Whales Offloading Lido DAO As Prices Struggle

Rune Christensen, the founder of Sky (formerly MakerDAO), has lately been selling his Lido DAO (LDO) stake. Christensen was part of the original DAO of Lido Finance, and he had an initial allocation of 25 million LDO tokens.

His constant selling has slowly raised eyebrows and prompted discussions about why and what it might mean for the market.

Lido DAO has been engaging with Christensen since its inception, when he was allocated LDO tokens at $1.75 each in December 2020. This sizable endowment was part of the protocol’s strategy to distribute governance staked between key community members for engaging and the ability to make decisions based on people other than the protocol’s founders.

Since 2022, Christensen has been selling off most of his LDO holdings, letting most go for an average of $1.94 and paring down his LDO holdings in 2022. But his latest tranche was a major plunge.

He sold 400,000 LDOs for approximately $407,300 in USD Coin (USDC), pegged the sale price at about $1.02 per LDO. The historical selling price for Lockdrop is significantly down relative to this, consistent with a broader bearish market trend for LDOs that depressed prices over the past months.

A 30% Yearly Decline and Market Sentiment

Lido DAO’s market value has plummeted by 30% already in 2022. Christensen’s trend toward lower sales volumes aligns with the general story that different large holders are selling their cryptos to signal that they may be losing their confidence or reorienting their investment portfolios.

Such sales have spiked a sense of jitteriness in the Lido DAO market ecosystem and have affected the behavior of both retail and institutional investors. A technical analysis of LDO’s price action offsets the gloomy macro picture.

Recent chart patterns in this cryptocurrency and traditional markets have shown the formation of a technical characteristic, a ‘falling wedge,’ often taken as a bullish signal. If this pattern occurs, a consolidation phase is typically followed by a breakout.

With such a setup in place, technical analysts are eyeing an impending recovery, with target prices overshooting the current levels and rising to above $1.10 in the near to mid-term.

The reality is that when referring to a cryptocurrency’s market dynamics, essential stakeholders can liquidate their positions, which significantly impacts the market. However, for Lido DAO, losing a figure like Christensen, who was there early on, directly affects immediate prices.

It could change the strategic governance of the protocol overnight. That, too, could be seen as a signal of his lack of long-term faith in the viability of the project or a shift towards other growing DeFi opportunities.

Future Prospects Amidst High-Profile Exits

Christensen offloads the remaining 647,000 LDO worth about $664,000, which the community and potential investors keenly watch to govern budget and price stability. Many of these are important because they’d discourage new investors or make existing ones uncertain about the future of the governance token.

Whether Lido DAO will weather these turbulent waters and reestablish its market presence will heavily depend on its ability to soak up high-profile disinvestments, seemingly without a second thought.

It will be a telling period for the market to come to grips with one less of its original proponents. As such, investors will need to keep an eye on these changes and begin to grasp what these translate to in the context of an increasingly dynamic DeFi space.

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