The world’s largest crypto exchange is adding a decentralized staking platform to its roster of assets.
In a new announcement, Binance says it’s listing Lido DAO (LDO), the governance token of Lido Finance which offers staking solutions across several popular blockchains.
Lido’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) grants holders of the Ethereum (ETH) token voting rights on project parameters, upgrades and staking protocols.
The Silicon Valley-based investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which in January announced its intentions to invest billions of dollars into the digital asset space, also revealed in March that it was backing Lido.
The a16z post says that Lido democratizes the proof-of-stake (PoS) process by both making minimum deposit amounts attainable to everyday crypto investors as well as offering an alternative to relying on centralized exchanges.
“That’s why we’re excited to invest in Lido, an effective, decentralized staking platform. It offers one of the easiest ways to stake ETH and other PoS assets today, while striving for decentralization through the DAO’s governance.
Lido [also] solves the competitive incentives between staking and seeking yield in DeFi [decentralized finance]. By issuing an Ethereum-native liquid token, Lido allows you to use staked ETH as collateral within DeFi in the same way you can use ETH currently.”
Lido users can stake tokens on a variety of leading networks, including Terra (LUNA), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC) and Kusama (KSM).
Lido DAO has been on a roller coaster ride of price action over the past day, at first rising 50% from $2.25 to $3.40 on the Binance news before tumbling vertically back down to its original valuation as the overall crypto markets flashed red.
LDO then worked its way back up to $2.53, but currently is down nearly 5% on the day, trading for $2.26.
Binance says LDO will be available in the Bitcoin (BTC), Binance USD (BUSD) and Tether (USDT) trading pairs.
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