Restructuring Core Leadership to Enhance Decentralization, Governance Equality, and LDO Value Accrual

Proposals
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1. Background

Lido Finance has achieved immense success as the leading liquid staking protocol on Ethereum. This success is heavily integrated with the hard work of early core contributors, including @Izzy @dgusakov @vsh @KimonSh etc.

However, as the protocol matures and solidifies its position in the ecosystem, the current governance and operational structure must evolve. To mitigate long-term systemic risks, Lido needs to transition from an early-stage, core-team-driven model into a truly decentralized, community-led DAO.

2. Problem Statement

  • Technological Inertia and Outdated Leadership Model:
    The current leadership team was crucial during Lido’s zero-to-one phase in 2020–2022. However, the Ethereum staking ecosystem has drastically shifted towards Restaking, DVT (Distributed Validator Technology), and modular blockchain architectures. The incumbent team operates on an outdated, rigid governance mindset that focuses entirely on maintaining old infrastructure rather than driving innovation. This bureaucratic inertia has caused Lido to lag significantly behind. Next-generation, highly aggressive protocols and decentralized restaking networks—such as EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and Karak—are rapidly capturing market momentum, leaving Lido’s current technology stack looking obsolete and defensive.
  • Rapid Loss of Market Share and Competitive Edge:
    Lido is actively losing its dominant position in the liquid staking market. From its historical peak of controlling over 32% of all staked Ethereum, Lido’s market share has systematically degraded, falling toward multi-year lows of 22-24%. Capital is systematically fleeing Lido in favor of more modern liquid staking token (LST) alternatives and yield-bearing restaking protocols. This decline is a direct result of leadership’s inability to deploy agile, high-yield solutions, allowing faster competitors to steadily erode Lido’s network effects and market relevance day by day.
  • Severe Misalignment with LDO Holders (The Value Accrual Crisis):
    Lido generates millions of dollars in fee revenue, yet the economic architecture treats LDO purely as a “governance token” with zero financial utility. In the current DeFi landscape, holding a token without revenue-sharing, buybacks, or structural yield is economically unsustainable. LDO holders absorb the entire smart-contract and regulatory risk of the protocol, while the economic benefits are heavily diluted or retained within core operations. The current core contributors have consistently blocked or ignored proposals for a sustainable tokenomics revamp, effectively making LDO a decaying asset despite Lido’s massive market share. The priority must shift from expanding infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake to directly rewarding the capital providers and holders who secure the DAO.
  • Severe Voter Apathy and Delegate Oligarchy:
    The current voting dynamics in Lido DAO are deeply flawed. Power is heavily concentrated in the hands of a few institutional delegates and whale wallets who control the vast majority of LDO voting power. This creates a delegate oligarchy where the wider community has effectively zero say in governance. Furthermore, voter participation among smaller holders is critically low because the current structure provides no incentives or reasons for them to engage, rendering the concept of a “decentralized” DAO meaningless.
  • Double Standards in Proposal Processing and Community Neglect:
    There is a clear and unacceptable double standard in how the governance forum operates. When the core leadership team or affiliated insiders post a proposal, it receives immediate attention, rapid feedback, and is fast-tracked to a Snapshot vote within days. Conversely, when an ordinary community member or outside contributor submits a valid proposal or critique, it is routinely ignored, sidelined, or left without response for months. The current leadership acts strictly in its own self-interest, maintaining a closed ecosystem that actively discourages outside initiative and suppresses community-driven evolution

3. Proposal: Transition to an Open RFP Model and Independent Oversight

To address these critical flaws, reduce centralization, and realign the protocol’s focus toward LDO holders, propose a two-pillar restructuring plan:

  1. Implementation of an Open RFP (Request for Proposals) Model: Propose moving away from permanent, closed leadership roles for core development and operations. Instead, Lido DAO should launch an open, competitive bidding process (RFP) for the protocol’s primary technical and coordination roles. This will allow reputable, independent third-party Ethereum development teams, infrastructure providers, and research hubs to submit proposals to take over these responsibilities under transparent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
  2. Onboarding Independent Risk and Financial Firms for Tokenomics Reform: Propose onboarding external, specialized DeFi risk management and economic modeling organizations (such as Gauntlet, Block Analitica, or Nethermind). These independent entities should be officially tasked with auditing Lido’s current revenue streams and designing an urgent, sustainable tokenomics upgrade. This upgrade must prioritize direct value accrual for LDO holders (e.g., revenue sharing, buyback-and-make models, or governance-staking rewards) while strictly maintaining protocol security.

