Celsius Moves $781M in stETH Just as Lido Withdrawals Open

As soon as the liquid staking platform Lido allows withdrawals, the beleaguered cryptocurrency lender Celsius rushes to remove its Ethereum staking tokens from it.

On May 15, a transaction on Celsius wallets involved the transfer of 428,015 stETH (Lido-staked Ether) to the Lido-staked Ethereum wallet. Some believe that the transfer was undertaken in anticipation of a withdrawal because the huge stockpile had a value of $781 million when it was transferred.

According to the information on the chain, Celsius appears to have made a test withdrawal of 0.1 stETH a few hours later. According to Celsius creditor and pioneer of the Bitcoin community Simon Dixon, the cryptocurrency may be “lining up for staking directly without Lido in the middle.” Additionally, he raised the possibility of using the asset as loan collateral for Celsius’s restructuring plans.

The blockchain intelligence startup Arkham Intelligence revealed that Celsius made a 40,928 ETH transaction to a smart contract known as “Figment ETH2 Beacon Depositor 1” last week. Etherscan claims that once it was finished on May 12, this was moved to the Ethereum Beacon Chain deposit contract.

On May 15, Lido, which levies a 10% stakes commission, upgraded to the V2 protocol and let users withdraw money.

“Lido V2 consists of two main parts, with Ethereum withdrawals serving as the functionality that most users will notice. Now, Lido users who are also Ethereum stakeholders can directly unstake ETH utilizing the protocol.

Lido is currently in charge of 29% of all staked ETH, or 6.27 million ETH, with a market cap of over $11.3 billion. On-chain analytics company Nansen reports that are currently 54,046 ETH waiting to be withheld. The Celsius stockpile is not currently included in this number.