Announcement: Onboarding for Lido on Polygon (Wave 2)

Node Operators
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With the Lido on Polygon protocol upgrade now completed, Lido would like to announce the opening of a new Node Operator onboarding round for Lido on Polygon.

You can find the Lido Node Operator portal here. This landing page contains information relating to previous and current onboarding rounds, and provides a general summary of the application process for all permissioned networks on which Lido operates.

Lido on Polygon

Polygon’s validator set currently consists of 100 validators, for which slots were initially granted on a first come, first served basis. As implemented in PIP-4, new validator slots could potentially become available if a Node Operator fails the Final Notice monitoring period (therefore losing their stake) or as the Polygon protocol expands the number of total validators to 105. Through this process new validators for the Polygon protocol will be determined by Polygon multi-sig holders.

Other than these processes, the only way to replace existing validators is to come to an agreement and have them give up their slot, which is represented by the staking NFT held in the owner account. Due to these constraints, Lido is only able to accept Node Operators that are currently in possession of a validator slot and operating a mainnet Polygon validator.

Following the Lido on Polygon protocol upgrade, Node Operators joining the Lido operator set will no longer have to transfer their validator slot to the protocol. In addition, the upgrade will allow for the rebalancing of stake among validators upon both deposits and withdrawals, more equitably reflecting changes in stake delegated to Node Operators through Lido.

All Lido on Polygon validators must maintain a commission of between 0%-5% to be eligible to join and remain in the operator set. There are at least three reward streams for Lido on Polygon operators:

  1. Node Operators will be able to collect validator rewards accumulated from their own stake.
  2. Node Operators receive rewards from the commission set on their delegated stake. The commission rate can be between 0%-5%.
  3. Node Operators will receive Lido on Polygon rewards (in the form of MATIC) based on the total amount of Lido on Polygon stake, according to the below distribution of daily staking rewards:
    • 90% gets restaked (i.e. turned into stMATIC),
    • 5% goes to the Lido treasury,
    • 5% is distributed equally amongst all active Lido on Polygon Node Operators.

Applying

If you are a Node Operator interested in joining the Lido on Polygon Node Operator set, you may submit an application by following the link on the Node Operator portal or directly here.

If you’ve applied in a previous round but weren’t selected for the short-list, you may indicate that you have already applied and you will not need to fill out the entire form. Alternatively, you may choose to re-fill out the form in case you wish to add additional details to your application.

Deadline

The application form will be open from February 1 - February 28 23:59 UTC.

Evaluation and Onboarding

Applications will be evaluated by the Lido Node Operator Sub-governance Group (LNOSG) in early-March and a proposed shortlist will be sent to the DAO for approval. Please note that being shortlisted is not a guarantee that you will be onboarded. The DAO ultimately chooses who will be onboarded, and we will be cognizant of DAO and/or community requests to review and propose further options if they are deemed necessary.

Once approved, onboarding new operators usually takes 1-2 weeks, so we aim for the new set of operators to be live on mainnet in mid to late March. This timeline is subject to change depending on the Lido on Polygon v2 upgrade.

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Hi there Will,

Eddie from FreshSTAKING here. We currently validate on Polygon. If accepted, we would be bringing in our slot/delegations, along with a sizable delegation of (unbonded) MATIC.

We have been in operation since 2018 and now validate on over 18 networks*. Our experience with Polygon: we have been operating on Polygon since the first batch of non foundation validators. I helped Polygon team create the Polygon validator advisory board. We have joined Lido before as a Terra Classic operator.

I see that the form is not linked on Apply to be a Lido Node Operator, but I’ve found a link to a form in Lido’s Discord. Should we use that link to apply?

*Cosmoshub, Osmosis (since genesis), Juno (since genesis), Akash (since genesis), Secret Network (since genesis), Quicksilver (since genesis), Polygon (since genesis), Terra 1 & 2. Additionally, we are active on Near Network (since genesis), Skale Network (since genesis), Mina (since genesis), as well as a MEV enabled private ETH validation operation. We also run a handful of IBC relayers for Cosmos. We ran Avalanche and Tezos validators in the past.

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Hi Eddie,

Thanks for your interest and the additional context about FreshSTAKING!

Here is a direct link to the form: https://forms.gle/TzPAXtgmgViBhAfp6. It is linked in the operator portal, but somewhat difficult to see (the forms.gle link under the Polygon onboarding section). Will revisit this to see if there’s a way we can make it more visible.

Thanks!

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Thanks, we will get to the form.

PS: I had seen the instructions on what to click. But the forms.gle link is in a different spot from the instructions :slight_smile: Just noticed it.

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We would like to update you with the results of the Lido on Polygon onboarding LNOSG evaluations that took place Monday, March 27th.

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Evaluation Results

During the evaluation discussion, the Lido Node Operator Subgovernance Group (LNOSG) decided to nominate five applicants for the proposed shortlist for onboarding onto Lido on Polygon.