4. Next Steps & Community Feedback
We invite all community members, active delegates, and fellow LDO holders to voice their opinions on this restructuring framework. We also highly welcome comments and feedback from representatives of independent dev teams and risk firms regarding how they could assist Lido DAO in successfully managing this structural transition.

If this discussion reaches sufficient community alignment, we intend to move this proposal to a formal Snapshot vote to mandate a transition plan.

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Hi Xamov,

Thank you for your proposal. I appreciate the time and effort you put into it.

I’m Jay from FP Validated (Four Pillars). While I’m not a core stakeholder in Lido, I’ve been researching its governance system for quite some time and have generally come away with a positive impression of the protocol.

With that said, I’d like to clarify a few points regarding your comments as a researcher:

1. “Protocols such as EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and Karak are rapidly capturing market momentum.”
Could you share the evidence supporting this statement? According to DefiLlama, Lido’s TVL has actually declined less than the protocols you mentioned. I’d be interested in understanding what metrics you’re using to reach this conclusion.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t characterize Lido as being outdated. Rather, I think Lido has consistently focused on what it does best.

For example, several years ago, when a multi-chain strategy was widely regarded as the obvious path forward, Lido made the deliberate decision to withdraw from other ecosystems and focus exclusively on Ethereum, recognizing that each protocol has its own unique context and operational requirements.

I think restaking is a similar case. While restaking initially attracted significant attention, its momentum has slowed until now due to uncertain yield expectations and a risk model that compounds rather than isolates risks.

Integrating a new system always requires extensive analysis and validation. From my perspective, Lido has been careful to respond to evolving market trends without compromising its core value proposition, rather than chasing every new narrative as it emerges.

2. “Rapid Loss of Market Share and Competitive Edge.”
My understanding is that Lido’s recent decline in market share is largely attributable to major institutional players such as BitMine and the emergence of staking ETFs with large validators, both of which have driven more institutions toward direct staking.

To me, this reflects a broader shift in institutional adoption rather than a weakness specific to Lido. In fact, it arguably expands the problem space that Lido is trying to address. Lido has already been responding to this trend through initiatives such as stVaults and Lido Earn.

3. “Severe Misalignment with LDO Holders.”
I partially agree with this point. However, the Lido community has been actively exploring mechanisms such as the NEST framework and one-off buybacks to better align incentives.

In my view, the observation window is still too short to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of these initiatives. But always happy to explore more appealing and appropriate alternatives / approaches for these!

4. “Severe Voter Apathy and Delegate Oligarchy.”
I also agree that this is an important concern. That said, I don’t think it’s unique to Lido. While voter apathy is certainly an issue, there’s also a real risk of uninformed participation from voters who lack sufficient expertise or context around Lido. From that perspective, Lido’s delegation model appears to be a fairly reasonable approach. Moreover, Dual Governance introduces an objection mechanism that gives key stETH stakeholders additional safeguards.

That said, if you have ideas for improving the current model, it’d be welcoming for the community :slight_smile:

5. “Double Standards in Proposal Processing and Community Neglect.”
Could you provide more concrete evidence or examples to support this claim? Personally, I feel that attributing intent or characterizing the motivations of the contributors in this way may be too subjective for a community forum discussion. I’d be interested in reviewing the specific proposals that led you to this conclusion, including their quality, significance, and overall context.

6. “Transition to an Open RFP Model and Independent Oversight.”
If you could point out and provide some concrete examples for these, it’d be helpful to research them. It would be particularly valuable if you could compare the level of contribution and outcomes before and after these participants became involved.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! I appreciate the discussion.

