Sage D. Young
Sage D. Young is a tech protocol reporter at CoinDesk. He owns a few NFTs, gold and silver, as well as BTC, ETH, LINK, AAVE, ARB, PEOPLE, DOGE, OS, and HTR.
Lido, the dominant liquid staking platform, is voting to execute its second iteration on the Ethereum blockchain, a pivotal moment for users in the decentralized finance (DeFi) community that want further decentralization and better on and off ramps into Ethereum’s staking ecosystem.
Lido’s Twitter account is calling v2 the “most important upgrade to date” since its launch in December 2020 as Ethereum is Lido’s first and largest market for liquid staking tokens.
With two main focal points, ETH staking withdrawals and the introduction of a “Staking Router” to increase participation from a more diverse set of node operators, v2 on Ethereum comes as Lido commands the lead as the largest liquid staking platform in the DeFi space, with $11.77 billion in total value locked across the Ethereum ecosystem, per DefiLlama.
According to a blog post, “The implementation of withdrawals coupled with the Staking Router proposal will contribute to an increase in the decentralization of the network, a more healthy Lido protocol, and enable the long-awaited ability to stake and unstake (withdraw) at will, reinforcing stETH as the most composable and useful asset on Ethereum.”
The vote ends on May 15. If it passes, Lido’s smart contracts will upgrade and v2 will go live.
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At press time all participating LDO token holders have voted to deploy the upgrade. LDO, the governance token for Lido, has jumped 16% in the past 24 hours to $1.89, per CoinGecko.
Edited by Danny Nelson.
