2024 - Q4 Community Lifeguard Report
Happy New Year everyone! Here’s the latest on what happened during Q4 2024. Some of the things you’ll read about are: CSM on Mainnet, helping to convert node operators, community activations, the launch of the Lido Community Staking Tribes and… Devcon!
Community
From Q3
As the Community Staking Module (CSM) went live on Mainnet on 25th October 2024, we focused our efforts on onboarding CSM operators onto Mainnet from the main Lido community and our satellite communities.
Similar to Q3, our approach included a mix of content, async support, and synchronous activities described in the sub-sections below.
As it stands, these are the numbers at the end of this quarter:
- 289 total registered Node Operators in the CSM. Note that this is the total amount of NOs coming from a mix of efforts from Lido contributors as it’s currently not possible to attribute provenance.
- 9 satellite solo staking communities established (up from 7 in Q3’24) with local advocates across Asia and LATAM with 799 members in aggregate (~15% up from Q3’24). These satellite communities mainly organize themselves on Telegram and leverage the Lido CSM for their solo staking journeys.
| Satellite Community | Country | Members | Local co-host |
|---|---|---|---|
| CSM Japan | Japan | 89 | Next Finance Tech |
| CSM Taiwan | Taiwan | 38 | TABEI |
| CSM Philippines | Philippines | 38 | Bitskwela |
| CSM x DDC | Philippines | 25 | Davao DeFi Community |
| CSM Korea | Korea | 14 | DSRV |
| Club de Nodos | LATAM | 301 | SEED LATAM |
| Kipu Stakers* | LATAM | 17 | ETH KIPU |
| Home Staking Summit Community (Singapore)* | Singapore | 103 | Stakesaurus |
| [New] Solo Staking Boleh (Malaysia) | Malaysia | 60 | Stakesaurus |
| [New] Solo Stakers Guild @ TBW 2024 | Taiwan | 24 | AWS Taiwan, ETH Taipei |
| Total | 799 |
*The same footnotes from the Community section of Q3’24’s report apply here.
Satisfaction Survey
As usual, we ran our quarterly satisfaction survey to understand where we can improve. This one received 47 respondents, up by 2 from the 45 respondents in Q3. We subtracted the percentage of those who voted 5 (promoters) from the percentage of those who voted 1-3 (detractors), giving us a total Net Promoter Score (NPS).
These are the results:
| Question | Q3 NPS (%) | Q4 NPS (%) | Change (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| How would you rate the quality of events (workshops, presentations, etc) from the Lido Community Lifeguards? | 81.81 | 76.19 | -5.62 |
| How satisfied are you with the quality of interactions and support provided by the Lido Community Lifeguards? | 80.00 | 72.34 | -7.66 |
| How likely are you to recommend the Lido Community Lifeguards as guides to someone interested in Ethereum staking? | 73.33 | 74.47 | +1.14 |
| Aggregated NPS | 78.36 | 74.33 | -4.03 |
Pretty much all messages in the additional comments section were supportive of the work we’re doing. We appreciate all the kind words from the community 
Community Staking Roundtables
Introduced late Q2, we’ve been hosting Community Staking Roundtables roughly every two weeks, where we sit down with the community in a very relaxed and open conversation, oftentimes inviting Lido contributors or other projects including Nimbus, Stakers Union or Obol to participate and engage with the growing community of stakers.
With big events like Devcon, and festivities like Christmas or the New Year, we have been less consistent with Roundtables. We’ll come back to regular programming in Q1 2025.
Santa, I want to become a Solo Staker
Other Community Staking Content (podcasts, blog posts, and more)
Crypto is a digital world, and thus we started to work more on online content and activities, here are some of what happened during the quarter:
- Gnosis Chain Workshop
- Workshop for employees of a leading Web3 company (anonymised by request) who added the purchase of Dappnodes to their annual employee benefits budget
- Squad Staking Stories with Obol
- Playlist of short videos on Dappnode’s new CSM package by Stakesaurus
Community Lifeguards at Conferences & Events
Q4 was another quarter packed with in-person CSM activations via conference appearances, workshops, and community meetups.
Check out the the details below!
