Q2 2025

We’re ending the first half of 2025 strong and in line with the goals outlined in the past report. Let’s dive in!

Community

Similar to Q1 ‘25, 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:

• 434 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.
• 13 satellite solo staking communities established (up from 10 in Q1’25) with local advocates across Asia and LATAM with 1142 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 38 respondents, down by 2 from the 40 respondents in Q1 ‘25. 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:

We're grateful for the feedback in the additional comments section, which was full of positivity and support. Thank you all. 🙏

Community Staking Online

This quarter came with a diverse lineup of online events like targeted workshops and community calls. We’ve really enjoyed stepping up to host many of these sessions, allowing us to deliver hands-on training and connect directly with our community on key topics!

• Run Lido CSM with Nethermind Sedge: A hands-on workshop guiding new and existing solo stakers on how to use the Nethermind Sedge tool for a rapid Lido CSM setup.
• Governance for Node Operators: A session exploring how node operators can actively participate in the governance processes of Ethereum and the Lido DAO.
• Lido x Aztec Community Call: A collaborative community call with the Aztec team, focused on their privacy-preserving L2 and how home stakers can run a sequencer on existing hardware.
• Lido CSM Hands-on Workshop en Español: A dedicated, step-by-step workshop conducted entirely in Spanish, teaching participants how to deploy a Lido CSM validator using Google Cloud.
• Roundtable with Shayan from ethduti.es: One of our classic roundtables, this time dedicated to some community-wide updates (like CSM v2 or the Identified Community Staker framework) with a special guest! Shayan, who is building ethduti.es, an Ethereum validator duties tracker.

CSM-DVT Clusters

We continue to use this as a conversion strategy within our strongest communities. In Q2’25, we have one more CSM-DVT cluster committed to operating on mainnet!

There are no changes to the number of keys run on Lido CSM by these clusters as the key limit of CSM remains capped. That said, we will be facilitating these clusters to increase their key count once CSM v2 goes live.

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

• Official all-in-one Lido CSM guide
• Validation tips from professionals #1: Abstract of Yorick Downe’s presentation at Lido Connect 2024
• How onchain voting works featuring Lido DAO
• How Ethereum consensus works for new CSM Operators
• [Written Guide] How to deploy a Lido CSM node using Google Cloud credits (Spanish)
• [Video Guide] How to deploy a Lido CSM node using Google Cloud credits (Spanish)
• How the proposed Community Stakers Identification framework works (Spanish)
• Summary of forum proposals for CSM (Spanish)

Community Lifeguards at Conferences & Events

We maintained low conference participation in Q2’25 in favour of larger key conferences in the 2nd half of the year—e.g., EthCC, Edcon, KBW, Token2049 Singapore, DevConnect.

With more time on our hands, we continue to double down on our strategy of engaging grassroots communities. Check out the details below!

Conferences & Community Events

Solo Stakers Guild (SSG)

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—ZAN, SNZ Capital, OpenBuild, GCC, OKX, Uniswap, GnosisHQ, Stereum, ETH Costa Rica, Web3MentorHood, CENFOTEC University, Club de Nodos & more!

Lido Luma Calendar

We continued the momentum into Q2 with more in-person and online events than ever (activity increased from 13 events in Q1 to over 17 events in Q2).

Our Luma Calendar for all things Lido remains the central hub, including our own events 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.

1981 subscribers vs 1539 last quarter.

Lido Community Staking Tribes (LCST)

In Q1, we mentioned 3 more organisations will be participating in Q2 but we actually have 4 new ones this quarter—The movement is getting louder!

Check out the announcements in the linked table below.

Progress of Participants

Next Steps

Although some participants prefer to wait for Dappnode to release their Hoodi CSM package before resuming their setup process, we took the initiative to publish workaround instructions to all participants.

We will be pushing all participants aggressively onto Lido CSM v2 Mainnet in Q3!

Support

We continue helping node operators in CSM and all over Ethereum to keep their validators online through many of the workshops, 1-1s and reachouts.

The queue for CSM is still long, and deposits started to come in just recently. We hope to see a stake share limit increase for CSM soon! Due to this, conversion efforts remain low but engagement with already-existing, or training on testnet for new operators is going strong.

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.

Grants given in Q2

In this second quarter, we saw an increased usage of our budget to 24,003 USD compared to the previous quarter (16,670). Most of it was spent on key integrations, while the rest was used for general community grants and the expansion of our Solo Stakers Guilds, as described in the points below.

• Solo Stakers Guilds: The initiative expanded with two new events this quarter! The first-ever guild in Vienna, Austria, held as a 'Road to EthCC' event, and a successful SSG in Costa Rica for the LATAM community.
• Unified Performance Rating API for CSM v2: A grant was awarded to Miga Labs to develop a unified performance API for CSM v2. This will enhance validator evaluations by adding block proposals and sync committee participation to the existing attestation metrics.
• High-Signal: A grant was provided to adapt the High Signal tool for Lido. This platform uses AI to ingest and analyze content from various channels, ensuring its alignment with Lido's strategic goals.
• Lido CSM Japanese Community: We continued to support our Japanese community with a grant for various activations. This included a keynote at a Fracton Ventures event, a hands-on workshop during the TEAMZ Summit, and the creation of localized Japanese-language guides used during the workshops and follow-up sessions
• ETHAsia: We supported the first ETH Asia conference in Hong Kong with a small grant. Stakesaurus gave a talk on the community stage during the morning of ETHAsia which served as a funnel to Solo Stakers Guild Hong Kong in the afternoon.
• Balkan Operators Community: This grant helped kick off the Balkan Operators Community, led by the Web3 Academy team, with their first meet-up happening in Belgrade!
• ETH Tegucigalpa (Honduras): Tegucigalpa community received a grant to host a workshop on how to run an Ethereum node from home. The event is scheduled for July, and we will provide an update on its outcome in our next report.
• urbe.eth (Rome): urbe.eth community hosted a hands-on workshop in Rome for 30 attendees. The event was conducted in Italian to help build a local node operator community - some pictures here!
• CSM Interns: This was the last quarter supporting one community staker who was helping the Lido marketing team with bottoms-up social media outreach.

Operative Expenses

This quarter we used $7,570.65 (37.85% of the total $20K budget), an increase of 36.07% over the past quarter’s 5.5K. As seen on the screenshot below, most was used for travel expenses, followed by software expenses and some miscellaneous.

What to expect in Q3 2025

• Getting operators prepared for CSM v2, including dynamics to help them go through the Identified Community Stakers framework.
• 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 organizations onto Lido Community Staking Tribes

Stay tuned!