Proposal: Commission research through the Messari Hub

Proposals
1

In an effort to scale the amount of quality, long-form research, we are proposing Lido joins the Messari Hub. This would serve to better inform the crypto ecosystem on major developments and ongoing fundamental changes, effectively attracting more builders, entrepreneurs, and investors providing value to the overall network.

Rationale:
Currently, there is a high barrier for those within existing project communities and the broader crypto world to stay informed and up to date with all of the major fundamental and protocol-level changes. While there are various analytics dashboards, blog posts, and messaging channels, it is still cumbersome to have a strong understanding of all the important happenings going on. This leads to a misallocation of resources, both time and money, since there are investors, developers, and users that are not acting with the full breadth of knowledge at their disposal.

To alleviate this problem, many of the largest projects and DAOs are expending additional resources to better surface a lot of this core information. These initiatives are serving to increasingly professionalize this industry, however, what is still missing is the proper contextualization of this data from an independent third party that would allow an outsider to gain better insight into what’s going on.

Research questions:

  1. How does liquid staking on Lido work and what differentiates it from other liquid staking providers?
  2. How big is liquid staking on Solana and how does that compare to other chains?
  3. Who are the biggest liquid staking providers on Solana?
  4. How is stSOL distributed across the ecosystem?
  5. What are the major KPI/fundamental metrics that can be standardized and tracked across time?
  6. What was the impact of recent protocol/governance changes?
  7. What are the implications of future roadmap initiatives?

Proposal:
We propose the following reports to be commissioned through the Messari Hub for $150k

  • Initiation of Coverage report that provides an overview of liquid staking and the existing landscape while narrowing in on the approach that Lido is taking looking at the token economic design.

  • Solana staking report to assess the size of the Solana liquid staking market breaking it down by the major players.

  • 4 quarterly reports that present and analyze key KPIs and fundamental metrics (supply of staked assets, number of stakers, unique users, etc.), governance developments, upgrades, and key roadmap initiatives on a recurring basis.

All reports would live as free resources on Messari and would be distributed through our newsletter (~200k subscribers) and various social channels. We would also set up a data dashboard (example) to view the metrics discussed in the quarterly report in real-time as well as set up quarterly analyst calls with any member of the team/community to discuss the report and answer any questions.

We’d love to hear any and all thoughts on this proposal and if there are any changes or additions to the research topics that you think would be value-add for the community!

4 Likes
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I could only link twice but example reports are found below:

1 Like
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Hello! Thanks for sharing this, it looks interesting. Can you share any info on timelines, e.g. what would be the completion date for the coverage report and the Solana staking report?

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I have used Messari Hub, and I have found it to be high-quality research that mainly introduces and discusses key concepts rather than digging into the details (technical and otherwise). For Lido, I think that the “initiation of coverage” and quarterly reports would be useful in exposing a more conservative, less crypto-native set of potential users to Lido’s service and value prop. I think institutions in particular would rely on this type of analysis for validating the project and making decisions about using it for staking.

I would definitely recommend that anyone considering this proposal take a look at the reports linked in the first comment to see the type of deliverables that are being proposed here. I think that the quarterly report could be especially useful in creating more engagement with stakeholders, since right now it requires quite a lot of work to stay informed on all of the various developments going on within Lido. On a related topic Messari also recently produced a report on the “staking-as-a-service” sector, which I thought was well done and discussed Lido as the leading liquid staking provider.

A few additional questions from me:

  • Are there specific authors/editors who would be responsible for these reports?
  • What sort of input would Lido have on the deliverables? Any ability to provide feedback or approval rights?
  • What would be the timing of payments? Are these paid in parts as deliverables are produced?
5

This is great feedback thanks!

@kethfinex The Initiation of Coverage report would likely come out in March while the first quarterly would be shortly after the end of Q1 (3/31) and then the Solana report could be slated for later in April/May

@PatrickOD

  • Our research team is segmented by sector expertise so it would be someone who has written reports similar to the Staking as a Service piece you mentioned.
  • We send over a report outline before getting started to ensure we’re aligned on the scope. Before releasing it we also provide a final copy to ensure there are not errors or misstatements
  • Payment is typically made upfront