Q3 2024

Here we come with another report to the community! During this quarter, we onboarded a new Community Lifeguard, created a ton of new content, participated and organised 10 community activities, and supported the launch of the CSM tesnet among other things.

Continue reading to see all that in more depth.

StakeCat are now a Community Lifeguards!

With @Untitled and @Enti covering Asia and Latam respectively, and our plates already getting full, we decided it was about time to bring a third CLG covering Europe to the Initiative.

Here’s a list of some of their contributions to the solo staking community:

1. GLCStaked’s Solo Staker List (recently updated in preparation for CSM’s Early Adoption!)
2. Solo Stakers Aren’t Going Away blogpost
3. StakeCat grows and maintains their local communities in the UK centred around solo staking, the Lido ecosystem, DVT, and in general all things Ethereum.
4. Pioneers in DVT adoption with one of the first Obol clusters on mainnet, and Simple DVT participants.
5. Their experience operating AVS can be of help to guide solo stakers in the ever expanding offering of services that can be run to secure the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Solo Staker List

Stakecat jumped aboard the CLI to a running start by performing a major update to the Solo Staker List for September 2024. This list now includes the latest solo stakers and Rocketpool node operators eligible for early CSM participation.

Maintained by Stakecat, this list is usually updated either during major network milestones or on the anniversary of the merge (September 15th). While it typically takes a month to compile and update the data, extra effort was made to release it in time for CSM.

The detailed methodology available on the repository provides insight into what's involved in updating the list, though many finer details are required to complete it. This data also offers a wealth of information on the current state of solo staking on Ethereum and will contribute to forthcoming research in this area (intended for Q4).

Community

With the Community Staking Module testnet running, our focus this quarter was on converting existing Lido community members into CSM operators and establishing strong relationships with Ethereum-aligned communities to develop new solo stakers.

Our approach included a mix of content and synchronous activities described in the sub-sections below.

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

• 370 total registered Node Operators in the CSM testnet (this is excluding the known sybil operators). 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.
• 7 satellite solo staking communities established with local advocates across Asia and LATAM with 512 members in aggregate. These satellite communities mainly organize themselves on Telegram and leverage the Lido CSM for their solo staking journeys.

*ETH KIPU is a bit different in that it doesn’t work strictly as a community, but Enti is a contributor to their continuous education program that creates new node operators all across Latam.

**The Home Staking Summit Community is a neutral space where participants are free to discuss and explore all solo staking related topics.

• 766 discord users with the @community-staker role (6.23% QoQ growth). Note: We stopped optimising for this metric beginning Q3’24 in favour of a more direct measure—Registered Node Operators on CSM testnet (and soon Mainnet).

Satisfaction Survey

Introduced on Q2, we ran our quarterly satisfaction survey to understand where we can improve. This one received 45 respondents. 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:

• Most of the respondents interacted with us IRL and in the Lido Discord server, followed by in other communities and interactions on the forum. That’s a slight shift from Q2, where Discord was at the top.
• NPS for “How would you rate the quality of events (workshops, presentations, etc) from the Lido Community Lifeguards?” was 81.81%, significantly improving (+45.27%) over the 36.54% from last quarter.
• NPS for “How satisfied are you with the quality of interactions and support provided by the Lido Community Lifeguards?” was 80.00%, up 10.51% from 69.49% in Q2.
• NPS for “How likely are you to recommend the Lido Community Lifeguards as guides to someone interested in Ethereum staking?” was 73.33%, an increase of +7.23% over Q2’s NPS of 66.10%.
• Aggregated NPS for the survey is 78.36%, well above our base target of >50%. This is +20.98% when compared to Q2’s aggregated of 57.38%.

Pretty much all messages in the additional comments section were supporting the work we’re doing. We appreciate all the kind words from the community 🙏

Community Staking Roundtables

Introduced late Q2, we’ve been hosting Community Staking Roundtables roughly every two weeks, where we sit down with the community in a very relaxed and open conversation, oftentimes inviting Lido contributors or other projects including Nimbus, Stakers Union or Obol to participate and engage with the growing community of stakers.

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

With the CSM testnet running, and mainnet around the corner we put together a few practical video tutorials to help community stakers in their journey, from CLI-based integrations to more graphical ones as well as exiting and other miscellaneous. Here’s a list of them:

• @Sam’s videos on ETHPillar, ETH Docker and exiting CSM validators.
• Samuel Chong Join the Lido CSM in 10 mins for free (No code, no hardware!)
• Samuel Chong Lido CSM Speedrun #2: ETH Docker (with faucet steps)
• Samuel Chong Exiting your ETH validators in under 8 minutes (TESTNET ONLY)
• Davao DeFi Community DDC On-Demand #17 with Stakesaurus
• These video resources have also been supplemented in the existing CSM Operator guide that Stakesaurus maintains
• @enti’s videos on setting up CSM validators using Stereum and Sedge both in English and Spanish
• enti Become a Node Operator in less than 10 minutes using Lido's CSM and Stereum
• enti Become a Node Operator in less than 10 minutes using Lido's CSM and Sedge

• The StakeCat guys demoed the CSM to the Gnosis Chain community in their monthly Validator Meetup StakeCat StakeCat on Twitter / X, and prepared a guide to set up CSM validators using DVT GitHub GitHub - alijprof/CSM---Obol-DVT-Integration: A walkthrough guide on how to integrate obol DVT into Lido's community staking module

Gnosis Chain Validator Community onboarding

Ongoing effort to onboard Gnosis validator community to CSM. These stakers, included in Stakecat's Solo Staker List, are predominantly solo stakers and at-home validators, many identified as DAppNode users. Efforts to engage them included raising awareness, community calls and tutorials tailored for the Gnosis community.

