2026 Ecosystem Grant gRequest (EGG): Executing GOOSE-3

[Jenya_K]

Let me clarify part of your questions based on my general understanding

@cp0x

You write that buybacks are not included in the 2026 budget, even though the DAO adopted NEST in September for this purpose. While no specific decisions on buybacks were made, they weren’t put to a vote either – and I hope a vote will take place soon, which will impact the 2026 budget.

The 2026 Ecosystem Grant Request is a consolidated submission from the Lido Foundations, not a Lido DAO budget. It covers only the funding required for the Foundations’ operational and growth work. Buybacks however are a DAO-level mechanism executed according to rules approved by tokenholders, with any resulting LDO returned to the DAO Treasury.
That’s why I think that buybacks are not something that should appear in the Foundations’ Grant Request, even though they do require economic modelling and ongoing analysis in the future.

Regarding current progress:
The DAO has already supported the development of NEST v1, a module that enables the DAO to swap Treasury-held stETH into LDO through a single on-chain vote. That work is underway.

In parallel, a specific liquid buyback proposal is being discussed here. It is awaiting a dev team analysis and evaluation of the technical rails required for potential execution. The discussion is still in progress, and further updates will follow soon.

@cp0x

You also say that the currently proposed buyback parameters would not be triggered under the conservative ETH price assumptions used in the model, but the current buyback scheme indicates this:

If the ETH price were to decline under 3000 or the USD revenue equivalent under $40 million, the buybacks would not be activated.

But total revenue expectations from staking are set at $45.3 million for 2026. I understand this may not be the final version, but it seems odd not to take the buyback into account if the decision on it is made in 2026.

The conservative assumption used in the model is an ETH price of $2,712, which is below the $3,000 threshold defined in the current buyback proposal. Under that assumption, the buyback mechanism would not activate. It’s correct that the projected DAO revenue for 2026 is above the level that would allow buybacks. Btw, no conclusions should be made from the grant request proposal about whether buybacks will occur next year, when or in what form.

@cp0x

I also didn’t see any inclusion of revenue from the decision to convert Treasury Stablecoins into sUSDS or TMMFs. (Or tell me in which paragraph this is taken into account, I didn’t find it)

It’s included in the Comparison of 2025 Actuals and the Proposed 2026 EGG Request section - specifically in line marked [2.2], in the first table of that section.