The first three months of LEGO initiative had ended, and here’s our retrospective of what we managed to achieve in that time. Reminder, LEGO stands for Lido Ecosystem Grants Organization and its mission is to provide valuable resources to contributors who help to improve Lido. By rewarding talent early with developer incentives, bounties, and infrastructure support, LEGO acts as a catalyst for growth and helps to maintain Lido as a leading and most useful liquid staking protocol in the whole space.
Here’s what we’ve done in pursuit of that mission in short three months:
Grants funded
We funded quite a few grants, from sand grains to mountains. The full list of txs is here, and below is the short summary.
A big one of the period is Uniswap v3 LP helper being made by David Mihal. There’s a number of small “thank you” no strings attached grants people are making to be thankful for cool works or pieces of content people are making, that were not funded by Lego but drive forward the industry. Apart from being the right thing to do, our feeling is they’ve helped Lido to acquire some community goodwill.
There are also some grant proposals in the work, being ironed out with respective grantees.
Bug bounty
We allocated funds to Lido’s bug bounty with Immunefy and made the first payout for a low severity vulnerability. Immunefy had been very professional in their handling of the disclosure process, can’t thank them enough for that; as well as the whitehat who made the disclosure.
Mountains
We worked closely with Chorus on making the first mountain-sided proposal to develop Lido for Solana, and it passed.
Unfinished and invisible work
Development
We’ve reached out to one of the winners in Lido OpenDeFi challenges, Tom French, to offload validators’ keys management from the protocol smart contracts. The hackathon challenge concluded with PoC, and the LEGO granted the project for building a production-grade solution.
Tempus Finance is interested in building products on top of stETH, and we’re talking to them if they want a LEGO grant for this or not. The team is funded, so they’re not sure if they want a grant or not; that’s not a blocker for LEGO though.
Community
- Meme contest
Plans for a Lido/stETH meme contest have been drafted by a community member to incentivize unique content creation related to Lido, with submissions voted on and rewarded by the Lido community.
- Translation initiative
We’ve launched a community-driven effort to make available Lido’s website and educational resources to a wider audience in multiple languages. This translation work is ongoing and currently includes Chinese, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. If you’re interested in getting involved, please get in touch with the LEGO committee.
- ETH staking - metrics report
A plan for an Ethereum staking metrics report has been shared to track growth and development of the Ethereum staking ecosystem. The weekly report is to cover qualitative and quantitative aspects of Ethereum staking with the objective to showcase growth of Ethereum staking and liquid staking, and the role of Lido in driving this growth. The report is to feature insights, interviews and more and we’re excited for the public launch.
- Community contributors
A number of independent contributors have been rewarded for their work for the Lido DAO, including FrontAlpha, NF and more. Rewards have been distributed for contributions ranging from community management tasks, content creation (staking guides, videos, long-form Twitter threads and more). We encourage anyone interested in contributing to content/community initiatives, regardless of format, to reach out.
We’ve been talking to Bloxstaking to support their work on an implementation of SSVs (Secret Shared Validators) on Ethereum into various clients like Prysm or Vouch. Long term, SSVs would be an interesting technology for Lido to use since it makes us more resilient and reduces risks of single node operators. If you want to learn more about Bloxstaking and SSVs, check out their blog.
Committee expansion
We expanded the committee by adding Tim Beiko
Hackathons
We sponsored an OpenDefi hackathon and had quite a few submissions and winners, which you can read about in this blog post.
Proposal
We were allocated 240000 LDO and spent 22100, which is about 9.2%. We’ve got significant capital, and how good we are at using it will determine if we’re going to make it. Not spending funds allocated for spending is inefficient.
I suggest for the next 3-month leg of LEGO to focus on increasing intensity of LEGO program, with following steps taken:
- top up LEGO multisig to 240k LDO by sending 118650 LDO from treasury
- keep the current LEGO council as a entity that gets to decide on boulders and helps prepare mountain-sized grants
- expand the number of people who manage personal allocations (10 thousand LDO) for grants to 20-ish, with LEGO council being in charge of said expansion
- implement an experimental coordinape platform grants program
