This new year started on a high note with the Lifeguards leveraging their on-the-ground experiences to design and launch the Community Staking Fleet (CS Fleet) Initiative from scratch and represent Lido at conferences.
On a more bittersweet front, Eridian will be stepping down as a Community Lifeguard (CL) to focus on the more technical aspects of the Community Staking Module (CSM). Even though we’ll still work very closely together, we (Enti & Stakesaurus) wish Eridian the best in his new adventure!
Community Staking Fleet Pilot:
With Simple DVT progressing onto Mainnet and the Community Staking Module approaching launch, we designed an initiative to serve as a flywheel to grow the number of home/solo stakers with the help of local communities—the Community Staking Fleet Pilot.
During Q1, we worked closely with the Community Staking team while interviewing local communities in our regions. For example, @Untitled interviewed 6 Latam community leaders and shared a written report with Lido contributors. Similarly, Sam (Stakesaurus) actively engaged SEA communities to gather on-the-ground feedback while designing the CS Fleet proposal. The goal was to understand the dynamics of local communities, how they typically engage their members, and how best to support them.
Applications for the Pilot phase opened on 15 February 2024, and we are heartened to have received 15 quality applicants from LATAM, the US, and SEA within a month.
The chosen communities for this pilot phase are Bitskewla, based in the Philippines with 10,000 active users, and The Mu @ Buenos Aires, a 6-week dev-focused pop-up city happening in Buenos Aires with 500+ registered users. We will work with them through Q2 to co-create activities that expand the talent pool of solo stakers in their respective regions and share updates on the CS Fleet forum thread.
This is an essential step as this program sets the foundations for establishing long-term relationships between the Lido DAO and Ethereum communities worldwide.
Regional analyses for CS Fleet
Now that the partner communities for the pilot phase have been chosen, the CLs will share their respective analyses for the regions they cover ahead of the main phase with two goals in mind.
- Allow potential partner communities to understand our view of each region and the thought process behind the type of solo staking activities we are looking to co-create
- Invite on-the-ground feedback from communities in different markets to refine our approach and explore creative ideas for increasing the number of home/solo stakers together.
For our first analysis piece, @Untitled presents—Opportunities & Challenges of growing solo staking in Southeast Asia.
Lifeguards at conferences:
We have been helping to spread the word about Lido, community staking initiatives, and the importance of home/solo stakers for the Ethereum network!
Here are our appearances:
Southeast Asia
With a goal of creating net new solo stakers ahead of the launch of the Lido CSM product, Sam spoke at ETH Vietnam on “Building solo staking communities in SEA.” The core messages of the keynote were the emerging opportunities for home/solo stakers and how community builders can tap on CS Fleet to grow home/solo staking participation within their communities.
Some were concerned about whether their members would be entirely dependent on Lido for home staking. However, these were easily dispelled once they understood that their members could take their node operations skill set anywhere they wished.
Five high-quality candidates have expressed interest in participating in the main phase.
With that being said, solo staking is still highly misunderstood in Vietnam. Most participants at the conference held common misconceptions, such as being slashed for simply going offline. “Why not just liquid-stake with Binance/Lido/Coinbase?” were the most common responses.
Almost all local participants are also unaware of bonded validator options that lower their financial barriers to entry and increase the yield of being a home staker. By the end of the conference, many were excited about the prospect of an ETH-only + low-bond validator option and participating in future cohorts of Simple DVT (if any).
Overall, much more work is needed from the ground up on solo staker education in Vietnam. Further, solo staking is comparatively slower-moving and “boring” versus more exciting narratives (e.g. finding the next windfall meme coin, airdrops/points farming).
Hence, we must leverage the collective benefits across the solo staking landscape (LST & DVT optionality, airdrop potential) to encourage community builders to incorporate home/solo staking activities in their programming.
LATAM
On the road to ETHLatam, @enti attended several conferences, including Ethereum Lima and Ethereum El Salvador, where he connected with leaders and community members to gauge interest in home/solo staking and inform them about what was happening in Lido and all the opportunities. In our opinion, it is important that the communities see the Lido DAO as a welcoming and supportive place to grow their communities.
The icing on the cake was ETHLatam @ San Pedro Sula, Honduras, an annual conference co-created by Latam community leaders. It was full of university students, Ethereum students, community leaders, and seasoned contributors from top teams, such as L2s or Foundations, totalling more than 1100 attendees.
As Lido is a well-known entity in Ethereum, everyone was eager to chat and (respectfully) debate the contributions of Lido to the ecosystem and how communities should navigate this complex situation. With that in mind, @enti presented ‘Lido: Net positive or negative?’, closing with the Community Staking initiatives and how everyone can take part in decentralizing Lido; the organizers of ETHLatam and I thought it’d be a rather interesting and high-value/impact presentation. We were not wrong; we had 10+ minutes of questions and several follow-ups from people interested in learning more.
