Lido Shifts $16B in Staked ETH to Larger Post-Pectra Validators

Lido, a liquid staking app, is moving its bulk of staked ETH onto Ethereum's larger post-Pectra validators. This move aims to reduce the number of validators from thousands to fewer, much larger ones.

The migration involves $16B in ETH, which is about 8 million tokens, and covers more than 265,000 existing validators.

This change was triggered by Ethereum's Pectra hardfork, activated in May 2025. The update raised the maximum effective balance per validator to 2,048 tokens through 0x02 credentials.

Lido is implementing a new permissioned operator layer called Curated Module v2, which supports native 0x02 credentials (Phase 1 went live on Monday). This change requires operators to lock up their own ETH as collateral, so if they fail operationally, that ETH is taken.