Total Value on Liquid Staking Platform Agility Soars to $467M Following Ethereum Shapella Fork

Attention on the liquid staking sector has increased this week following Ethereum's successful Shapella hard fork that enabled staking withdrawals.

Agility is one liquid staking platform that has experienced tremendous growth in recent weeks. It calls itself a liquid staking derivatives (LSD) distribution platform that incentivizes deposits of ether and liquid staking tokens, according to its documents.

Agility’s contracts were launched in the past two weeks. Agility’s ETH staking pool contract, which holds almost $170 million worth of wrapped ether (wETH), had its first transaction nine days ago, while its deployer contract had its first transaction 14 days ago.

Five of the top 10 hottest decentralized finance (DeFi) smart contracts by total inflow value launched in the past 14 days belong to Agility, and almost $400 million has flowed into Agility’s staking pools in the past seven days, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen.

“A large number of commentators are predicting a season of "LSDeFi" – products and services built around staked ETH yield,” said Nansen content lead Andrew Thurman. "Agility appears to be one of the first successful examples, and the speed with which it has grown could be a sign there's more to come.”

Since April 12, Agility’s total value locked increased more than 643% to $467 million, per DefiLlama, while its AGI token has jumped roughly 185% to 53 cents, making its market capitalization stand at $7.5 million, according to CoinMarketCap.

On April 12, data from CoinGecko showed that AGI’s total daily trading volume stood at less than $9,000. Two days later, trading volume spiked to roughly $1.5 million. At presstime, AGI’s 24 hour trading volume has jumped to over $9.5 million.

According to Snapshot, the Agility decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has 129 members. Nansen data shows that the number of unique addresses holding AGI has risen over to 926 at press time from one on April 5.

Despite performing well in terms of TVL and activity, Agility has raised the eyebrows of some after security detection platform GoPlus noted two “attention items” related to the code for the AGI token.

According to Open Zeppelin, three functions inside the AGI’s contract allows privileged accounts to mint more AGI, increasing the token’s supply and to pause the activity in the smart contract such as trading.

As a result, the AGI token page on CoinGecko says, “The smart-contract owner can mint new tokens, please proceed with caution.” CoinMarketCap on its AGI token page also expresses a similar cautionary warning.

Ismael Bautista, a software developer and community grants committee member for the Moonbeam Network, told CoinDesk over Discord that “the AGI token is a very standard OpenZeppelin implementation.”