Lido, the largest Ethereum staking protocol by total value locked, launched Curated Module v2, a new version of its main staking module that for the first time requires professional node operators to back the stake they manage with their own capital, the team said in a blog post published Monday.
The upgrade, Lido's largest protocol change since Lido V2 went live in May 2023, kicks off the migration of more than 265,000 validators holding over 8 million staked ETH, worth roughly $16.5 billion, onto Ethereum's high-balance validator design.
Lido expects the consolidation to cut the network's total validator count from about 880,000 to roughly 628,000 — a one-third reduction — and to trim attestation messages across the network by approximately 29% per epoch, easing load on the consensus layer. All 34 node operators in the curated set are expected to make the transition.
"This is the biggest change to how Lido Core staking works since Lido V2," Isidoros Passadis, chief of staking at Lido Labs Foundation, said in the release. "The node operators securing the majority of ETH staked via Lido are consolidating onto far fewer validators, and for the first time, they're backing that stake with their own capital, leaving the validator set underpinning Lido Core much leaner and better secured."
