Hello Lido community,
Nethermind and Twinstake jointly submit this proposal to migrate all the active Nethermind-run validators (~7400) in the Curated Set to infrastructure operated by Twinstake. Twinstake was developed as a joint venture between Nethermind and WebN in 2022.
Below you will find:
- Why the migration is being proposed
- How key security and operational excellence are preserved
- How rewards will continue to benefit Nethermind’s client-development efforts
- Answers to community questions raised in previous operator-set transitions
We invite discussion, after which the LNOSG will issue its recommendation and a Snapshot vote will be opened.
Why Migrate?
- Delegating operations to a purpose-built staking provider like Twinstake ensures that validators continue to meet the highest standards of uptime, security, and responsiveness. It also aligns with a broader industry trend: decoupling protocol R&D from operational execution to create clear accountability and unlock deeper specialization.
- As Nethermind continues to excel in client development, protocol research, and other core initiatives, partnering with Twinstake for validator operations creates a strategic collaboration that allows both teams to leverage their respective areas of expertise. This migration reflects a thoughtful allocation of resources and the infrastructure will benefit from the same engineering excellence, now delivered through a purpose-built staking provider while maintaining the potential for future collaboration and expanded service offerings.
- For Lido, this migration reinforces the protocol’s long-term decentralization strategy by strengthening the separation of concerns between protocol contributors and validator operators. At the same time, it ensures continuity in high-quality staking performance from a team already deeply aligned with Nethermind’s operational standards and Lido’s expectations. This setup enhances both reliability and transparency, while also future-proofing the operator set for scale.
Why Twinstake?
- Twinstake is a multi-regional, security-first staking provider founded by Nethermind and backed by leading institutional investors. It operates validators across 20+ proof-of-stake networks and brings extensive experience managing Ethereum validators at scale. Twinstake has built dedicated monitoring, alerting, and analytics infrastructure that enables real-time responsiveness and proactive performance management. Into the future, we propose Twinstake will be the operator. Twinstake’s validator business is highly professional, and Twinstake has significant business interest in maintaining and enhancing its reputation.
- The operational handover is also uniquely low risk. Nethermind has a significant shareholding in Twinstake, and works closely with Twinstake. Twinstake shares infrastructure DNA with Nethermind and includes engineers who have worked on both stacks. The migration benefits from strong continuity in tooling, architecture, sharing security frameworks, operational best practices, engineering culture and team knowledge, ensuring a seamless transition without compromise.
- This migration is not a break in continuity. It is the formalization of an already tightly integrated relationship that improves transparency and sets the foundation for future collaboration.
Key security & custody plan
- Original mnemonic seeds used by Nethermind Seed Owners to derive the keys will be kept in a custody of Nethermind
- Nethermind will migrate its AWS account on which the database with Lido’s private keys, encrypted with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Key Wrap Algorithm, is deployed to a Twinstake’s AWS organization. This will not require direct, original key material transfer.
- Once the consolidations are supported by Lido protocol Twinstake is going to consider consolidating validators, further mitigating the risk of multiple party custody.
- Validator signing will be performed by redundant instances of the Dirk remote signer, deployed across multiple AWS regions for resilience and fault tolerance.
Personnel continuity
Validator operations will not be transitioned to an unfamiliar team, with continuity ensured:
- The same senior Nethermind SREs who have historically operated these validators will remain actively involved throughout the migration and beyond. These engineers, with deep domain knowledge of Lido operations will retain on-call responsibility after the transition, ensuring operational continuity and preserving institutional memory.
- Additional Twinstake personnel will be onboarded to Lido-specific workflows and procedures, complementing the existing expertise and expanding long-term support capacity.
- First-line monitoring will be handled by Twinstake’s established 24×7 Network Operations Center (NOC), with escalation paths continuing to route through the original Nethermind engineers.
Maintaining the original spirit: voice
- Nethermind retains a seat in the Lido Node Operator Validator community and will keep submitting client-team feedback, relevant discussions and proposals.
- Nethermind remains committed to supporting Lido’s broader initiatives, including CSM and DVT efforts, the existing DVT infrastructure operated by Nethermind will not be transferred in the scope of this proposal.
This migration does not mark a withdrawal but marks a specialization of responsibilities within a deeply aligned partnership.
Infrastructure footprint
- Execution clients: Geth, Nethermind
- Consensus clients: Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm which preserves client diversity.
- Hosting: Infrastructure will remain hosted in EMEA, with a 50/50 split across AWS multi-region deployments. Each availability zone will house independent instances of Dirk and Vouch to ensure fault tolerance and geographic redundancy.
- Future roadmap: A long-term plan is in motion to add an on-premise, bare-metal deployment layer to further strengthen infrastructure diversity and resilience. Progress will be reported transparently in the Lido validator operators channel.
Proposed Migration timeline
- Week 1 – Snapshot vote in July
- Week 2 – 3 – AWS Account with encrypted keys ownership transfer & signer deployment
- Week 4 – Rest of validator infrastructure migration in four sub-units (Lido0–Lido3), 2-3 epochs downtime each
- Week 5 – Nethermind infra decommission
- Week 6 - Operator’s Name & Reward address change
A detailed runbook plan is going to be shared with Lido representatives as PDF.
We welcome any feedback.
Thank you for helping us keep Lido resilient, diverse and client-team aligned.
— Twinstake & Nethermind Team