The Lido Community Lifeguards are excited to announce the launch of a new initiative to transform employees and contributors of Web3 organisations - whether companies or DAOs - into Ethereum solo stakers!
This will be achieved by empowering them to run validators using the Lido Community Staking Module (CSM).
Drop, a cross-chain liquid staking protocol and Lido Alliance Member, will be the first organisation to participate in this initiative, with Dappnode as the staking hardware provider!
Check out the full post on the Lido blog: The Lido Community Staking Tribes Initiative
TLDR;
Participating organisations sponsor their contributors custom co-branded staking hardware, while the Lido Community Lifeguards and hardware providers conduct training to equip participants with the necessary skillsets to run Ethereum validator nodes.
Through this initiative, participating organisations enjoy enhanced community recognition via collaborative marketing campaigns, upskill their contributors, and enable them to tap into the potential boosted staking rewards of the Lido Community Staking Module.
Who is this for?
This initiative is perfect for:
- Web3 organizations that directly benefit from increasing the number of solo stakers or plan to stake their ETH.
- Ethereum-aligned teams who want to help kickstart a flywheel that introduce new solo stakers continuously to Ethereum - the very foundation upon which their businesses are built.
- Organizations seeking innovative ways to upskill and incentivize contributors.
You can help us drive this movement by sharing this form with anyone who might be keen to participate in the next cohort starting in Q1’25! (or fill it up for your own organisation)!
Motivations
Hardware cost remains the final frontier for solo staking adoption.
Despite this cost being low for Ethereum Proof-of-Stake, it is still a significant number for small stakers. Hence, it still makes sense for small stakers to delegate their stake even when the Lido Community Staking Module enables enhanced staking rewards.
This is not a problem that any organisation can solve alone.
If we want to maximise the geo-diversity of nodes, the Ethereum ecosystem has to come together to subsidise hardware costs for aspiring home stakers with small amounts of stake.
Once aspiring solo stakers get their hands on decent hardware however, many possibilities open up to them.
For example, a single set of solo staking hardware is both vertically and horizontally scalable - capable of running hundreds of validator keys across various validator configurations such as Distributed Validators Technologies or DVTs (e.g., Obol and SSV) and Bonded Validators (e.g., Lido CSM).
This exposes solo stakers to more use cases and may make it more worthwhile than delegating their stake. For this reason, getting solo staking hardware into the hands of aspiring stakers is considered the most impactful factor in fostering new solo stakers on Ethereum.
Inspirations
This initiative draws inspiration from #Teamstaking, a similar program led by Aragon and Dappnode earlier this year.