Shortlisted applicants have been asked to confirm their desire to join the Lido on Polygon operator set. In case they do not reply affirmatively in a timely manner, or for some other reason cannot join this round, they will not be onboarded and will need to re-apply in a future round.

During the discussion, the LNOSG was cognizant of potential market volatility and the impact to existing Lido Node Operators from increasing the set size from its current six members. The proposed shortlist balances the goals of Lido’s diversification efforts on Polygon while working to limit rewards dilution for existing Node Operators.

This onboarding round was extremely competitive with over 43 total applications and 26 eligible applications. Due to the limitations of the Polygon validator set, Node Operators were deemed ineligible if they are not currently running an active mainnet validator.

As a result of the LNOSG discussion, the committee suggests that onboarding a cohort size of five is most appropriate at this time, an 83% increase in the number of Node Operators participating in the Lido on Polygon protocol.

During the meeting on March 27, 2023, the LNOSG decided to propose the following applicants for inclusion into our node operator set for the Polygon protocol:

Shortlist (in alphabetical order):

Bountyblok

BwareLabs

Everstake

Smart Stake

Stakin

You can find the full PDF with summary statistics and the recordings of the introduction and conclusion to the LNOSG evaluation meeting in the public drive below. Due to the privileged/confidential nature of some of the information provided in some of the applications, the portion of the call where applications were discussed in detail was not recorded.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1WpOQwX6BZ1rD3ppLfi4DIqj_tV9Mm_UA

Both shortlisted and non-shortlisted applicants have been emailed notifying them of the results. Where relevant, applicants who were not shortlisted also received comments regarding potential ways to improve their application in future rounds should they wish to reapply. If for some reason you applied but did not receive an email, please reach out to [email protected].

Governance voting

A snapshot will be proposed in the coming days and the link will be added here: The snapshot will be for the inclusion of the 5 (or fewer, in case applicants cannot continue) Polygon Operators. Should the DAO disagree with any of the proposed applicants, request additional information, or otherwise request additional input for the onboarding, the LNOSG will reconvene to propose a next course of action.

Next Steps

Following DAO approval (or during the vote optimistically so that we can execute faster), we will coordinate with the respective teams to onboard the new node operators onto Lido’s communication channels and prepare operators for inclusion onto mainnet. The estimated timeline for the new node operators to be fully on mainnet is mid April.

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Hi everyone,

My name is Dimitri the co-founder of bountyblok.io

We are a company based in Montreal, Canada a team of 8 from developers to infrastructure engineers.

bountyblok would be honoured, if selected, to join the Lido ecosystem and contribute to its growth. As a validator on the Polygon mainnet since its inception, we have the know-how and expertise in running mission critical nodes which are crucial in today’s ever expanding defi space.

Kind regards,
Dimitri

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+1 to Dimitri comment!

On the behalf of the whole Everstake team, I would like to thanks all those involved to the application processing, interviews and evaluation. Thanks both the Lido team, our fellow Node Operators and the LNOSG for their recommendation, really appreciate your choice!

Looking forward to DAO approval :star_struck:

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Hi Kristian from BwareLabs here.
We are honoured to be selected as one of the 5 providers, and would like to thank you for putting your trust in us.
We are looking forward to joining Lido’s Polygon Operator set If the DAO deems us fit.

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Hello everyone,

I’m Edouard from Stakin :wave:

We are thrilled to be one of the five shortlisted providers for Lido on Polygon (Wave 2), and we want to express our gratitude to the LNOSG for their diligent work in evaluating and interviewing the candidates.

If you have any questions or concerns before the DAO approval voting, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are here to support the community in any way we can.

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Hello Lido Community

This is BigB from Smart Stake.

Super excited to be shortlisted as a node provider for Lido on Polygon. Appreciate the efforts put in by Lido team in the thorough assessment they did in the applications.

Smart Stake has been a Polygon mainnet validator since genesis. Besides providing quality validator operations, Smart Stake contributes to the Polygon ecosystem with analytics dashboards:

polygon.smartstake.io - is an analytics dashboards providing features related to 1) validator assessment/comparison on 30+ metrics, detailed history of validator performance and statistics 2) network assessment, historical statistics 3) decentralization metrics including historical stats.
decentralization.smartstake.io - A decentralization analytics dashboard providing comparison of 25+ smart stake supported networks on various metrics.

If you have any questions about Smart Stake, please feel free to ask here or reach out in our Telegram support group.

Best Wishes

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Snapshot vote started

Please get your wallets ready to cast a vote :white_check_mark:, the Validators on-boarding for Lido on Polygon (wave 2) Snapshot has started! The Snapshots ends on Fri, 14 Apr 2023 18:00:00 GMT.

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Snapshot vote ended

The Validators on-boarding for Lido on Polygon (wave 2) Snapshot vote concluded!
The results are:
To on-board up to 5 validators: 52.9M LDO
Not to on-board new validators: 65 LDO

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