What a liquid staking token like stETH or rETH actually represents

A liquid staking token is a claim on a staked position, not the staked asset itself. According to BitGo’s explainer on liquid staking derivatives, published 12 February 2026, these tokens “represent claims on underlying staked positions, not independent assets,” and the token “does not create additional value on its own” – it mirrors whatever the underlying stake is doing, subject to the rules of the protocol that issued it. Holding stETH or rETH means holding that claim, not the ether sitting behind it. What differs between protocols is how the claim is represented in the token’s own accounting – and that difference changes what a holder sees in their wallet day to day. Two accounting designs for the same claim Lido’s stETH uses a rebasing design. According to Lido’s own blog, stETH balances update once a day when a Lido oracle reports changes in ETH2 deposits and in ETH rewards earned by users who stake through the protocol. Lido’s help centre describes stETH as “a transferable rebasing utility token representing a share of the total ETH staked through the protocol,” made up of user deposits plus accumulated staking rewards. In practice this means a holder’s stETH balance itself grows over time – the number of tokens in the wallet increases roughly daily as rewards are added, rather than the value of each token rising while the count stays flat. Lido also offers a second design: wstETH. Per Lido’s own site describing how the two tokens work, wstETH is a non-rebasing wrapped version of stETH. Its balance stays fixed – the number of tokens in a wallet does not change – while the value of each token rises over time to reflect earned rewards. Lido’s site states that “the amount of stETH held can potentially grow automatically over time,” whereas wstETH instead grows in exchange rate rather than in count. Rocket Pool also issues a liquid staking token, rETH. A Rocket Pool support page hosted by MetaMask, headlined “Rocket Pool / MetaMask Help,” addresses it – but only that headline could be verified for this piece, not the text beneath it. This page cannot say, on that basis, whether rETH’s balance mechanics resemble wstETH’s fixed-balance design, or how its redemption process behaves during network congestion. That is a real gap in what can be reported here, not an omission for brevity. Redemption: how the claim turns back into ether Turning the token back into the underlying asset is not uniform across protocols.