Lido & stETH Weekly Data Report — Week of September 28–October 4, 2026

1. Executive summary

Seventh snapshot. The market did almost nothing and the network did a lot. ETH closed at $2,694.14, −0.2% close-to-close — the flattest weekly print in our nine-week record — while the exit queue spiked from roughly 166,000 ETH (Sep 29) to a peak above 850,000 ETH (Oct 2) on the MetaMask security exits, the largest backlog since December 2025. Lido TVL held at $26.51B (+0.1%) and the peg finished at −6.4bp. The ETF complex swung from +$689.8M to −$138.1M.

Two editorial notes belong in the summary rather than the footnotes, because both change what this edition can claim. First, the staking board is carried, not refreshed. Ebunker's October weekly did not land inside the window, and no dated network read exists inside September 28 – October 4 either, so staked balance, staking ratio, validator count and base APR all stand at the Sep 28 print (43,681,037 ETH; 36.19%; 2.18%). No week-over-week change is claimed for any of them. Second, one figure is withheld. The stETH supply input behind our supply×price cross-check remains the Sep 9 dated print — 26 days before this window opened — so rather than run a stale input through a live comparison, we suspend the cross-check this edition and derive the same quantity from two in-window prints instead (section 6). The Sep 27 price baseline was re-read in the same session as the Oct 4 prints, and every cross-week number below runs on that single basis.

Source: DefiLlama coingecko feed (Sep 27 and Oct 4 prints, one read session); DefiLlama protocol history; Farside final daily prints; Ebunker weekly (Sep 28); COIN360 and Crypto Briefing queue prints (Oct 1–2); BLS.

2. Week-over-week table

Source: DefiLlama coingecko feed and protocol history, one read session (Sep 27 and Oct 4 points); Farside final prints; Ebunker weekly (Sep 28) for the carried board; COIN360 (Oct 2) for the queue. LDO market cap on the 834.151M supply basis (DERIVED). Rows marked carried print their own print date and claim no change.

3. The week's tape and the peg, day by day

ETH printed its week low on day one ($2,653.59, Sep 28), climbed to $2,715.75 by October 2 — the session of the weak jobs report — and settled at $2,694.14. Daily closes: $2,653.59 (Sep 28), $2,659.74 (Sep 29), $2,674.18 (Sep 30), $2,689.93 (Oct 1), $2,715.75 (Oct 2), $2,677.23 (Oct 3), $2,694.14 (Oct 4). The week's range was 2.3% wide, the narrowest in the record; the close-to-close move was 0.2%.

LDO's path was far wider: $0.48412 → $0.43348 (−10.5%) → $0.47318 (+9.2%) → $0.45331 → $0.43952 → $0.44689 → $0.46354. Realized daily volatility on LDO ran roughly ten times ETH's for the week, which is the cleanest available measure of how little of this week's token action had anything to do with Lido's protocol data.

The stETH/ETH ratio, on this week's single-read basis, spent the week inside a ±16bp band: +5.4bp (Sep 27), +15.2bp (Sep 28, the week's high), +4.1bp (Sep 29), −5.2bp (Sep 30), −3.6bp (Oct 1), −7.9bp (Oct 2, the week's low), −0.2bp (Oct 3), −6.4bp (Oct 4, close; ratio 0.99936). Edition six printed the Sep 27 point as a 5bp discount; this week's re-read of the same date prints a 5bp premium. The sign sits inside the feed's re-print noise, both prints are disclosed, and no conclusion is drawn from the flip — what the band supports saying is that the peg held within ±16bp all week while a nine-figure validator exit ran through the protocol's redemption machinery.

Source: stETH, ETH and LDO series, DefiLlama coingecko feed, same-session prints (Sep 27 and Oct 4 points read together); re-print noise disclosed per the basis note in site_data.py.

4. Staking and the queues: a carried board and a live queue

The board did not refresh, and that is the disclosure. Ebunker's October weekly was not obtainable inside this window, and no other dated network read inside September 28 – October 4 published an active-balance, validator or supply figure we can stand behind. The board therefore stands exactly where edition six left it, at the Sep 28 print: 43,681,037 ETH in active validator balance, a 36.19% staking ratio on that series' denominator, a 2.18% network base APR and a 2.52% stETH 7-day average. Staked balance, ratio, validator count (906,000, last obtainable read Sep 20/21) and base APR all carry their dates in this edition, and no week-over-week change is claimed for any of them. A carried column that says it is carried is worth more than a fresh-looking number with an undisclosed basis.

