As I was researching Lido and stETH, I wondered what kind of a person locks up ETH for an undetermined amount of time (until the Eth2 merge) and what do they do in the meantime?
The curiosity started with looking at the stETH token contract and the "Holders" section on Etherscan.
The top 3 holders makes sense but who are the other people who hold a significant supply in their wallet and not deployed into any yield farming platform (like Curve's stETH pool) Normally, Etherscan is pretty good about labeling addresses but are these other addresses smart contracts or user wallets?
Only one way to find out — by a combination of quantative and qualitative sleuthing! GET READY! As I type this, I have no idea what we're going to discover. You, Dear reader, and me, both are going on a journey. I don't know what we'll discover next!
As of this writing (October 9th, 2021), I excluded any address labeled as a "contract" by Etherscan
This left me with the following addresses:
Before anything else, let's get a look at the financial profile of our stETHians.
First up - start by looking at the net worth and how that's grown over time. Collectively, our stETHians are worth $350 Million USD combined.