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

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

The DAO is now reviewing an automated LDO token buyback mechanism, with the deployment targeted for Q2 2026, as part of a broader effort to align the governance token’s value with the protocol’s financial performance.

A Difficult Year for Staking Revenue

In the report, Lido noted that its main source of income, staking fee revenue, fell from $48.5 million to $37.4 million. In addition, there was a drop in execution layer rewards as a result of the ongoing network scaling on Ethereum, as well as a decrease in consensus layer rewards that was built into the issuance curve, with both weighing on the protocol’s income.

Meanwhile, gross staking rewards across the entire protocol fell 18% in dollar terms, from approximately $1.03 billion to $846.7 million. There was also a decline in Lido’s share of the staked ETH market, with its holdings going from more than 28% of all staked ETH in 2024 to just over 24% in December 2025.

In ETH terms, total value locked fell from 9.63 million ETH to 8.81 million ETH, a drop of 8.5%. The report attributes the share loss to capital rotating toward exchange staking, institutional low-risk staking, and liquid restaking platforms that used their own protocol tokens to subsidize returns.

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

Expansion and Buyback Plans

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

Meanwhile, the protocol is developing a potential LDO buyback plan that would operate under the Network Economic Support Tokenomics (NEST) framework. Once live, the offering will enable users to buy LDO from the open market using protocol-generated yields and place the tokens into an LDO/wstETH liquidity position controlled by the platform.

As part of this, Lido shared that it has already completed the development of a manual module that would allow governance-controlled token swaps ahead of a planned technical validation scheduled for Q2 release. The firm added that any buyback mechanism only activates once a genuine treasury surplus exists.

Last year, the firm launched Lido Earn, a platform meant for high-yield stakers, that 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 that provide clients with more custody and staking options.

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