Ratings · Measured, not sponsored
Liquid staking
Every comparison in this category ranks tokens on advertised yield. We rank them on the only number that has ever cost anyone money: how much of the token you could actually sell before the price breaks.
Charges the highest fee here — and is the only protocol that treats providing a market as its own job. About 30% of the token is genuinely sellable. Everyone else is under 4%.
The only protocol here that hands you a public API returning the raw price series, so you can compute your own net yield rather than trust its number. Every protocol could do this. One does.
1.9% of supply changes hands daily — roughly twenty-seven times better than stETH — at the lowest fee of any major staking token, 4%.
What we did · July 15, 2026We derived the gross rate each network actually pays — a figure nobody publishes — then measured every token as a subtraction from it. Then we asked the question the category avoids: how much of this “liquid” token could you actually sell?
Backing is not liquidity
On 10 October 2025, wBETH — a $7 billion, fully-backed, 1:1 wrapped staking token — printed $430 against ETH above $3,800. An 88% discount. On Binance’s own order book.
The ETH behind it was never impaired for a single second. It was fully backed the entire time. Binance priced the collateral off a thin internal pair, the depeg forced liquidations, and the liquidations dumped more wBETH into the same broken book. Binance paid $283 million in compensation and quietly changed how the token is priced.
HOW MUCH OF YOUR “LIQUID” TOKEN COULD YOU ACTUALLY SELL?
Every “best liquid staking” page compares advertised yields and omits this table entirely. It is the only number that decides whether the word “liquid” is true — so it carries 35% of the score here, more than the yield and the fee combined.
The ranking
Click any row for the quick read, or open a company for its full profile and per-criterion scores. Measured July 15, 2026. How we rate.
HOW WE SCORED THIS — CRITERIA AND WEIGHTS+
Four times now, a fully-backed staking token has cratered simply because there was no market to sell it into: stETH in 2022, mSOL on $8m of selling in 2023, ezETH in 2024, and wBETH at an 88% discount on Binance’s own order book in 2025. In every case the underlying asset was never impaired. Backing is not liquidity, and we weight the difference first.
The question every comparison omits, and the one that has actually cost people money. We take the token’s outstanding value and set it against the depth genuinely available to sell into — on-chain pools, and daily turnover. The ratios are brutal: a token with a billion dollars outstanding and two million dollars of exit is not liquid, it is a building with an emergency exit sized for one person. Backing does not save you. Depth does.
Not the fee percentage — whether the yield they SHOW you is the yield you GET. Some publish the formula and hand you the raw numbers to check. Others advertise a rate that explicitly excludes their commission, and say so only in a support article nobody reads. And the worst simply state a number and never mention a take rate at all, which we then have to derive by dividing.
Measured against the gross rate the network actually pays, which we derive rather than accept: the protocol APR, before anyone’s cut. Every token is scored on how much of that it gives back to you.
Do you hold an asset or an IOU? And when a validator is slashed, what actually covers it — a contractual claim you own, a fund of undisclosed size, or a discretionary vote by token-holders? Note that Solana has no protocol slashing at all, which is a real structural advantage its LSTs are never given credit for.
A liquid staking token must not quietly become a restaked one. We check whether the product takes on EigenLayer-style obligations, and whether that extra risk is quantified anywhere for the holder. A plain LST scores full marks here by simply not doing it.
Weights sum to 100. If we cannot verify a criterion, we delete it rather than score it on impressions — read the methodology.
WE LOOKED AT 21. 1 DID NOT MAKE IT — HERE IS WHO, AND WHY
- Diva Staking — We could not verify that it is alive. No entry in the major protocol trackers, no market, no pools we could find — while it still appears in "best liquid staking" roundups. We are not asserting it is dead. We are asserting we could not confirm it is not, which for anyone thinking of depositing amounts to the same warning.
Is there a free alternative?
At 2.2%, the staking decision is roughly a hundredth as important as the decision to hold ETH at all.
The whole industry is built to make you forget that. Ethereum pays about 2.47% gross; after anyone’s cut you keep somewhere between 1.5% and 2.2%. Against an asset that halved in nine months, that is a rounding error. So: if you already hold ETH and want the yield, stake it with Lido or Rocket Pool, take the 2.2%, and ignore every restaked token in the neighbouring category. If you have 32 ETH and the competence, run your own validator and keep the entire 2.47% — there is no product here that beats simply not paying anyone. And if you are thinking of BUYING ETH because of the staking yield: do not. Two per cent is not a reason to own a volatile asset, and any page that presents it as one is selling you something.
What changed since last time
- 2026-08-27Split out of the old combined staking page.Pooled custodial staking, liquid staking tokens and liquid restaking are three different products with three different failure modes. One table implied they were comparable. They are not.
- 2026-07-15Category published.Every “best liquid staking” page compares advertised APYs and omits the only number that has ever cost anyone money: how much of the token you could actually sell.
- 2026-07-15We dropped our own thesis on fees, partly.We expected to find hidden fees everywhere. Lido and Marinade publish honest net numbers and the formula behind them. We said so instead of forcing the story.
Questions
What does Ethereum staking actually pay?+
About 2.473% gross — and nobody advertises that number, which is why we had to derive it ourselves from Lido’s published formula. It is the ceiling. Everything anyone sells you is a subtraction from it. Solo staking keeps all of it. Lido gives you 2.226%. Coinbase gives you 1.75%. The differences are entirely somebody’s commission.
Is “liquid” staking actually liquid?+
Only while nobody needs it to be, and that is the whole point of this page. stETH has $17.2 billion outstanding against roughly $113 million of on-chain depth — 0.66%, with 0.07% of supply trading in a day. Four times now a fully-backed token has cratered purely because there was no market to sell it into: stETH in 2022, mSOL on just $8 million of selling in 2023, ezETH in 2024, and wBETH at an 88% discount on Binance’s own order book in October 2025. In every case the underlying asset was never impaired for a second. Backing is not liquidity.
Do the liquid staking protocols hide their fees?+
We expected to find that, and mostly we did not — so we are saying so. Lido’s advertised rate is already net of its 10% fee and the formula is in its documentation. Marinade publishes an API that hands you the raw price series so you can compute your own yield rather than trust theirs. Both deserve credit. The 20–40% gap we went looking for is real, but it lives at the custodians rather than in DeFi — see the staking platforms rating for that half of the story.
What is the difference between liquid staking and liquid restaking?+
A liquid staking token represents ETH staked with Ethereum, and carries Ethereum’s slashing risk. A liquid restaking token takes that staked ETH and pledges it a second time to other services, adding a second slashing layer — and since April 2025, one where a slashed stake can be redistributed to the service that slashed it rather than burned. They are separate products with separate failure modes, which is why they are separate ratings here. Almost every comparison lists them in one table, and that alone has already misled you.
So what should I actually do?+
Recognise that at these rates the staking decision is roughly a hundredth as important as the decision to hold ETH at all, and that the entire industry is built to make you forget that. If you hold ETH and want the yield: use Lido or Rocket Pool, take the 2.2%, and do not use an exchange — paying 29% of a 2.5% yield for the privilege of holding an IOU is a bad trade. If you have 32 ETH and the competence, run your own validator and keep the whole 2.47%. And if you are considering buying ETH BECAUSE of the staking yield: do not. Two per cent is not a reason to own a volatile asset.
How this is funded
It is not. There are no affiliate links on this page or anywhere on this site, no paid placements, and no sponsored positions. Nobody in this table can buy a place in it, accelerate their inclusion, or influence a score — and none of them paid us anything, because there is nothing here to buy. The full policy.