Right after the presentation, @enti participated in a staking panel with contributors from Obol and MetaPool. We discussed staking in the context of individuals and communities in Latam, their challenges, and how they can leverage staking.
You can see both of them on this livestream from 00:18:00 to 1:15:00.
Simple DVT Support:
@Untitled continued actively supporting the Simple DVT trials throughout Q1, with hundreds of operators participating in both Obol and SSV trials. These trials push the frontier of DVT technology and provide important information for future operators. One interesting test was how many validators could run on a single NUC on a residential internet connection. @Untitled for example was able to run over 500 Holesky validators on SSV from a home staking setup with only a slight drop in performance. Pushing these limits allows the DVT protocols to optimize their clients to ensure home stakers are competitive with cloud providers such as AWS.
The results and summary of the Obol Simple DVT Testnet are summarized here: https://blog.lido.fi/simpledvt-obol-testnet-results
At the end of Q1, the shortlisted Obol clusters started to prepare for Mainnet, and their onboarding will be a major focus in Q2.
Increased participation from underrepresented regions in Simple DVT:
One of the goals and benefits of having CLs spread across the globe is helping increase the geographical diversity of node operators. On this front, we are proud to say that we are seeing good growth in applicants to Simple DVT Testnets from Latam, Africa/Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
Region | Testnet 3 (%) | Testnet 4 (%) | Change |
Europe | 74 | 68.31 | -5.69 |
North America | 8.8 | 8.23 | -0.57 |
Central/South America | 1.2 | 5.35 | +4.15 |
Africa/Middle East | 0.8 | 2.47 | +1.67 |
Asia-Pacific | 15.2 | 15.64 | +0.44 |
Testnet 4 saw the most applicants by a large margin, and in preparation for this, @Untitled and @Untitled were enlisted to support the testing of integrating Simple DVT with the ETH-Docker stack.
We will also be supporting the participants of Testnet 4 throughout their journey.
Community Staking Content (podcasts, blog posts, and more):
The Community Staking content has served through the initiative as different avenues like podcasts or blog posts to share more nuanced information around Lido and the future of staking, shedding some light on the noise that’s usually found on X/Twitter with a wide range of guests from the community.
The podcast series continued with @Eridian hosting episode 11. This episode takes a deep dive into the Community Staking Module, with @dgusakov discussing the reason behind the development of CSM and some of the early architecture assumptions for the module.
@Eridian also sat down with Spacesider, an Ethereum solo home staker and EthStaker contributor, in the Community Staking Q&A 4. Their discussion went from the very first time they heard of crypto in 2013 to falling in love with Ethereum and joining the Simple DVT trials.
Outside our scheduled content, we also made some appearances in several X Spaces:
- Simple DVT with @Kimmon, @Perrier, @Luca, @eridian, @enti, and @Stakesaurus: https://x.com/LidoFinance/status/1752449067601310101
- Opportunities of community staking in Lido with @Enti (in Spanish): https://x.com/EthKipu/status/1765406419145113886
- Lido Community Staking AMA #2 with @Enti, @Stakesaurus, and @Dmitry:
Lido DAO Contributor Meetings and Discussions:
Though not something the Lido community sees, the Community Lifeguards also spent time on weekly calls, with a weekly sync between Lifeguards and regular meetings with Lido DAO contributors. These meetings covered various topics, from presenting community ideas and initiatives to module design. We, as always, do our best to give feedback from solo stakers.
Community grants:
This first quarter of the year, we had SEEDLatam, a community in Latam, apply for a grant to do on-the-ground work creating an educational hub in Spanish that will then be used to collaborate with universities starting in Argentina, possibly expanding to the rest of Latam.
Part of our mandate is to empower communities and individuals alike, and we’re happy to support this first of many community grants.
Eridian is stepping down from the Lifeguards initiative:
After nine months as the coordinator of the lifeguards, Eridian has decided to step down as his focus shifts towards more technical roles. He’s done a lot for the Lido DAO in that time, helping shape and set the foundations for other Lifeguards to jump in, supporting Simple DVT trials, and creating lots of content in the form of blog posts, podcasts, workshops, and more! You can read his stepping-down message in this link.
Fees & Payment
For the contributions completed in Q1 2024, the CLs request that LEGO consider payment based on the individual performance of the Community Lifeguards to the Ethereum addresses:
Eridian
0xaB402d5F93FdF5Ec1ADe26e9C295A04dDc522A06
@enti
0x06Fb051a46cC49D99Be778BDd6Dcd3519d3820db
@Stakesaurus
0xAC2bdb872655572f616879eB32E5fB81f336974c