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Hi Jay,

Thank you for your detailed and constructive feedback. It is great to engage with researchers who follow Lido’s governance closely. Here is my perspective on the points you raised:

1. Market Momentum & Innovation (Restaking vs. Traditional LST)

While DeFiLlama TVL reflects USD value (which fluctuates with ETH price), the core metric I am looking at is ETH denominated growth and ecosystem integrations. Protocols like Symbiotic and EigenLayer have attracted millions of ETH in a very short period. The momentum isn’t just about raw TVL; it’s about where the incremental capital and developer mindshare are moving.

Lido’s decision to focus on Ethereum was correct in the past. However, avoiding restaking isn’t just “avoiding a narrative”—it has created a vacuum. By not providing native, agile restaking solutions or failing to move fast enough with Symbiotic integrations, Lido allowed competitors to capture the highest-yielding segments of the market. This isn’t chasing hype; it’s adapting to the new baseline of Ethereum’s economic security.

2. Market Share & Institutional Shifts

You mentioned that the decline to 22-24% market share is due to institutional players moving to direct staking or ETFs. While true, this highlights the core issue: Lido’s current product suite is losing its premium appeal to these very institutions.

If institutional adoption is expanding, Lido should be leading that expansion, not losing ground to institutional-grade solo-staking tech or alternative LSTs. Initiatives like stVaults and Lido Earn are steps in the right direction, but they are reacting to the market rather than driving it. A more agile leadership structure would have deployed these solutions before the market share systematically degraded.

3. Value Accrual & The Observation Window

I acknowledge the discussions around the NEST framework and occasional buybacks. However, the “observation window” for LDO holders has been open since 2021. For years, LDO has acted strictly as a non-revenue-sharing governance token while the protocol generated massive fee revenue.

+ NEST will be activated if the ETH price exceeds $2,700—something that might not happen for another couple of years. Meanwhile, the current 10,000 stETH buyback program is proceeding quite slowly, and the price threshold was lowered after the first phase of the buyback, which did not sit well with the community.

In a mature DeFi ecosystem, holders cannot indefinitely absorb smart-contract and regulatory risks without structural yield. The frameworks discussed so far are heavily gated by core contributors and lack the urgency required to reverse LDO’s underperformance relative to the protocol’s actual cash flows.

4. Voter Apathy & Delegate Oligarchy

I agree that voter apathy is an industry-wide challenge, and Dual Governance (stETH veto) is a great safety mechanism. However, the current delegation model protects the status quo.

To improve this, we need to incentivize informed participation. For example, implementing curated/rewarded delegate programs (similar to MakerDAO/Sky or Optimism) or introducing quadratic voting elements could balance the weight of institutional whales. The open RFP model I propose naturally solves part of this: when independent teams compete for budgets, they are forced to actively pitch and educate smaller token holders to win votes, revitalizing community engagement.

5. Double Standards in Proposal Processing

To clarify, this observation comes from tracking the lifecycle of independent vs. insider proposals over the past year. Proposals originating from core teams or tightly aligned VC partners transition from discussion to Snapshot with minimal friction.

Conversely, community ideas regarding tokenomics revamps or alternative vendor onboarding frequently stall in the “Ideas” phase without formal feedback or transparent rejection criteria from core maintainers. My goal is not to question anyone’s personal intent, but to point out that a structured, formalized governance pipeline is missing. We need clear SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for proposal reviews so that all contributors are treated equally.

6. Precedents for the Open RFP Model

We can look at successful transitions in other major DAOs:

  • MakerDAO (Sky): Shifted from a centralized core foundation to independent SubDAOs (Ecosystem Actors) competing for budgets based on strict KPIs. This led to massive growth in RWA integration and revenue.
  • Aave: Utilizes independent risk management firms (like Gauntlet and Chaos Labs) via competitive RFP cycles. The contribution and safety outcomes significantly improved once risk management was decentralized and put on a commercial, accountable contract rather than kept in-house.

Transitioning to an open RFP model doesn’t mean firing the current talented dev teams. It means holding them to the same transparent standards, KPIs, and budget caps as any top-tier external team.

