Disclaimer: All of the following information was pulled from Blockworks Advisory Lido Governance Manual & Steakhouse Lido Dune Dashboards (and forum posts).
Acknowledgements
Thank you, lidoecosystem-ops and lidolabs-operations for putting this information together! In general, all of the objectives of the Ecosystem BORG & Labs BORG fall in line with the brief description of strategic priorities.
General Thoughts
For the community, and to answer @Nansen’s well-timed question, “What are the key increases or decreases compared to previous years? / How does this budget compare to prior years’ requests?” it appears that:
- G&A has increased YoY to level off in 2025
- Excluding 2022, R&D has increased YoY at around 55%
- S&M has stabilized in 2025
To further explore another one of Nansen’s questions, “Are there specific cost drivers that have led to significant budget changes?” we have to look at the previous variance by budget period and back out these numbers. (Disclaimer: H2 of 2024 and ongoing Q1 of 2025 budgets have not been reviewed)
The average variance across all budget period categories is 39%. A rough approximation for 2025 end spend is then:
- General & Administrative: $4,989,800.00
- Research & Development: $24,265,800.00
- Selling & Marketing: $5,264,300.00
- Total Expense: $34,519,900.00
Given the following admission, it is difficult to name specific cost drivers. Yet, the assumption is that they are primarily related to the build-out of Lido V3 and the cost of pursuing stETH issuers.
Questions
All in all, we will repeat the same primary question as Nansen:
- Given the significant increase in budgeted resources in 2025, there must be cost drivers that are related to these projections – generally, what are they?