Aside from being ideal participants for CSM due to their readily available infrastructure and experience, they will represent a significant portion of the ‘not already a solo staker’ cohort providing greater decentralization by bringing brand new node operators to the network.

Community Lifeguards at Conferences & Events

During Q3, the CLI sponsored and participated in 10 events across Asia and Latam. Our goals were to help push explorers into running nodes, raise awareness about the CSM testnet, and establish satellite solo staking communities with local advocates.

Below are some of our highlighted appearances followed by a table of all 12 events.

(Sponsorships are listed in a subsequent “Grants” section)

LATAM Highlight: Ethereum Argentina Staking Day

@enti participated in the first ever Staking Day in Latam, organized by Ethereum Argentina and EthStaker with a presentation on decentralizing Ethereum through liquid staking, showing various options and how Lido’s CSM is paramount to the continuous efforts to decentralize Ethereum.

You can read a full coverage on the Staking Day in Rhino Review #27.

Asia Highlight: Home Staking Summit

Together with Ethereum Singapore, @Untitled co-organised the inaugural Home Staking Summit in Singapore on 16th September 2024, during the week of Token2049 and the F1 Grand Prix.

This conference brought together major players in the solo staking ecosystem (including Lido), and provided existing and aspiring home (& solo) stakers first-hand opportunities to meet and engage the key builders in the space. The Lido CSM was a hot favourite among participants!

For a cohort of aspiring home stakers, the Home Staking Summit was also the culmination of their efforts following 2 weeks of intense in-person solo staking workshops. Guided by Stakesaurus, this cohort is still actively honing their solo staking skills and even formed DVT clusters among themselves to move forward together with new friends.

Overall, we observe renewed enthusiasm for solo staking across all of our community channels (even earning Vitalik’s retweet) and will be doubling down on our community co-building efforts with local advocates!

Lido Staking Tribes (LST)

About the initiative

This is a movement where Web3 companies and DAOs help create new solo stakers (via CSM) from their own employees/contributors by providing funding for staking hardware.

Hardware costs are a key hurdle in driving solo staking adoption for small stakers and this holds true even when considering the boosted rewards rate available to CSM Operators. On a high level, this initiative consists of co-education and co-marketing components with the hardware provider (e.g., Dappnode) and the LST partner respectively.

Through this, we aim to bootstrap an entirely new channel of solo staker development and onboarding for the CSM.

The Community Lifeguards reached out to >40 organisations and 3 are very keen to proceed so far.

What to expect in Q4

We will be kicking this off our first cohort in October and use this as a case study to drive momentum among the other organisations in our shortlist and expanding our funnel at the same time.

More details will be announced soon!

Support

Simple DVT

With the completion of the Obol Testnet #4 the need for support has slowed down a bit, but as the SSV Tesnet #4 picks up we are in the lookout for participating community stakers having issues with their setup!

Community Staking Module

The CSM testnet was a big focus of ours this quarter! With it being one of the ways to get into Early Adoption Mainnet, we helped all community stakers in our reach to give it a try— setting up a CSM validator is so easy it didn’t require as much continuous support from us as SDVT, for example.

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 Q3

The CLI spent 23,700 USD (39.5% of our grants budget) on grants this quarter between event sponsorships, CSM Resources, integrations and regular grants.

Here’s a list of the grants we gave during this period:

• Ethereum Argentina Staking Day.
• Next Finance Tech.
• Tabei Forum @ ABS.
• Modular Crypto month-long campaign in Brasil.
• ETHPillar CSM integration.
• CSM Resources: In this first round of small community grants we had 10 applicants (8 of which received a grant) share their contributions to the CSM on the forum! From translations in 3+ different languages to in-depth guides and videos on integrations and using DVT with the CSM. You can see a list of CSM-relevant resources here.

Updates from previous grants

The deliverables of Tane’s proposal has been completed. They worked on a series of community education content (podcast, writings, translated guide) covering various topics on Lido, including the CSM. Their deliverables also included a side event during Edcon (July 2024) where @Untitled gave a presentation + demo on the CSM.

Read the full report here.

Operative Expenses

As described on the proposal, there’s a quarterly 20K DAI budget to spend on Operative Expenses. This quarter we used 6,869.07, or 34.34% of the entire budget of which 87.8% is payment for travel expenses from the CLGs to conferences, and the rest on software used to support our work.

What to expect in Q4

With the expected launch of the CSM in Mainnet this Q4 is a very important quarter for the Community Lifeguards, and here is a rough plan of what the community can expect from us this quarter:

• Support the launch of the CSM: this includes ground work during Devcon & Lido Connect, as well as coordinating with the satellite communities to make sure home stakers in EA are aware of the launch and take advantage of it.
• Assist testnet participants in their journey to mainnet: many of the 370 testnet participants are already preparing to jump to mainnet as soon as the CSM goes live, and we’re here for them!
• Grow the amount of satellite communities by 2-3 each CLG: communities are one of the reasons we even exist; growing (and supporting!) local home staking advocates around the world is of extreme relevance to us.
• Double down on Lido Staking Tribes: we firmly believe contributors in web3 projects are deeply aligned and invested in the success of Ethereum, hence they have all the incentives to contribute further to the ecosystem by running their own validators at home.

Fees & Payment

For the contributions completed in Q3 2024, the CLGs request that the committee consider payment based on the individual performance of the Community Lifeguards to the Ethereum addresses:

@enti

0x06Fb051a46cC49D99Be778BDd6Dcd3519d3820db

@Stakesaurus

0xAC2bdb872655572f616879eB32E5fB81f336974c

@glcstaked (stakecat)

0xF164A3741677099A6BeF78b62c09925a985b9001