After shifting consensus from PoW to PoS,
$ETH now has staking yields, creating an "maturity mismatch" arbitrage opportunity between one's own LST liquid staking tokens and LRT liquidity re-mortgage tokens.
As a result, leveraging, cyclic lending, and maturity arbitrage of ETH staking yields have become the largest application scenarios for lending protocols like Aave, and also form one of the foundations of current on-chain DeFi.
That's right, the biggest application scenario for DeFi today is "arbitrage."
But don't panic, and don't be discouraged; traditional finance is the same.
The problem is, ETH's maturity mismatch hasn't brought additional liquidity or other value to the blockchain industry, or even to the Ethereum ecosystem itself, but only ongoing selling pressure. After all, institutions earning ETH staking yields will eventually cash out.
The selling pressure, ETH buying, and deflation form a micro