Liquid-staking protocol Lido deployed its largest upgrade since 2023's V2, starting the consolidation of over 8 million staked ether (stETH), worth roughly $16.5 billion, onto Ethereum’s post-Pectra validator design introduced a year ago.
The move will shrink Ethereum’s total validator count by an estimated one-third, significantly easing the load on the network’s consensus layer, Lido, the largest staking pool on Ethereum, announced Monday via an emailed press release.
The migration will not directly reduce gas fees or speed up transactions for regular users, but it will improve network performance in the background. Lido said it expects the consolidation alone to cut attestation messages across the entire Ethereum network by roughly 29% per epoch, which is a predetermined period of time or a specific number of blocks used to organize and synchronize a blockchain network.
The upgrade transitions Lido’s professional node operators to Curated Module v2 (CMv2). For the first time in Lido’s five-year history, operators in the curated module will be required to back their performance with locked ETH bonds, adding financial penalties to a system that previously relied on reputation and track record.
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