Lido Posts 23% Revenue Decline by 2025, Plans LDO Buyback

Measured in ETH rather than dollars, Lido’s total locked-in value dropped from 9.63 million ETH to 8.81 million ETH.

Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, closed 2025 with a total revenue of $40.5 million, down 23% from $52.4 million last year, according to the execution report published by the Lido Foundation.

The DAO is now revising the LDO automatic token return mechanism, with deployment targeted for Q2 2026, as part of a broader effort to align token value management and protocol financial performance.

A Hard Year to Earn Income

In the report, Lido noted that its biggest source of income, earnings, fell from $48.5 million to $37.4 million. In addition, there has been a decrease in execution layer rewards due to the ongoing network scaling in Ethereum, and a decrease in consensus layer rewards built into the release curve, so both weigh on the protocol’s revenue.

Meanwhile, gross earnings across the board fell 18% in dollar terms, from about $1.03 billion to $846.7 million. There was also a decline in Lido’s share of the ETH market at the stake, with its holding going from over 28% of all ETH at stake in 2024 to just over 24% in December 2025.

In terms of ETH, the total amount locked decreased from 9.63 million ETH to 8.81 million ETH, a decrease of 8.5%. The report attributes the losses of shares in circulating funds to changes in exchange rates, low-risk institutional holdings, and liquid return platforms that have used their protocol tokens to fund returns.

However, Ethereum’s staking environment has since improved, taking the network to new activity records in 2026.

Extension and Buyback Plans

Market data from CoinGecko shows native LDO trading at $0.27 as of March 27, down 7.3% over the past seven days. The token hovers near its recent lows, with a 24-hour range between $0.275 and $0.290, and remains close to the all-time low of $0.2714 recorded on March 8, 2026.

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At the same time, the protocol develops an LDO recovery system that could work under the Network Economic Support Tokenomics (NEST) framework. Once live, the offering will enable users to purchase LDO on the open market using a regulated yield and deposit tokens into the LDO/wstETH liquidity pool managed by the platform.

As part of this, Lido shared that it has already completed the development of a manual module that will allow the exchange of governance-controlled tokens before the planned technical validation scheduled for the Q2 release. The company added that any recovery mechanism becomes effective only if there is a real surplus in the treasury.

Last year, the company launched Lido Earn, a platform designed for highly productive stakeholders, which now holds more than 77,000 ETH in TVL. It came after WisdomTree launched the first STETH liquid staking ETP in Europe. The product also includes integrations with BitGo, Hex Trust, Komainu, and Crypto Finance AG providing clients with additional storage and hosting options.