The queues printed the week's real story, and every print is inside the window. The exit queue's last pre-event reading was a 2.8-day wait on the Sep 28 board — roughly 161,000 ETH at the churn rate the deep dive derives. It sat near 166,000 ETH on September 29, crossed 700,000 ETH on October 1, and peaked above 850,000 ETH on October 2: 773,447 ETH in the queue with a printed wait of 13 days 10 hours on COIN360's Oct 2 read, and a peak worth roughly $2.31 billion at the Oct 2 ETH print (DERIVED). The physical ceiling is about 57,600 ETH per day (256 ETH per epoch, ~225 epochs per day); 773,447 ÷ 57,600 = 13.4 days, which is why the printed wait and the arithmetic agree to within hours. About 523,000 ETH of the backlog is MetaMask's exited stake across roughly 17,000 validators, with 821 potentially affected validators reported as not yet exited at the time of the Oct 1 analysis. The entry queue — where that stake eventually has to re-enter — stood at 2.48M ETH on the same Sep 28 board.

Source: Ebunker Ethereum staking weekly (Sep 28, 2026: carried board, entry-queue volume, pre-event exit wait); COIN360 (Oct 2, 2026: 773,447 ETH and 13d10h); Crypto Briefing and Gate research (Oct 1–2, 2026: queue path, MetaMask volumes, 821 figure); Lido governance disclosure (Sep 30, 2026: 45-day cycle, 6,750 stETH reserve, no-action notice).

5. ETF flows, session by session

Cumulative net inflows on the complex sit near $13.8 billion through the window's final session — a counter that moves only when sessions print, so it is in-window by construction. For context, US spot bitcoin ETFs took in about +$82.9M the same week: the ETH complex lost more in five sessions than bitcoin's gained in the same five, which is the flow fact of the week.

Source: Farside Investors Ethereum ETF daily flow table (final prints through Oct 2); provisional-vs-final disclosure per COINAlertNews (Oct 4, 2026); BTC weekly per COINAlertNews (Oct 4, 2026).

6. Supply: one figure withheld, and what replaces it

Withheld. Our supply×price market-cap cross-check runs on a stETH supply input whose last dated print is September 9 — 26 days before this window opened, and the third consecutive edition without a fresh print. Edition six carried it with the age disclosed; this edition does not carry it at all. Running a live comparison on a 26-day-old input is how a stale number turns into a false signal, and the rule this site publishes is that no figure dated outside the window is presented as current. The cross-check returns when a dated supply print inside a window arrives, and the withheld comparison is logged in section 9.

What replaces it. The same quantity can be derived from two in-window prints instead of a stale one: Lido's TVL at the Oct 4 print is $26,510,866,919, and the ETH print for the same session is $2,694.13535, which implies 9.84 million ETH under Lido's management (DERIVED: 9,840,213 ETH). Set that against the 43,681,037 ETH staked network-wide on the Sep 28 board and Lido's share of stake works out to 22.5% (DERIVED). The same denominator puts MetaMask's 523,000 ETH exit at 5.3% of the ETH in the protocol's TVL. Both derivations carry inputs dated inside the window and are reproducible from the two numbers quoted.

Issuance and burn stand where the last dated window left them. The Sep 28 Ebunker print's 7-day window showed net issuance of +19,815.93 ETH — about +0.016% of that series' supply denominator, annualizing to 0.86% (DERIVED). No October print arrived, so the figure is carried with its date rather than refreshed, and the burn side keeps the carried pair that frames it: a 30-day average base fee of 0.179 gwei against the 13.384 gwei needed to hold supply flat — a ratio of roughly 1/75. Those are the thresholds, not this week's prints, and they are labeled that way.

Source: Lido TVL history and ETH print, DefiLlama, same read session (Oct 4 points); Ebunker weekly (Sep 28, 2026) for staked total, entry queue, issuance window and the 2.52% stETH 7-day average; carried base-fee and breakeven figures per their Sep 2 print dates.

7. The sector board, refreshed

Fourth consecutive fully fresh board: every row is a DefiLlama protocol-history read taken in one session, pointing at the Oct 4 print. The board's story is compression — six of eight rows down less than a percent, Morpho the only mover above one, and not a single liquid-staking competitor gaining share during the week that Lido's own stake had 523,000 ETH withdrawing from it. Ethereum chain TVL slipped −0.5% to $53.28B.

