News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Lido is the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, issuing stETH against deposited ether; on 27 July 2026 it began migrating over 8 million staked ETH to Curated Module v2, cutting Ethereum's validator count by close to a third.
Liquid staking lets a depositor earn Ethereum's validator rewards without running a validator: Lido takes ether, stakes it through vetted node operators and issues stETH, a rebasing ERC-20 whose balance, per Lido's docs, represents the ether withdrawable from the protocol. Launched in 2020, it is governed by the Lido DAO, where LDO holders vote on parameters and on which operators join the curated set. Lido's site showed 9,345,010 ETH staked, $17.54bn of TVL and over 900 operators on 28 July 2026; Datawallet, citing hildobby's Dune dashboard, put Lido at roughly 23% of the 39,673,448 ETH staked as at 15 June 2026, down from a peak near 32% in 2023. The fee is 10% of rewards, split evenly between operators and the DAO treasury. Critics have long argued that one protocol nearing a third of staked ether sits close to the threshold at which a colluding set can disrupt finality. Curated Module v2 moves over 265,000 validators onto post-Pectra 0x02 credentials holding up to 2,048 ETH each and makes operators post ETH bonds for the first time; Lido expects the network to fall from about 880,000 validators to roughly 628,000, a 29% cut The Block reported as about a third.
Developments in which Lido is a named party, newest first.
The largest Ethereum staking protocol has started migrating roughly $16bn of stake to Curated Module v2, a consolidation expected to cut the network's validator count by about a third.
Lido began moving more than 265,000 validators onto consolidated post-Pectra credentials on 27 July 2026, a migration of over 8 million staked ETH that it expects to cut Ethereum's validator count from about 880,000 to roughly 628,000 and attestation messages by about 29% per epoch. The new module requires node operators to post ETH bonds for the first time.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
Unsubscribe in one click.