LDO · a fixed cap that is quietly shrinking, with no burn.
LDO is the governance token of the Lido liquid-staking protocol on Ethereum — ~836.3M circulating against a fixed 1B cap. The supply was minted once in 2020 and all vesting ended in 2024, so nothing new is issued and nothing is burned; the only thing that moves supply is a DAO buyback.
Sell pressure. Zero. There is no mint, no unlock calendar left and no bankruptcy estate — every sell row is structurally empty.
Buy pressure. A holder-approved buyback drew ~12.75M LDO off the market in 90 days and parked it in the DAO treasury — held, not burned.
Net. About 1.52% taken off the market over 90 days — the float is shrinking, and a vote could still send the treasury stack back.
Lido cannot create LDO. The token is a fixed 1B supply minted once at the 2020 genesis, and the contract mints nothing new — there is no block reward, no staking emission and no inflation curve. This row can never be anything but zero.
Every team, investor and treasury vesting stream finished releasing in 2024, so there is no unlock calendar left and no cliff falls in this window. Nothing enters the market on a schedule.
The DAO treasury (an on-chain Aragon Agent) holds ~114.8M LDO, and it grew by ~12.75M this window because that is where bought-back LDO is parked — the treasury took coins IN, it did not sell any out. This large reserve has no published release schedule, so it is a tracked overhang, not sell pressure. No public evidence of release in window — monitored.
There is no Lido bankruptcy estate, no trustee and no court-ordered LDO distribution. Nothing can enter the market from this row.
A holder-approved buyback spends the DAO's staked-ETH treasury on LDO in the open market, executed in batches with each batch separately disclosed. Reading the DAO treasury wallet directly, its LDO balance rose ~12.75M over 90 days — coins bought off the float and returned to the treasury, held rather than burned. Only about a fifth of the ~10,000-stETH budget is spent, so the forward row holds the same measured pace.
Lido burns no LDO. Staking revenue is collected in stETH and other assets, and the buyback keeps the LDO it buys rather than destroying it, so no LDO has ever been removed from supply by a burn.
The DAO's only open-market buying is the programmatic buyback already counted in row 1. No separate foundation or labs entity has disclosed an additional LDO purchase. Counting it here would double the buyback.
The automated LP-mode buyback that would pair bought LDO into a liquidity pool had its contracts deployed on-chain in late Jul 2026, but it only fires when ETH is above $3,000 and protocol revenue clears a threshold, and no execution is visible on-chain yet. Until it fires it adds no new lock.
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