Lido

Lido Grants has announced another round of grants for initiatives that advance the Ethereum staking space. Check out @LidoGrants for more information.

Lido Finance announces that in less than 6 weeks, hundreds of new Node Operators will have the chance to run validators through the Lido protocol. Those interested can fill out a form to participate.

On February 4th, unstaking stSOL using the Lido UI will no longer be available. Users are advised to unstake any remaining stSOL before then. Staking will only be available via the CLI after that date.

The Lido Community Staking Module includes a bonding mechanism to facilitate permissionless onboarding of node operators. The bonding mechanism allows for restitution for stakers in case of malicious actions and increases economic alignment between node operators and stakers. ETH in the form of stETH is used for bonding to prevent exposure to volatile tokens. Bonds can be used as coverage for events where node operators negatively impact staking rewards. Non-linear bonding allows node operators to operate multiple validators with decreasing bond requirements. The design of reward and penalty measurement and distribution in the community staking module will be discussed in the next part of the series.

Lido has added ParaSwap to its Withdrawal Aggregator, allowing users to skip withdrawal queues with instant swaps between stETH/wstETH and ETH. ParaSwap is an aggregator that offers fast swaps across various networks. It checks rates on multiple liquidity sources to get users the best rate.

Lido Node Operators using the Lido protocol are actively working to improve EL client diversity. Efforts are underway to reduce supermajority client risk in Ethereum, with the goal of reducing majority client usage below 2/3rds. Node Operators have begun signaling their commitments to reduce majority client usage and avoid supermajority bugs. The progress is tracked and reported transparently in the VaNOM report.

Lido on Solana frontend support will end on February 4th, 2024. Users are advised to unstake any remaining stSOL before then. Unstaking will only be possible using the CLI after this date. For more information and guides on how to unstake using different wallets, please refer to the original sunsetting announcement.

Lido has launched its staked ETH on zkSync, an EVM-compatible L2 scaling solution for Ethereum. zkSync is the fifth L2 platform that Lido ETH stakers can bridge their staked ETH to. The bridging process to zkSync is simple and takes approximately 15 minutes. When bridging to zkSync, users need to use wstETH, the wrapped version of stETH. The bridge to zkSync is expected to bring liquidity opportunities to zkSync users and fuel the growth of staked ETH across the zkSync-based DeFi ecosystem.

The first wstETH reward opportunity is now available on zkSync, offering a chance to earn rewards in wstETH.

A reward campaign has been launched with Sparkdotfi. Additional rewards will be given to wstETH suppliers until February 13th. For more information, click here.