Conferences
| Conference | Engagement Type | Location | Organizer(s) | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ETH KL 2024 | 1) Presentation: “Building Home Staking Communities in Malaysia with Lido CSM” 2) 2-day workshop + networking mixer. Day 1, Day 2 | Malaysia | ETH KL, Equities Tracker | 4-6 Oct 2024 |
| muChiangMai pop-up city | 1:1 talks and roundtables | Chiang Mai, Thailand | The Mu | 7-28 Oct 2024 |
| MEV Shanghai 2024 | Presentation: Lido’s progress on NO set diversification (e.g. SDVT + CSM) | Shanghai | Panta Rhei | 15-16 Oct 2024 |
| Blockchain Scotland | Presentation: The Future of Ethereum Staking: Democratising validation with DVT and Lido CSM. | Edinburgh | Blockchain Scotland | 17 Oct 2024 |
| DVT Summit | Panel: Home Stakers Panel | Bangkok | SSV | |
| Devcon 2024 | 1) 4-day Node Operator Community Hub 2) Lido Community Staking Luncheon with community leaders across the world | Bangkok | Devcon | 12-15 Nov 2024 |
| Lido Connect 2024 | 1) Community Staking Roundtable in person 2) Node Operator Perspectives panel 3) DVT workshop | Bangkok | Lido | 14 Nov 2024 |
| Taipei Blockchain Week | Panel: “Empowering Users to Participate in Web3 Economies” | Taipei | TABEI | 12-14 Dec 2024 |
Solo Stakers Guild
Stakesaurus began experimenting with regular in-person solo staking workshops followed by networking mixers for the various satellite communities that the Community Lifeguards have worked to establish over the past 10 months.
This represents the next phase of our community activation strategy with conversion as the north-star and may be held either during conference periods or off-cycle.
We named these the **Solo Stakers Guild—**drawing inspiration from the success of the Lido Stakers Guilds held during ETHCC and Token2049 last year—and will be a staple format for our in-person activations through 2025!
| Name | Location | Local Contributor(s) | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo Stakers Guild #01: Solo staking with DVTs | Singapore | N/A | 10 Oct 2024 |
| Solo Stakers Guild #02: Obol Techne & Lido CSM | Singapore | SG Builders | 26 Nov 2024 |
| Solo Stakers Guild #03 @ PJ | Malaysia | Equities Tracker | 5 Dec 2024 |
| Solo Stakers Guild #04 @ TBW 2024 | Taiwan | AWS Taiwan, ETH Taipei, TABEI, imToken | 13 Dec2024 |
| Solo Stakers Guild #05: Lido CSM with Obol setup for Mainnet prep | Singapore | N/A | 19 Dec 2024 |
Gallery
One of the Solo Stakers Guild hosted by Sam
Enti moderating the Node Operator Perspectives panel during Lido Connect
StakeCat presenting CSM to Blockchain Scotland at Edinburgh University
Lido Community Staking Tribes (LCST)
[Previously known as Lido Staking Tribes]
As promised in Q3’s report, we officially launched the initiative this quarter!
Drop, a cross-chain liquid staking protocol and Lido Alliance Member, is the first participating organisation, with Dappnode as the staking hardware provider.
Check out the full announcement post on the Lido blog here.
Collaborative Marketing
The first of three waves of collaborative marketing efforts for our first participating organisation began in December, receiving substantial engagement on the X (Twitter) accounts of Lido, Drop, Dappnode, and Stakesaurus.
The launch announcement was also picked up by quite a number of crypto media platforms!
- 9 primary coverage: Chaincatcher, Odaily, Techflow, Cointime, Alphaseek, PAnews, Foresight News, Coinlive, Coingape
- 3 secondary coverage: Binance news, Gate.io news, Bitget news
Progress of Participants
4 Drop contributors are participating in this initiative and all of them have received their custom co-branded home staking hardware proudly sponsored by Drop with preferential pricing generously offered from Dappnode.
Check out the sleek designs shared by the participants themselves!
The Lido Community Lifeguards and Dappnode team also conducted the first of three workshops for all participants in December to kick start their journeys of becoming solo stakers via the Lido CSM.
