We are excited to announce that Attestant has been acquired by Bitwise Asset Management. This acquisition includes Attestant BVI, who is an Ethereum node operator.
There are no plans to change the team that are responsible for running the infrastructure supporting the Lido validators, nor indeed to change the infrastructure itself. The infrastructure will remain the same in terms of deployment (bare metal) and geographical and jurisdictional location, with the only change being that Attestant BVI and Attestant’s ultimate shareholder is Bitwise rather than the Attestant team themselves.
Importantly for many Lido node operators, we will continue to support both Dirk and Vouch and provide them as open source software. We wish to restate our commitment to ensuring that these and other products and libraries that are currently supported by Attestant (ESD, Go client libraries, ethdo, chaind, etc.) remain available to all stakers to support their own operations.
There is more information available at the press release and our blog post, and of course if there are any questions then please feel free to ask here or contact anyone from either team in person.
Hello, I’m the cofounder / CTO of Bitwise. I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and similar to this example add more certainty around the future operations of Attestant from Bitwise’s point of view.
1. As a result of our deal, confirming there are no planned material changes to existing validator operations.
As Jim mentioned above, there are no plans to change the team that are responsible for running the infrastructure supporting the Lido validators, nor indeed to change the infrastructure itself. This acquisition is not just limited to the tech + infra but rather the tech + infra + team. This is also stated in our press release: “The core Attestant team will join Bitwise, including co-founders Sreejith Das, Jim McDonald, and Steve Berryman”
2. Also confirming there are no planned material changes to the organizational structure of the node operator.
Bitwise will be keeping the operations of Attestant intact including its organizational structure and setup from a geographical and jurisdictional perspective.
As shared publicly in this tweet we love the Attestant team’s staking and Ethereum protocol expertise, open source contributions, and community research / engagement. Our aim is to protect and amplify all of those efforts.
3. Bitwise does not have any controlling interest in another Lido node operator.
Attestant is the first and only acquisition / investment we’ve made amongst Lido node operators.
Here to answer any more questions from the Lido community! Thank you.
Congratulations @jgm and the rest of Attestant! Thank you for already pre-empting some of the questions/considerations that have historically been a part of the community assessment process for these types of business events as of recent (e.g. see Numic is joining Pier Two, NO CryptoManufaktur is now part of Galaxy).
As we dig into the details and ask LNOSG to provide a similar recommendation, could you please let the community know whether it would be required for you to be changing your Node Operator registry address? In the same thread, please if the name of the operator as it is registered in the Curated Module registry should change. Please place this request here: Node Operator Registry - Name & Reward address change
With regards to the acquisition itself and as per the rough rubric developed previously for assessing these changes, personally I do not see any reason to pause the Attestant Node Operator or for the community to request any validators for exit and it can make sense to proceed optimistically, but if anyone in the community does it would be prudent to have a discussion ASAP.
@Hong_Kim appreciate your rapid joining of the research forum to confirm the business event and provide additional information for the community.
Congratulations to both teams for a really substantial step forward!
Had a chance to discuss with the team. There is no need to change the Node operator registry address. With regards to the name of the operator we’ll likely revisit this in 2025 but currently there’s no need to change it either.
