Lido DAO proposes $20 million one-off LDO buyback as token hovers near all-time low

Ethereum's largest liquid staking protocol is looking to deploy a significant chunk of its treasury to buy back its own governance token.

A governance proposal posted Friday by the Lido Ecosystem Operations team seeks authorization for the Lido Growth Committee to spend up to 10,000 stETH from the DAO treasury to accumulate the protocol's native LDO token. At current ether prices of roughly $2,000, that amounts to approximately $20 million.

The LDO-to-ETH ratio currently sits at around 0.00016, which the proposal describes as a 70% discount to levels that characterized most of the prior two years. The token recently set a new all-time low near $0.27 on Mar. 7 and currently trades near $0.31, with a market capitalization of roughly $260 million. At current prices, the buyback could absorb roughly 65 million tokens, or about 8% of the circulating supply.

"This is not a routine fluctuation," the proposal reads. "It represents one of the most significant dislocations between LDO's market price and its underlying protocol fundamentals in the token's history."

The proposal is explicitly framed as a one-off, distinct from Lido's separate NEST automated buyback proposal introduced in Nov. 2025. NEST would create an ongoing mechanism deploying LDO and wstETH into a Uniswap v2-style liquidity pool, but it is designed to activate only when ETH trades above $3,000 and Lido's annualized revenue exceeds $40 million. 

Lido posted total revenue of $40.5 million for all of 2025, a 23% decline year-over-year. The NEST program, set to be formalized in Q2 2026, would also cap annual spending at $10 million. The one-off proposal is effectively a way to move faster and at double the scale while LDO trades at what the DAO views as a bargain.

On-chain LDO liquidity is thin, with only around $90,000 of depth at plus-or-minus 2%, per the proposal. The Growth Committee would execute in 1,000 stETH batches across on-chain venues like CoW Swap and Uniswap as well as centralized exchanges including Binance and OKX, which each offered more than $100,000 in depth. The proposal also permits the committee to engage market-maker partners on the Lido Ecosystem Foundation's behalf.

Lido's case is that the price decline has outpaced the actual deterioration in protocol performance. Net protocol rewards fell roughly 20% over the same period the LDO:ETH ratio dropped about 50%. Costs improved 13% year-over-year and the effective take rate rose from 5% to 6.11%.

Lido remains the largest staking protocol on Ethereum with 23% market share, per its February 2026 tokenholder update.