I think all of these make sense, and I’d personally even like solo stakers to be ~15% (I’m assuming a subset of solo stakers running LSP validators, or “native-LST” validators if that’s ever a thing) which I think is doable in the long-run with simpler hardware requirements (e.g. once we have some form of statelessness), battle tested DVT, etc. My biggest issue with
is that the key thresholds argument is one based on technical thresholds that ignores how risk actually pools, at which layers, and where the “pressure points” are from a practical perspective. It pushes things like aggregate operator risk to the network under the surface (which is IMO is actually the most important thing to be able to identify, assess, and evaluate), and makes them almost impossible for the protocol or community at large to reason about.
I don’t think the purpose behind it is just for yield points. The point is that actors, capital, liquidity, etc will coalesce around the most utilitous solution. This is basically the role that ETH has in DeFi. What’s the difference? I’m not saying it’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s just how these things tend to work. Ethereum is wildly successful in large part because it’s the locus of defi activity (and vice versa, in a virtuous cycle).
The WETH analogy is less-so about ubiquity and more-so about it being something that is so “sturdy” that it’s basically equivalent to ETH. Obviously there are different levels of inherent technical, economic, etc complexity at play here, but I believe that LSTs can eventually become solid enough that they achieve a similar kind of status. I just don’t think it’s likely that you’re going to see a lot of LSTs achieve this per network.
I think the natural progression here is one LSP (it could be 2-3, it happens in some markets, I just don’t think it’ll happen in DeFi due to liquidity drivers) becoming a defacto standard and basically eventually getting assimilated into the protocol. Either via enshrining it/them or a version of it/them when the base layer becomes stable enough to do so or by other means. Much of the indirect power that the DAO might have is because the protocol cannot be ossified because Ethereum itself is not yet “done” (at least insofar as staking applications on it are concerned). The only thing that can be done is to constantly meter or shed as much of that indirect power as possible whenever the base protocol allows it to, or when/if it’s not possible to do that yet to provide for safe egress so that failure modes are not of the “too big to fail” variety.