Liquid Staking
Staking your coins while receiving a tradable token representing them — keeping liquidity you'd otherwise lock up.
Liquid staking solves staking’s core inconvenience: normally staked assets are locked and illiquid. A liquid staking protocol (Lido is the largest) stakes on your behalf and issues a liquid staking token — like stETH — that accrues rewards while remaining freely tradable and usable across DeFi.
It unlocks capital efficiency: earn staking yield and still deploy the value as collateral or liquidity. The systemic worry is concentration — if one liquid staking provider controls a large share of a network’s stake, it becomes a centralization and governance risk for the whole chain. Convenience for users, a structural question for the network.