The Community Staking Fleet Pilot is over! This is our first time formally engaging as Community Lifeguards with local crypto communities, and it has been vital to understand the current state of community stakers on the ground and what the next steps should be.

A few days ago, @stakesaurus shared his experience with Bitskwela, a web3-native education project based in the Philipines Lido Governance Community Staking Fleet Pilot.

Let’s dive today into mine, muBuenos, with a little backstory and context that I think can be very useful :)

muBuenos

Argentina is a nation full of tech entrepreneurs (they’re the founders of Vercel, MercadoLibre, Globant, OpenZeppelin, and more) deeply affected by a complicated sociopolitical landscape and one of the highest inflations in the world, getting the Argentinian peso to 3-digit annual inflation in 2023.

This combination has made Argentina one of the world's biggest crypto communities and contributor base, if not the biggest. I can’t remember who told me this, but rumor has it that a big chunk of smart contracts on Ethereum are deployed in Argentina—at least single-collateral DAI was!

However, fragmentation and coordination costs are a thing within big communities. Cryptobros in Argentina know everyone, but they kind of don’t at the same time. Despite having all the pieces, they needed something to bring them together and spark the next wave of crypto innovation and adoption.

All of a sudden, the team behind The Mu decided to host the second edition of their dev-focused pop-up cities in Buenos Aires. Co-hosted by Ethereum Argentina and with multiple sponsors and community partners, muBuenos was born, bringing enthusiasts with little to no experience under the same roof as seasoned contributors in remarkable projects like Maker, StarkNet, Protocol Labs, or Scroll.

muBuenos happens amidst one of the biggest changes in Argentina's sociopolitical landscape in decades. The newly elected president, Javier Milei, is a freedom absolutist with policies that may get crypto treated as an actual viable (and legal) option for the country—and that's a reason muBuenos is evolving into Operación Crecimiento, a pro-crypto initiative from the local community, The Mu, and Protocol Labs with support from the local government, but that’s a story for another day.

Okay, sounds good, but what does it mean for Lido, and what did I exactly do in my time there?

Lido x muBuenos

The goal of the Community Staking Fleet is to help grow grassroots staking interest in local communities—I’m happy to say Lido x muBuenos did not disappoint.

In all honesty, I didn't know what to expect. MuBuenos is not the typical community with years of running and a user base with a determinable outcome beforehand, in fact it was born to die in just 6 weeks; on the other hand, it offered a super immersive experience along with a community that was quite mature in itself and that everyone was talking about in a very positive way.

Luckily, I was greeted upon arrival with a lot of excitement and curiosity (along with some incredible facturas and fernet) to get more clarity on everything they were reading on Crypto Twitter about Lido, the changes in the issuance curve, or the appearance of restaking all of which I tried to address along the whole engagement.

To sum it up, during my time there I:

Ran 4 staking sessions.
Participated in the Staking Meetup by SenseiNode & MetaPool in collaboration with Staking Rewards.
Met with SEEDLatam, a recent LEGO grantee working on a staking educational hub in Spanish and collaborations with local universities, have a look at their proposal here.
Made custom Lido x The Mu t-shirts for participants.
Bought a staking hardware machine.
Took care of the closing community dinner.

The Mu interview

Additionally, as part of the community engagement efforts by the Community Lifeguards, we have begun a series of podcast interviews showcasing the communities—allowing the Lido DAO and community stakers to get to know these local communities better.

The staking sessions

For the last two weeks of muBuenos I held two sessions per week for a total of two weeks, these were on relevant topics that I agreed upon at the end of each class with a nice staking group that was formed—turns out Nixo from EthStaker was around which was actually a really nice surprise and helpful to provide some more context and other perspectives.

They were scheduled for 1hr in a 10-seat room, but there was so much interest that we had 15-20 folks in the room for 2 hours on almost all sessions! Here’s a quick breakdown (with tweets/pics) of each one:

Intro to Lido x The Mu, the role and importance of solo/home stakers, relevant staking EIPs on Pectra & understanding liquid staking.

DVT workshop using SSV. We made a 6-person cluster on Holesky running the SSV client on their laptops calling my personal EL+CL clients.

Anatomy of a block, PBS & MEV and validator economics.

Issuance changes debate with Nixo from EthStaker who happened to be around, and intro to restaking.

(Bonus) impromptu Lido governance session (Dual Governance, EasyTrack, LEGO, etc.)

The hardware machine

What better to learn about running nodes and staking than to have a machine to do it! Part of the grant given to muBuenos was used to purchase an Intel NUC with a Core i5-1135G7, 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD, enough for most operations and with the option to upgrade it later down the road with more disk space or RAM if needed.

The machine is custodied by Ethereum Argentina, the local Ethereum community. We’re still defining some things (maybe it’s used as a community node, or left for experimentation in events and other activities), but I’ll definitely stay in touch to support them and see how this evolves.

The staking meetup by SenseiNode & MetaPool

Coincidentally, while I was in Buenos Aires @senseinode and MetaPool teamed up with the support of Staking Rewards to do the first staking meetup in Buenos Aires and invited me to participate.

It was full of local players such as CEXes or representatives of the fintech chamber, as well as with the participation of contributors from several protocols and chains.

In my case I had a very good conversation with Nacho, one of the founders of Sensei about DVT, our experience running a community cluster, the impact it can have for the region and how to participate in Simple DVT.

Takeaways & Recommendations

The Argentinian community is pretty mature, and even the socio-political landscape seems to be turning positive for crypto. That comes with a natural rising interest in Lido, node running and staking boradly speaking—in fact some of the attendees already had experience and knew much of the topics beforehand. I learnt a lot myself from the arguments they were able to put together.

Plus all the recent changes and narratives in the staking landscape (MVI, restaking, etc.) are very hot topics. There seemed to be rough consensus on the urgency/need of issuance targeting, and curiousity around restaking mechanics and opportunities for community stakers.

It’s obvious to me that Lido must pay close attention to Argentina and keep supporting the rising community of stakers there, and in order to do that:

I still stay in touch with some of the participants, some of whom have repeatedly expressed their willingness to eventually run nodes and participate in Lido CS initiatives.
Continue supporting community-led projects, and open up new avenues for them to engage and contribute. This was a very good first engagement, followed by a community-led grant to build resources in Spanish and engage universities Lido Governance SEEDNode - Lido and other leads coming our way, like the first Staking Day in Latam during Ethereum Argentina ‘24.
Various institutions are exploring staking, and more now that regulatory clarity seems to be slowly appearing under Milei’s administration. This is good for BizDev/ProRel, but also means that universities and others are closer to running nodes than ever (some already do, actually).