I want to out myself as “Ethereum Researcher #1”, one of the three that missed participating in the sale.
Very unfortunately, I was not following the sale distribution process when the contract was deployed and simply missed it. I apologize for that and for giving cause for this thread to even exist. And no, I was not looking for a free option or anything. I’m actually just swamped, working on shipping Altair and the Merge while also working on Sharding R&D.
Although I have not spent the past many months working on building Lido DAO and products, I have spent more than three years working day and night on shipping Proof-of-Stake to Ethereum and plan on continuing to build necessary upgrades to the protocol for the foreseeable future.
At the core of it, what I intend to build and advocate for over the next many years has natural alignment with Lido’s longterm vision – better options for trustless pools and a fundamentally robust and secure protocool. A critical element of what I intend to work on (beyond the major upgrades – withdrawals, sharding, etc) are features that allow for enhanced trustless staking options – e.g. expanding withdrawal credentials to allow for contract control over some of the core staking operations, robust specs and implentations of SSV, etc. I hold these trustless pool enhancement features as critical to the security and core ethos of Ethereum in the long run. And to my understanding, this is very aligned with Lido’s long term vision of progressively decentralizing the core of the operation – a vision not only important to the success and security of Ethereum but to the success and value of the Lido DAO, in my opinion.
I hope you will consider making an exception for my prior mistake