Why Leverage Staking Is Riskier Than It Looks

Our comprehensive stress tests on the Lido-Aave-Curve LSD ecosystem reveal critical vulnerabilities and dynamic interplays under extreme conditions of significant stETH devaluation. These simulations illustrate that leverage staking strategies, while innovative, expose the market to heightened risks. The presence of leverage staking significantly escalates the risk of cascading liquidations within the LSD ecosystem. This finding underlines a crucial concern: systemic risk is exacerbated not only through direct liquidations but also via the market pressures these actions generate. The selling pressure on stETH, driven by both liquidations and deleveraging actions, can trigger a ripple effect across the system, further depressing stETH prices and adversely impacting the financial stability of broader market participants (such as ordinary users). Therefore, it is crucial to strike a balance between leveraging opportunities for higher returns and the potential for destabilization in LSD ecosystems.

Building upon these insights, future research can pursue several avenues. A crucial direction is the development of refined models that simulate a broader range of conditions, incorporating more granular behaviors of market participants and liquidity variations. This could lead to more robust parameterization of platforms such as Aave, similar to the ‘safe parameterization’ design used in traditional finance, which aims to mitigate risks without stifling innovation. Additionally, exploring new regulatory frameworks tailored to LSDs could help prevent the systemic shocks observed in our simulations. By integrating advanced risk management strategies and regulatory innovations, future research can contribute to creating a more resilient LSD ecosystem. This involves a holistic approach to understanding the interdependencies and collective behaviors that define these platforms.

10 Conclusion

This paper systematically studies the leverage staking strategy with LSDs. In the analytical section, we propose a formal model to capture the direct and indirect leverage staking strategy within the Lido–Aave–Curve LSD ecosystem. In the empirical section, we introduce heuristics to identify historical leverage staking positions and assess factors such as leverage amounts, loops, multipliers, and APRs. Our findings indicate that the majority of leverage staking positions yield an APR higher than the APR of conventional staking, underscoring their high-return nature. However, recognizing the associated risks, we also conduct stress tests to simulate various extreme scenarios. These tests reveal that leverage staking significantly increases the risk of cascading liquidations within the LSD ecosystem because it triggers additional selling pressures during liquidations and deleveraging. Furthermore, our simulation suggests that leverage staking not only intensifies the risk profile of individual portfolios but also contributes to broader systemic risks as it exacerbates the liquidation of ordinary positions. We hope our research inspires academic researchers and protocol developers to create robust risk assessment methods and safe parameterizations that safeguard all stakeholders within the LSD ecosystem.

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Authors:

(1) Xihan Xiong, Imperial College London, UK;

(2) Zhipeng Wang, Imperial College London, UK;

(3) Xi Chen, University of Sussex, UK;

(4) William Knottenbelt, Imperial College London, UK;

(5) Michael Huth, Imperial College London, UK.

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.

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