Liquid starch is a bottled product you find in a supermarket laundry aisle. It's water mixed with cooked cornstarch or wheat starch, usually with a small amount of preservative. You spray or soak it into fabric before ironing, and the shirt comes out crisp. Bakers sometimes use a diluted version as a fabric glue for craft projects.
That's the whole answer for the laundry version. If that's what you needed, great. But this site is about a completely different topic, and most of the people searching "liquid starch" actually mistyped one letter. So if you meant liquid staking — the crypto thing — here's the short version, and then a proper walk through it.
If you actually meant liquid staking
Liquid staking is a way to earn rewards on coins that back a proof-of-stake blockchain like Ethereum, without those coins being locked up. You hand the coins to a service, the service stakes them for you, and you get a token back that represents your stake plus its earned yield. That token can be sold or used in other apps at any time. If you want the full picture, our liquid staking explainer covers it in depth.
The short-hand: normal staking locks. Liquid staking hands you a receipt you can keep, spend, or trade.
How a receipt token works
Say you send 1 ETH to Lido. Lido stakes your ETH along with everyone else's, and mints you 1 stETH in return. Your stETH balance climbs slightly every day as rewards accrue on the underlying stake. When you want out, you either wait for the network exit queue and burn the stETH for ETH, or you sell the stETH on any market that trades it.
Rocket Pool does something similar with rETH, and Coinbase issues cbETH the same way. Solana has its own set — Jito (JitoSOL) and Marinade (mSOL) are the two most used. The receipt tokens are not all built the same, but they share the same core trick.
The rewards people actually see
Ethereum liquid staking currently pays somewhere around 3% APY, minus a service fee. Solana liquid staking tends to be higher, closer to 6% APY, again minus a fee. These figures shift with network activity and validator count. Treat them as approximate.
| Product | Approximate APY | Fee cut |
|---|---|---|
| Lido stETH | ~2.7% | 10% of rewards |
| Rocket Pool rETH | ~2.6% | ~14% of rewards |
| Coinbase cbETH | ~2.2% | ~25% of rewards |
| Jito JitoSOL | ~7% | ~4% of rewards |
Fees change. Yields change. Nothing here is a promise; it's the shape of what's on offer.
The risks worth knowing
Liquid staking is not free money. The main risks are:
- Smart contract bugs. The staking contract could have a flaw. Big services have been audited, but audits are not guarantees.
- Depeg. The receipt token can trade below the coin behind it during market stress. stETH did this in mid-2022. cbETH has done it too. Selling during a depeg locks in the loss.
- Slashing. If the validators under the service misbehave, part of the stake can be taken by the network. Services usually spread this across users, but it can still cut into your balance.
- Service failure. A centralized issuer like Coinbase carries counterparty risk on top of the smart-contract layer.
For a broader look at what can go wrong, our staking risks page lists them out. If you want to compare liquid to regular staking, the side-by-side guide covers the trade-offs.
Liquid starch vs liquid staking, cleared up
To recap: liquid starch stiffens shirts. Liquid staking earns rewards on staked coins while keeping the position tradable. Two totally different topics, one shared typo. If you came for the laundry answer, thanks for putting up with the crypto detour. If you came for the crypto answer, the linked pages above will fill in the rest of the picture.