Lego Grant Proposal: Boosting Ethereum Consensus Client Diversity with Grandine

Introduction

Client diversity is essential to Ethereum’s security and decentralization. Today, some consensus clients still validate more than 33% of the total staked ETH—a critical threshold. If such a client experiences a bug or exploit, it could prevent network finality, threatening the safety and liveness of Ethereum.

Grandine is a high-performance, security-oriented consensus client designed to address this challenge. Written in Rust and architected from the ground up for efficiency, Grandine is emerging as a serious contender among Ethereum consensus clients.

With targeted support, Grandine can help Ethereum reach a healthier state—where no single client is responsible for more than one-third of the staked ETH.

We are requesting a $50,000 grant from the Lego Program to support the ongoing development, adoption, and hardening of Grandine.


History of Grandine

Grandine began in 2019 as a performance and safety-focused Ethereum consensus client. It was created by a team of experienced developers who prioritized performance, correctness, and security.

In March 2024, Grandine was open-sourced. Since then, it has continued to mature through contributions from the open-source community, rigorous security audits, and early production deployments.


Security Audits and Reviews

Security is foundational to Grandine’s mission. The client has undergone audits by reputable firms including Matter Labs and X41 D-Sec, available here. Grandine is also integrated into multiple fuzzing infrastructures to proactively catch edge-case bugs.

These ongoing efforts ensure Grandine is hardened and production-ready for diverse deployment environments.


Current Usage and Adoption

Grandine is already live in production and currently supports a modest but growing percentage of the total Ethereum stake.

Now is the time to scale. With greater adoption, Grandine can contribute to the goal of ensuring that no consensus client exceeds one-third of the validator set—a key milestone for Ethereum’s resilience.


Plans to Grow Adoption

With support from the Lego Grant, we will:

  • Work directly with node operators to ease migration to Grandine

  • Implement deployment-specific features to improve operability and performance

  • Improve onboarding documentation and community support

  • Conduct additional interoperability testing with other clients

  • Participate in client diversity initiatives and collaborative testing networks

Our goal is to significantly increase Grandine’s stake share by the end of 2026, contributing to a balanced and robust multi-client ecosystem.


Conclusion

Grandine is uniquely positioned to strengthen Ethereum’s consensus layer through performance, safety, and diversity. Built in Rust with a clean architecture and already proven in the wild, it stands ready to serve as a production-grade alternative to dominant clients.

Your support will help us accelerate adoption, improve the client, and contribute meaningfully to Ethereum’s long-term health and decentralization.

Requested Grant Amount: $50,000

ETH Address to receive DAI: 0xCc5eDC89a7eE3c865D6615bF2B36f02DF778e818

We appreciate your consideration and commitment to the Ethereum ecosystem.

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Hey Saulius! The LEGO Council reviewed the grant requested and has decided to approve the request of $50,000.00 DAI as a way of supporting the effort to open source this consensus layer client as well as to support the work you ddi for the third party security audits and reviews. While grants probably cannot be provided on an ongoing basis, it’s certainly an important step that you have taken to release the client to the public, in line with Ethereum ethos and values, and this is something to be celebrated and acknowledged. Thank you and we wish Grandine continued increased usage and success!

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Hey Izzy, thanks! Looking forward to further increasing client diversity across the Lido node operators!

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Super happy to see this grant approved — congrats Saulius & team!

You’ve been putting in a ton of work for quite a while now, and it’s great to see that effort getting recognized and supported.

Always great to see more options coming online for the consensus layer — would be even better to start hearing feedback from Node Operators who’ve tried it out!

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@saulius the grant is successfully disbursed!

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Thank you very much! We look forward to supporting Lido node operators in adopting Grandine.

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