wstETH exists to solve a compatibility problem rather than a financial one. Lido’s stETH pays staking rewards by increasing your token balance, and a great many smart contracts cannot cope with a balance that changes on its own. Wrapping fixes that.<\/p>\n
Deposit stETH into the wrapper and you receive wstETH. Your wstETH balance never changes; instead, the amount of stETH each token can be redeemed for grows as staking rewards accrue. The two are freely convertible in both directions at the current ratio, so nothing is given up by wrapping \u2014 only the accounting changes. Because the underlying is stETH, everything true of that token is also true here, one layer down.<\/p>\n
Supply is simply how much stETH is currently wrapped, so it rises and falls with demand from the protocols that require a fixed-balance token. It carries no independent issuance and no schedule.<\/p>\n
Watch the wstETH-to-stETH ratio, which should only ever climb as rewards accumulate \u2014 it is a useful running record of the staking return. Beyond that, the things to monitor are Lido’s, not the wrapper’s: the exit queue, validator performance, and Lido’s share of total staked ether, which is a live concern for Ethereum’s decentralisation given how concentrated staking has become.<\/p>\n
wstETH is the form of staked ether that appears in most lending markets and cross-chain deployments, precisely because a fixed balance is easier to account for. It is heavily used as collateral, and it is the asset most often bridged to layer-2 networks.<\/p>\n
The risk stack is worth spelling out because it is three deep: you hold ether’s price risk, plus Lido’s validator and smart-contract risk, plus the wrapper’s own contract. A discount between staked ether and ether can and has opened during stressed periods, so exiting may cost more than entering. Positions that loop this asset \u2014 borrowing against it to buy more \u2014 have been liquidated in exactly those moments, and the leverage is usually the thing that turns a drawdown into a loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wrapped stETH is a non-rebasing version of Lido’s staked ether: the balance stays fixed while its value grows, which is what most smart contracts require.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"template":"","meta":{"_cp_coin_symbol":"WSTETH","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-656","coin","type-coin","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coin\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coin"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/coin"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coin\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coinpric.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}