Source: api.llama.fi/protocol/<slug> reads (Sep 27 and Oct 4 points, one read session) and /v2/historicalChainTvl/Ethereum.

8. The rate path, and the carry table it moves

The October 2 September Employment Situation report is the window's macro print: payrolls +29,000 against roughly 90,000 expected, unemployment 4.2%, revisions −60,000, wage growth +3.0% year over year. CME FedWatch closed the week pricing a hold at the October 28 meeting near 72–77%, against roughly two-thirds-to-three-quarters odds of a further hike as late as September 23–24. Every cash row in the table below is carried with its own print date, as it has been all edition; the position value is this week's.

The carry gap at this week's price is −$458 against bills, −$571 against the 2-year and −$779 against the 10-year — all three still negative, all three computed on the same 2.22% user-net mid-point the site has used since edition five. What changed this week is not the gap but the direction of the thing that widens it: a hold at the October 28 meeting would be the first print since August that lets the cash leg fall while the staking leg stands still.

Source: position value DERIVED on the DefiLlama coingecko feed Oct 4 print; staking rate rows and cash rows carried with the print dates shown; jobs report per BLS (Oct 2, 2026); FedWatch per China Securities Journal (Oct 2, 2026).

9. Data-quality ledger

• Sep 27 price baseline re-read. Edition six printed ETH $2,709.26, stETH $2,707.83, LDO $0.48893 and BTC $84,876.06 for Sep 27. This edition's same-session re-read prints $2,699.13, $2,700.58, $0.48585 and $84,443.47 for the same dates — revisions of −0.4% to −0.6%. Every cross-week figure here runs on the re-read values; edition six's pages keep their prints.
• Peg sign flip on re-read. The Sep 27 stETH/ETH ratio re-read as a 5bp premium against edition six's printed 5bp discount. Both prints disclosed; the difference is inside feed noise; no conclusion drawn (section 3).
• Staking board carried, with its date. Ebunker's October weekly was not obtainable inside the window and no substitute dated read exists, so staked balance (43,681,037 ETH), ratio (36.19%), base APR (2.18%) and the validator count (906,000, Sep 20/21) all stand at the Sep 28 print. No week-over-week change is claimed for any of them, and none is implied.
• stETH supply cross-check withheld. The supply input's last dated print is Sep 9 — 26 days before the window. Rather than present a stale input as current, the supply×price comparison is suspended this edition; the ETH-under-management and share-of-stake figures in section 6 are derived instead from in-window prints and are reproducible.
• Post-window prints excluded. Network reads, treasury updates and flow sessions dated after October 4 exist and are deliberately not used anywhere in this edition — not in tables, not in prose, not as context. They arrive, dated, in the next edition.
• Queue prints are news-sourced. The 166,000 / 700,000+ / 773,447 / 850,000+ path comes from dated news prints (COIN360, Crypto Briefing, Gate research), not from an on-chain API read; the pre-event 2.8-day wait and the entry-queue volume come from the Sep 28 Ebunker board. The two are labeled and never averaged into a single queue series.
• ETF Oct 2 final print. The session finalized at −$37.4M against provisional −$17.3M; the weekly net of −$138.1M uses final prints.
• Carried rows. The 2.21–2.24% user-net APR band (Sep 2), frontend APR (Sep 7), rETH 2.19% (Sep 2), base fee and breakeven (Sep 2), and the Treasury rows (Aug 28 / Sep 1 / Sep 23) all print as carried with their dates. No fresh provider print was reachable inside the window, and none is invented to fill the gap.

Source: this ledger restates the disclosures made at each point of use above.

10. Method notes

Price series: DefiLlama coingecko feed, one print per day at a fixed UTC hour, all four assets read in a single session. TVL: DefiLlama protocol history, same session. Flows: Farside final daily table. Network and queue prints: the dated sources named in each section, with no post-window read admitted. Derived values are computed at full precision and marked DERIVED where they appear. The snapshot the whole site reads from is Snapshot #7, as of Oct 4, 2026; the shared JS and every page regenerate from it in one pass.

Source: site_data.py (truth layer), regenerated into assets/steth-data.js.

FAQ

Related reading

• Lido & stETH Weekly News Review — Week of September 28–October 4, 2026
• The Exit Queue Shock: What 850,000 ETH Exiting Actually Means
• stETH Yield Update — Week of September 28–October 4, 2026