There is a recently formed reWARDS committee that oversees these types of incentive programs. The goal of that committee is to monitor liquidity and trading activity across different exchanges and to provide reporting back to the DAO on effectiveness and changes to the incentive budget. The January budget is being worked on right now and there will be a public post on that in the next few days. But to answer your question how long LDO incentives will continue… they will likely continue for the foreseeable future, although the specific pools incentivized and reward amounts will change based on effectiveness and needs. For example, there will be more rewards directed towards pools and platforms on Solana and Terra to help grow Lido’s presence on those protocols, while certain incentive programs on Ethereum DEXs such as 1inch have recently been scaled back due to low trading volumes relative to TVL in the pool.
In addition to public posts by the reWARDS Comittee, there are several Dune dashboards that show liquidity and utilization metrics across different pools where LP incentives are offered (Summary Dashboard, Detailed Dashboard). Some of the metrics that these reports show are
- How much liquidity is in the pool per $1 of rewards offered - This measures whether the rewards offered are actually drawing in liquidity
- How much trading activity takes place per $1mm of liquidity - This measures whether the liquidity gathered in the pool is actually being used for trading activity i.e. is it worth the liquidity worth the cost of acquisition
On your comment about low liquidity, I think that you may be taking too narrow of a view on this. It is definitely true that much of the stETH/ETH liquidity is contained in the Curve pool, but for a stable pair that should not be surprising. Balancer has another stableswap stETH/ETH pool which is not shown on CG. I think you may also be referring to low trading volumes across different exchanges (which can be skewed lower during a holiday week), which is ceratainly one consideration. But for stETH to be integrated into different applications (ex. as lending collateral) there needs to be capacity to convert large volumes of stETH with minimal slippage which is one reason for continuing to incentive liquidity in certain pools even if the “utilization” of that liquidity is relatively low.