The participants will be referring to Stakesaurus’ playlist of short videos covering Dappnode’s newly released CSM package to complete their Holesky testnet setup over the next few weeks.
Next Steps
We will hold the 2nd workshop by the middle of Jan’25 to review the participants’ Holesky setups and provide live troubleshooting support. Thereafter, we will monitor their performance as CSM Operators and solo stakers on Holesky for 2 weeks before the Mainnet transition phase, which will be initiated by the 3rd workshop.
We will also be executing the 2nd wave of our collaborative marketing efforts in January and onboarding the next cohort of participating organisations in our pipeline.
Stay tuned for our announcements soon!
Support
With the CSM finally on mainnet, we switched gears and made a big focus on supporting home stakers in the Early Adoption list (testnet users, Gnosis Chain stakers, etc) to get their first validators up on Ethereum Mainnet.
In this process we saw individuals, groups and communities alike set up validators with very different setups, from using the vast available integrations to DVT and beyond.
On another note, given the growth of the independent node operators in Lido, a lot of the technical support work for Simple DVT and CSM is being taken care of by Chimera Advisors.
Internal work
This is not something the community sees, but we spend a fair amount of our time on organizing ourselves internally (CLGs weeklys, internal documentation, etc) as well as calls, some regular syncs with other Lido contributors and other meetings with relevant parties from the ecosystem like other staking-related projects or communities. These meetings cover various topics, from CSM-related decision-making to presenting community ideas and initiatives.
Grants given in Q4
- First batch of CSM Tooling, including a rewards calculator, a ethseer.io integration and a retroactive grant for validator-swarm.
- Web3 Fam Intro to web3 x CSM Meetup in Barcelona
- NodeBridge Nigeria Meetup
- In this quarter we started experimenting giving small grants for community staker social media outreach.
Updates from previous grants
- Next Finance Tech & Tabei Forum @ ABS: These were small grants given to Japanese and Taiwanese communities respectively for co-organising activation events for CSM in Q3’24. We have since established satellite CSM communities in these 2 countries with continuous engagement them to onboard them as CSM Operators.
- ETHPillar CSM integration: The ETHPillar CSM option is growing in popularity among existing solo stakers who want an easy way to add-on validators via the CSM to their existing setup. Coincashew has also released a subsequent update to further streamline the user experience for solo stakers.
- Modular Crypto month-long campaign in Brasil: Last quarter Modular Crypto, a Brazilian media and education platform, received a grant for a Lido-focused campaign. It included multiple kinds of content, including blog posts, podcasts and even a workshop.
This lays out the foundation for Brazil (and portuguese-speaking countries broadly speaking), which we believe to be strategically important as ETHLatam was announced to be held there in 2025, and recent economic and political changes are setting crypto up for success in the country.
- CSM Resources: In this first round of small community grants we had 10 applicants (8 of which received a grant) share their contributions to the CSM on the forum!
StakeCat is stepping down from the Lifeguards initiative:
After almost two quarters as Community Lifeguards, StakeCat is stepping back to focus on growing as a professional node operator. Over this time, they’ve been championing CSM, connecting with the Ethereum home staking community and collaborating with Lido contributors. While their priorities have shifted, they aren’t going anywhere and we can expect to keep hearing from them.
Operative Expenses
This quarter we used $8,154.67 (40.77% of the total $20K budget), an increase of about 18.71% over the past quarter’s 6.8K. As seen on the screenshot below, most was used for travel expenses, followed by miscellaneous expenses and software subscriptions.
What to expect in Q1 2025
- Bigger presence online with more workshops—you can subscribe to our events calendar here Lido Community Lifeguards · Events Calendar
- We’re doubling down on Lido Community Staking Tribes! Projects are eager to educate their contributors and support the network.
- Onboard a new wave of CSM operators after EA is over.
And lots more!
Fees & Payment
For the contributions completed in Q4 2024, the CLGs request that the committee consider payment based on the individual performance of the Community Lifeguards to the Ethereum addresses:
0x06Fb051a46cC49D99Be778BDd6Dcd3519d3820db
0xAC2bdb872655572f616879eB32E5fB81f336974c
StakeCat
0xF164A3741677099A6BeF78b62c09925a985b9001