2025 - Q1 Community Lifeguard Report

GM community. As usual, here’s our quarterly report with our work for the home stakers in Lido, including Solo Stakers Guilds, our 2025 strategy and more.

[New] CLGs 2025 Strategy

Sam and Enti officially have 1 year contributing to the DAO! Hence it made sense to formalize our strategy for the year to help us double down on what works and cut what doesn’t.

We narrowed our focus down to 2 main goals powered by 6 core activities, each addressing their respective segments in our CSM onboarding funnel. Goal #1 — Increase direct conversion of CSM Operators.

• The formal first cohort of the (1) Community Staking Fleet
• Doing multiple (2) Solo Stakers Guilds every quarter
• Working with other communities to expand our online reach through (3) Collaborative Workshops and more
• Ramping up the (4) Lido Community Staking Tribes Initiative

Goal #2 — Ensure the availability of relevant tools and resources for CSM Node Operators.

• Identify needs and channel (5) Community Grant funding towards meeting them
• Coordinate with Lido contributors for resources that require their involvement and put them in relevant places (e.g., Node Operator portal).

Finally, we will continue to use (6) Content as a pillar that supports all of our other activities.

Community

Similar to Q4 ‘24, our approach included a mix of content, async support, and synchronous activities described in the sub-sections below.

As it stands, these are the numbers at the end of this quarter:

• 400 total registered Node Operators in the CSM. Note that this is the total amount of NOs coming from a mix of efforts from Lido contributors as it’s currently not possible to attribute provenance.
• 10 satellite solo staking communities established (up from 9 in Q3’24) with local advocates across Asia and LATAM with 820 members in aggregate. These satellite communities mainly organize themselves on Telegram and leverage the Lido CSM for their solo staking journeys.

*The same footnotes from the Community section of Q3’24’s report apply here.

Satisfaction Survey

As usual, we ran our quarterly satisfaction survey to understand where we can improve. This one received 40 respondents, down by 7 from the 47 respondents in Q4 ‘24. We subtracted the percentage of those who voted 5 (promoters) from the percentage of those who voted 1-3 (detractors), giving us a total Net Promoter Score (NPS).

These are the results:

The sentiment on the additional comments section were full of positive and supporting feedback. Thanks 🙏

Community Staking Roundtables

The Lido Marketing team have taken over the organizing reigns of the Community Staking Roundtable so that topics can be broadened to include interesting discussions across the Lido value streams.

Meanwhile, the Community Lifeguards remain an ever-ready resource for the Lido Marketing team to tap on for any Roundtable sessions.

CSM-DVT Clusters

Forming DVT clusters among new home stakers are a great way for the community to bond and grow together while enjoying better performance & security for their validators.

It also serves as an aspirational motivation for others in the community to follow in their footsteps.

Hence, we began curating DVT clusters for CSM Operators who have shown interest in running such setups. However, we make sure that these CSM Operators are ready before they deploy on Mainnet—hosting both in-person & online meetups to walk them through the concepts and the steps, as well as helping them practice on Testnet.

To-date, we have curated 2 clusters on Mainnet and 1 cluster on Testnet, with a growing list of interested folks to participate in more.

Ministry of Stakers and SG Semi-Pros will be looking to scale up the number of keys operated when CSM key share limits are raised while Malaysia DV Operators will begin transitioning onto Mainnet.

Other Community Staking Content (podcasts, blog posts, and more)

With CSM hitting capacity within 90 minutes of it’s permission-less release, we geared our content towards up-skilling the existing CSM Operators.

• CSM Permission-less Release Livestream with the Community Lifeguards as hosts of the show
• Automated graceful shutdown and power on guide using Network UPS Tools
• Advanced monitoring guide with Telegram bot
• Ethereum block production simplified for CSM Operators
• Stakesaurus hosted the Validation Tips from Professional Node Operators with P2P session for the our Community Stakers
• Our first Mandarin CSM Operator Workshop by Stakesaurus and SatBalwyn

We have also been recording some episodes with Community Stakers in CSM. The first few episodes should go out soon!

Community Lifeguards at Conferences & Events

Q1’25 saw slower conference participation as relevant ones are scheduled for later in the year. In place of that, we spent more time engaging in grassroots community events.

Check out the the details below!

Conferences & Community Events

Solo Stakers Guild

Our cost-efficient in-person community engagement model continues steadily this quarter.

A ton of planning and coordination goes behind the scenes to ensure the quality of the Solo Stakers Guild series and we are grateful for an increasing amount of support from local ecosystem players.

A huge shoutout to the ones joining our cause this (and next) quarter to help grow Ethereum Solo and Home Stakers in their respective countries!

