Lido started its largest protocol upgrade since Lido V2 on Monday, shipping Curated Module v2 and Community Staking Module v3. The release begins consolidating more than 8 million ETH onto Ethereum’s larger post-Pectra validators and, for the first time, makes Curated Module operators post their own ETH as collateral.
Lido kicked off its largest protocol upgrade since Lido V2 on Monday, rolling out Curated Module v2 and Community Staking Module v3. The same release starts moving more than 8 million ETH, worth about $16 billion, onto Ethereum’s larger, post-Pectra validators.
Behind that consolidation, Lido is migrating over 260,000 Curated Module validators from legacy 0x01 credentials to the newer 0x02 standard. That standard lets a single validator hold up to 2,048 ETH instead of 32, which lifts the share of ETH secured by these larger “compounding” validators from about 32% to roughly 52%.
The shift also cuts Ethereum’s total validator count by close to a third and trims attestation messages by an estimated 29% per epoch. Lido pairs that consolidation with ETH-backed operator bonds, a combination intended to ease congestion and boost accountability across its staking modules.
Those bonds mark a first for the protocol: Curated Module operators must post their own ETH as collateral, which can be seized to cover losses from slashing or operational failures. Lido layers that bond-based backstop on top of its existing reputation-based vetting.
CSMv3, meanwhile, introduces an “Identified DVT Cluster” path with lower bonding requirements, native reward-splitting for operators, and faster governance for adjusting staking capacity limits. Following a DAO vote, 72 regular Simple DVT clusters have been wound down, and those operators are being routed toward CSM going forward.
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