Lido Governance Greenlights Revamped Revenue Sharing Program

The Lido community passed a revised rewards program designed to accelerate its growth alongside two other governance proposals on June 29.

Lido now offers a tiered revenue-sharing program that allocates a portion of its 5% share of staking rewards to prospective partners. Lido will also form a committee tasked with the authority to whitelist and distribute stETH rewards per the program.

Participants must apply for the program and meet eligibility criteria, and rewards will be paid out gradually over fixed terms.

Lido’s governance token LDO is up nearly 10% in the past 24 hours.

Centralization Fears

The proposals come at a time when Lido’s increasing staking dominance is under intense scrutiny.

Lido currently controls nearly 32% of the roughly 23.5M staked Ether and also accounts for 32% of Ethereum’s 733,950 validators, posing a centralization risk to the network.

Last month, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s chief scientist and co-founder, recommended that no single staking pool control more than 15% of the network’s validators. As such, Lido’s move to further bolster its growth through revenue-sharing incentives has drawn the ire of decentralization advocates.

On June 29, Danny Ryan of the Ethereum Foundation tweeted that liquid staking centralization threatens the network by driving otherwise “disparate node operators to operate in a unified manner.” Lido asserts that its validators are independent.

The revenue-sharing program will also likely target expanded DeFi integrations, despite prominent Ethereum community members sounding the alarm on Ethereum’s consensus mechanism being potentially subverted.

“The goal of staking is not to promote DeFi, the goal of staking is to promote the security and the health of the Ethereum network,”said Superphiz, the co-founder of the EthStaker community. “You’ve got to keep those two goals separate.”

On June 22, Seraphim, a Lido contributor, proposed a strategic alliance between Lido and Mantle. The deal would allocate 40,000 ETH to Lido from BitDAO’s treasury to bootstrap liquidity across Mantle, with Lido and Mantle sharing revenue generated from the stETH over 12 months. The proposal has been met with mixed reactions on Lido’s governance forum.

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The Defiant

Meanwhile, Lido’s mission statement, which passed on the same day, espouses “keep[ing] Ethereum decentralized, accessible to all, and resistant to censorship.”

Impact Staking

Lido’s community also approved a 300,000 DAI grant for Launchnodes, an “impact staking” project allowing users to distribute a share of their staking rewards to non-profit beneficiaries, including Unicef, GiveDirectly, and Treedom.

The grant allocates funding for the development of a user interface and smart contracts, the completion of a security audit, and consultation regarding the tax, KYC, and AML obligations of the project. Launchnodes will also deploy an Impact Staking Smart Contract for Lido, allowing users to participate in impact staking.

Lido will retain 60% of the allocated funding until Impact Staking has generated $3M in funding.