Lido Luma Calendar

We kicked off this year doing more in-person and online events than ever, so we opened a Luma Calendar for all things Lido. Including events of our own and those of our satellite communities.

Make sure to subscribe and help us spread the word while we continue delivering high quality event programming with strong ecosystem players at very reasonable costs compared to market norms.

Lido Community Staking Tribes (LCST)

Due to the non-finalization issue on Holesky and subsequent migration to the Hoodi testnet this quarter, the progress of participants were impacted and delayed across the board.

Hence, we focused on our outreach and onboarding efforts with 3 new organisations joining this initiative to sponsor staking hardware for their contributors.

• Chainstack, a platform providing a suite of services linking developers to Web3 infrastructure.
• Chainbound, a research and development organization building optimized infrastructure and networking tools for blockchains, and a member of the Lido Alliance.
• OpenZeppelin, Web3’s leading provider of open-source tools, contract libraries, and security services.

Catch the announcement for Chainstack here if you missed it and stay tuned for the announcements for Chainbound and OpenZepellin!

Progress of Participants

Next Steps

We will wait for Dappnode’s Hoodi packages to be released before pushing all participants through the new Testnet and then onto Mainnet if there are no issues with their performance.

In the meantime, 3 more organisations have committed to participate in this initiative and will be onboarded in between April to May 2025.

Support

This quarter was likely the most decisive for CSM. After hitting mainnet last year, we started targeting communities and groups that were likely to have stakers in the EA list and get them on before CSM went fully permissionless. This involved many workshops, 1-1s and countless reachouts.

CSM had keys deposited well beyond its limit soon after the permissionless release, and the issues related to the Pectra upgrade of Holesky. We had to slow down, but we definitely did not stop! We heard the feedback and an official CSM guide that further streamlines the user journey of CSM Operators is underway.

Internal work

This is not something the community sees, but we spend a fair amount of our time on organizing ourselves internally (CLGs weeklys, internal documentation, etc) as well as calls, some regular syncs with other Lido contributors and other meetings with relevant parties from the ecosystem like other staking-related projects or communities. These meetings cover various topics, from CSM-related decision-making to presenting community ideas and initiatives.

Plus, after receiving feedback from the community we’re working on a official CSM setup guide. Stay tuned.

Grants given in Q1

We started the year with a more modest usage of our budget of 16,670 USD compared to the previous quarter (19,300). Most of it was spent on event sponsorships & regular grants, while the rest was used for the remaining of CSM Tooling, and our Solo Stakers Guilds as described in a previous section.

• Solo Stakers Guilds: Sam and Enti conducted 3 Solo Stakers Guilds during this quarter. One in Buenos Aires, Argentina (the first SSG in Latam!) and three in Asia.
• Lido CSM Korea Community: Created localized content & resources for Korean CSM operators and conducted a workshop with 37 attendees and 8 CSM Operators onboarded onto Testnet. Check out their post-event report here.
• Lido CSM Japanese Community: A retroactive grant for a hands-on workshop during ETH Tokyo that onboarded 18 Testnet Node Operators, 6 of whom have since launched CSM validators on the Mainnet. (event page)
• ETH Taipei: This is an official side event of ETH Taipei focused on home staking, done in collaboration between AWS Taiwan, Insight Software and ETH Taipei.
• DDC Meetup: A CSM workshop by the Davao DeFi Community in the Philipines. See their grant proposal here.
• Ethereum Argentina Cordoba Edition: The team behind Ethereum Argentina got a sponsorship grant for their +300 person event on Cordoba happening on August. We’ll provide an update on our next report.
• CSM Tooling: The CSM Tooling round officially closed this quarter. The last grant was for Smeee’s Dune dashboard and a extension for a performance API from MigaLabs.
• CSM Interns: We continue with this small grant for two community stakers who are helping the Lido marketing team with bottoms-up social media outreach.
• CSM Stickers: CLGs together with the marketing team commissioned a pack of 15 animated stickers, you can find them on Discord and Telegram!

Operative Expenses

This quarter we used $5,563.89 (28% of the total $20K budget), a decrease of 30% over the past quarter’s 8.1K. As seen on the screenshot below, most was used for travel expenses, followed by software expenses and some miscellaneous.

What to expect in Q2 2025

• A steady cadence of online workshops, community events, and Solo Stakers Guild— Subscribe to our Luma calendar here to keep up to date and help us spread the word!
• Getting all of the current participants of Lido Community Staking Tribes onto Mainnet
• Onboarding more organisations onto Lido Community Staking Tribes
• An official CSM guide streamlining the user journey for CSM Operators
• Launch of the Community Staking Fleet Initiative with 2 strong candidates

Stay tuned!