generating opportunities. The current Lido APY for Terra (9.5%) and Solana (5.9%) are equally attractive.

Tempus (Yield Token)

Tempus’ approach is slightly different. Despite being a liquid staking provider, the team primarily aims to help users earn a decentralized fixed income. The protocol supports high-yield tokens such as stETH, cDAI, aDai, xSushi and other assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Locking these tokens allows users to set their future earnings. In addition, the platform allows speculating on the rate of future returns of backed tokens and providing liquidity to earn additional swap fees.

Additionally, Tempus does not charge any log fees. However, users pay a swap fee – which is distributed to liquidity providers – and the gas fee, which is mandatory to use the Ethereum network. Tempus has integrated with Lido, Aave Compound, Yearn.Finance and Rari and will support future integrations to unlock more liquidity.

Hubble (Solana, BTC, ETH, other assets)

Hubble is a new liquidity staking platform that offers its users additional revenue opportunities. Users automatically earn a return on their collateral by contributing liquidity – either in “vanilla” assets or high-yield formats such as mSOL or pSOL. Vanilla assets are delegated to partner lending platforms. Once the collateral is deposited, users can borrow from USDH, the Hubble protocol’s native stablecoin.

The USDH stablecoin can be sued via other DeFi protocols to generate income or deposited into Hubble’s stability pool. This latter option nets users the nearly 10% difference in liquidated accounts and HBB premiums. Additionally, users can stake HBB for additional rewards and use it as a native governance asset as an additional revenue opportunity.

Marinade (Solana)

Marinade protocol on Solana helps users to stake SOL and benefit from liquid staking. In return for their deposit, the Suers receive mSOL, which increases in value relative to SOL each epoch. Additionally, mSOL can be used across multiple decentralized finance protocols on the Solana blockchain.

Additionally, Marina eliminates the need to deal with an unstake period. Instead, users can delegate their SOL to over 400 top validators, helping to make the Solana ecosystem more robust and decentralized. As a result, today the platform has a total locked value of over 807 million SOL.

Meta Pool (NEAR)

The Meta Pool DeFi protocol offers liquid staking for NEAR holders at a prospective 10% APR. Staking NEAR via Meta Pool helps avoid the unstaking period of up to 65 hours and rewards users with stNEAR. In addition, the protocol offers broader near-protocol decentralization through delegated deployments to high-performance fee-based validators.

Similar to liquid stake assets in other networks, stNEAR can be used in other decentralized finance protocols. Any yield generated through stNEAR can be kept by the user while still generating the standard NEAR staking rewards. All earnings are automatically included in the inserted NEAR token.

Revault (supported by Orbs L3)

Vault Aggregates DeFi Protocol Revault improves its automatic rebalancing feature. Log users can use Revault to transfer assets into vaults that offer a high APY. In addition, the protocol constantly searches for more lucrative vaults and notifies users of new opportunities. Additionally, the integration of Orbs Layer 3 technology ensures that users can align their position to the better vault through an automated process.

Using Orbs, Revault will scour the market for the best performing vaults and rotate user funds to maximize everyone’s APY. It’s a different approach to the liquid staking aspect, although it offers more flexibility than swapping vaults or manually picking and re-picking assets. Automating asset staking liquidity to achieve higher APY is a unique capability that would not be possible without the Consensus-as-a-Service Layer 3 architecture provided by Orbs.

Izumi (Uniswap V3 LP Token)

The purpose of Izumi is to enable Uniswap liquidity providers to increase the rewards for mining liquidity through LiquidBox. Earning additional rewards is a powerful economic incentive and ensures users can keep their principle in Uniswap through Izumi’s non-custodial and fully decentralized approach.

Izumi supports liquidity mining in Ethereum and Polygon, with rewards being issued in iZi tokens. The USDC/USDT pair on Ethereum offers an APR of between 4.74% and 8.86%, while the same pair on Polygon – eligible for double rewards – earns 119% to 19.48%. Users earn iZi and YIN tokens, creating a strong incentive for users to provide liquidity on Uniswap and use their LP tokens to unlock more rewards.

Balancer Labs (Ethereum/Polygon)

As one of the most established projects in the decentralized finance space, Balancer offers various pools of liquidity for users to engage with. More importantly, multiple protocols have built-in support for Balancer LP tokens that can be earned for liquid staking purposes, making Balancer Labs one of the frontrunners in the broader liquid staking space.

In addition, Balancer serves as a protocol for programmable liquidity. This impacts liquid staking and other aspects of decentralized finance, allows broader liquidity for asset pools, and creates strong incentives for users to provide long-term liquidity.

Diploma

The concept of liquid staking is gaining momentum in decentralized finance. But more importantly, this solution has become accessible across multiple blockchains and networks, giving more users access to these revenue-generating opportunities. Maintaining liquidity when staking assets is crucial as it gives users more flexibility and additional opportunities to generate income.

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