Questions I had during the voting process and to which I received quick answers
Buybacks aren’t taken into account because this isn’t Lido’s budget, but the DAO’s budget. Moreover, when purchasing, nothing much seems to change, just one token exchanged for another in the Treasury.
I initially didn’t see information about Lido making money on Treasury stablecoins; they indicated where exactly this is factored into the budget.
Many questions were also answered while reviewing the community call.
In the end, all the points seem clear. Ultimately, we end up with a negative budget of $6 million with ETH at $2,712.
Based on this, we can assume that with ETH > $3,072, the budget will be positive.
It’s also clearly stated that the budget for core operations is well above zero, and all expenses are used to develop new areas.
Reducing the yield to 3.5% for the Curated Module. This is a benefit for both the DAO, as a portion of the income will go there, and also increases competition and requires certain actions to increase yield.
Reducing the spending limit for Easy Track to 15 million LDO. This formalizes previous decisions in the snapshot.
Allowing sUSDS to be used by stablecoins, as they will be transitioning to receive income from treasuries. This is a logical decision given the adoption of the sUSDS yield strategy.
Matic will be converted to USDC (six months ago, Lido closed its program there, and 500,000 Matic were simply sitting idle). It’s strange that this decision came so late.
• Full launch of Lido V3 (Phase 2)
• Enabling Predeposit Guarantee for stVaults - meaning users start receiving income immediately after making a deposit, rather than waiting for 32 ETH on this validator (as was previously the case)
• Increasing the share of stETH external shares to 30% - potentially more stETH could be available
• Increasing the share of the Community Staking Module to 7.5%
A $5M allocation from the DAO treasury (equivalent to stETH) is being requested for investment in new Lido Earn products:
ETH Vault ($3M)
USD Vault ($2M)
Strict usage restrictions - only for Volt investments
These are the same ones planned for launch in March and highlighted during the community call.
The advantages are not only that all earned funds will be returned to the DAO treasury, but also that Lido itself invests in its own products, demonstrating that these new products can be trusted.
Continuation of the delegate incentive program.
Essentially, this is simply the program’s permanent approval; the main change is that payments will be made in USD.
This will be welcomed by delegates, as LDO tokens have been highly volatile recently.
They plan to increase Easy Track’s spending capacity to $5 million within six months.
Given the Foundation’s additional responsibilities (Lido Earning, partner management), they will objectively have to spend more quickly.
The entire annual budget is $60 million, meaning a small portion of the funds will go through Easy Track.
So, this is more of a necessity.
A new policy is being introduced for all multisigs.
Main points are:
• 7-day waiting period for signatory changes
• the rule of retaining 50%+ of existing signatories when changing them is removed - simplifies signatory change in case of inactivity.
• minimum of 3 signatories, 5 for role management, 7 for finance management >$1 million (clear rules for everyone)
A new operator type is being introduced that allows for 4 nodes to be combined and a validator to be run via DVT.
In this case, the total bond will be smaller, meaning capital efficiency increases, but the costs of supporting the DVT will increase.
This is certainly a new opportunity and way to participate in the project.
I’m not sure many will take advantage of this new type.
However, diversity and accessibility improve the product in any case.
They plan to distribute all DVT and APM rewards through Lido Earn ETH.
I confirmed with the authors of the proposal that users will continue to receive their bonuses from the projects (Obol or SSV) where they previously earned them. Therefore, this seems like a good solution for distributing rewards through a single platform.
A new committee will be introduced that will be responsible for the Curated Staking Module parameters.
Since the new CMv2 was introduced, it now includes many parameters for staker types, so it’s necessary to promptly change:
• penalties
• operator types (but not yields)
• onboard new ones, change restrictions
However, the committee will not influence the part concerning rewards.
The expected decision to buy back LDO token at the bottom.
Interestingly, the decision appears to be correct, despite the fact that the conditions for implementing the buyback have long been announced. These conditions are currently not being met, and there is no prospect of their fulfillment in the near future. Despite this, Laido has found an approach to implementing the buyback.
Operator A41 is being deactivated. He requested this back in December.
Operator name changes (was in Snapshot, this is a simple implementation decision)
Fix based on MixBytes’ audit of the LazyOracle system.
VaultHub is being updated to prevent partial withdrawals while in debt (a good change that prevents a potential problem).
Bridge is being updated and enabled for zkSync.
Potential vulnerability with validator exits is being patched (hashes were not verified previously).
Chorus One and Stakefish are changing oracle addresses, among other things.
Chorus One is being shut down (Bitwise acquired) and the target number of validators is set at 0.
The gas spending limit is being reduced from 1000 stETH to 150 stETH (the limit had been in place since 2023).
The CSM stake is being increased to 10.2% (implementation of the Snapshot decision).
Removing restrictions on concurrent Group and Tier changes (previously, they had to be done one at a time).
In general, this is the implementation of previously made decisions or the implementation of useful changes related to security and operational changes.