Lido Consolidates $16.5B in Ethereum Stakes onto Leaner Validator Design

Lido, the largest ETH liquid staking infrastructure provider, has activated its Core Protocol upgrade and is moving over 8 million ETH, worth $16.5 billion, onto Ethereum's newer validator design, called 0x02 validators.

This upgrade marks a significant change in how Lido Core staking works since the launch of Lido V2, according to Isidoros Passadis, Chief of Staking at Lido Labs Foundation.

The move aims to ease Ethereum's network load by consolidating thousands of validators into far fewer, while securing the same amount of staked ETH. This will reduce the data Ethereum's consensus layer has to process on every slot and allow for faster finality and lower costs.

Lido's Curated Module v2 also introduces a new requirement for Curated Node Operators to lock ETH as a bond, covering risks like slashing and execution layer rewards violations. This is the first time this requirement reaches professional operators handling the bulk of ETH staked through Lido.