Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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Lido DAO has proposed spending up to 10,000 stETH (roughly $20 million) from the treasury to buy LDO tokens.
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This comes as LDO is currently approaching its all-time low of $0.27.
Lido DAO Seeks to Spend $20M in Buying Back LDO Tokens
Ethereum's largest liquid staking protocol intends to spend a large chunk of its treasury to buy back its governance token. This latest development comes as LDO is approaching its all-time low price of $0.27.
The Lido DAO posted a proposal on Friday seeking 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.
According to the proposal, the DO-to-ETH ratio currently sits at around 0.00016, a 70% discount to levels that characterized most of the prior two years.
LDO recently set a new all-time high of $0.27 earlier this month, but has added 12% to its value since then and now trades at $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.
In its proposal, Lido DAO stated that,
"This is not a routine fluctuation. It represents one of the most significant dislocations between LDO's market price and its underlying protocol fundamentals in the token's history."
The team added that the proposal is a one-off and is separate from Lido’s 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.
This proposal comes after Lido posted total revenue of $40.5 million for all of 2025, a 23% decline year-over-year.
Lido’s NEST program, set to be formalized in Q2 2026, would also cap annual spending at $10 million.
The broader cryptocurrency market has been underperforming since Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $124k in October 2025. This has affected liquidity within the market. On-chain LDO liquidity is thin, with only around $90,000 of depth at plus-or-minus 2%, per the proposal.
The team stated that if approved, it 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 remains the largest staking protocol on Ethereum with 23% market share, per its February 2026 tokenholder update. LDO is up 4% in the last 24 hours and now trades at $0.31 per coin.
