Lido Posts 23% Revenue Drop in 2025, Plans LDO Buyback

Lido, the most important 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, in response to an execution report printed by the Lido Foundation.

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 Difficult Year for Staking Revenue

In the report, Lido noted that its foremost supply of revenue, staking payment income, fell from $48.5 million to $37.4 million. In addition, 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 revenue.

Meanwhile, gross staking rewards throughout all the 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 simply 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 change staking, institutional low-risk staking, and liquid restaking platforms that used their very own protocol tokens to subsidize returns.

However, Ethereum’s staking setting has since improved, even taking the community to new exercise report highs in 2026.

Expansion and Buyback Plans

Market knowledge 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 current 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.

Meanwhile, the protocol is growing a possible LDO buyback plan that may function beneath the Network Economic Support Tokenomics (NEST) framework. Once reside, 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 guide module that may enable 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.

Last 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 consists of integrations with BitGo, Hex Trust, Komainu, and Crypto Finance AG that present shoppers with extra custody and staking choices.

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