Looking forward to your thoughts and continuing this framework’s evolution!

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Your ideas are good, but you’re wasting your time by making proposals here. The people making the decisions simply don’t value it

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That is precisely why this topic was created.

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As a curated set operator (RockLogic GmbH) we earn directly from Lido’s stake. We do not want Lido DAO to ever hold one third of staked ETH. No single DAO or entity should, Lido included. A cap on Lido’s share works against operators like us, it limits the stake we are paid on, and I am still saying it. That is the lens for everything below.

I am not here to defend the current contributors. Jay (FP Validated) already asked you for evidence on the bureaucracy and double-standards claims and you have not provided any, so I will leave that there. My problem with the post is different. Most of the premises are wrong, and the fixes you propose have failed everywhere they have been tried. There is no established playbook for any of this, which is exactly why it needs careful design.

1. The protocols you hold up as winners are the cautionary tale.
You call EigenLayer, Symbiotic and Karak “aggressive” protocols “capturing momentum.” DefiLlama says the opposite (27 Jun 2026). I am using ETH as the unit on purpose: for a staking argument, dollars just track the ETH price, ETH measures the actual stake. EigenLayer holds about 2.75M ETH, down from over 6M ETH at its 2024 peak. Karak holds about 3,700 ETH and pivoted off restaking as its core product (it rebranded to OpenGDP, an AI/GPU compute network). Symbiotic sits near 190,000 ETH. Lido holds about 9M ETH, same source and date. DefiLlama also records zero retained protocol revenue for both EigenLayer and Symbiotic: fees pass through, the protocols run on venture money and token incentives. EigenLayer took roughly $220M in venture backing and still cut about a quarter of its staff in mid-2025, and EIGEN trades about 96% below its all-time high. This is the model you want Lido to copy. Jay already noted Lido held up better than these, and it goes further: the “high yield” you are asking for is the thing that deflated.

2. Losing share is good for Ethereum.
Ethereum finalizes with a two thirds supermajority. From ethereum.org: “If 1/3 or more of the staked ether is maliciously attesting or failing to attest, then a 2/3 supermajority cannot exist and the chain cannot finalize.” At one third a single entity can stall finality, and by double-voting near that level can force two conflicting chains to finalize. Past one half it dominates fork choice and can censor and reorg. Past two thirds it finalizes unilaterally and can rewrite at will. Lido peaked at 32.3% in late 2023, within a point of that one third line. Lido is a set of independent operators, not one validator, so the realistic danger there is correlated failure stalling finality, not one actor rewriting it, but no set should sit on that line either. The DAO voted 99.81% against self-limiting in 2022. The market has since done what the DAO refused to, pulling Lido down to about 23%. CoinDesk wrote that this diversification “may be a sign of improved blockchain health.” It is. And the decline is not capital fleeing to restaking: Lido’s own February 2026 update says it is “driven almost entirely by large players entering the staking market like BitMine and Grayscale,” meaning direct institutional staking and ETFs, not your LST competitors. The premise of your market-share section does not hold. Pushing Lido back up with “high yield” would walk it toward the one third line the whole ecosystem has spent three years backing away from.

3. High yield is not innovation. It is the risk.
You do not have to theorize about where chasing yield leads. Look at Lido’s own high-yield product. In April 2026 an attacker minted 116,500 unbacked rsETH by compromising the LayerZero bridge behind Kelp’s rsETH, leaving a backing hole north of 100,000 ETH. Lido’s exposure ran entirely through its leveraged EarnETH vault (about 9% of that vault, on Aave), and the DAO put up a conditional 2,500 stETH toward a multi-party relief effort. stETH and wstETH were untouched, because the core protocol does not chase leveraged or restaked yield. The leveraged product is the one that got caught.

4. A buyback only returns value from genuine surplus, and Lido has none to spare.
A century of equity markets settled this: a buyback returns value only when it is funded from cash the business does not need and the asset is bought below intrinsic value. Otherwise it just hands money to whoever holds the most of the asset. Lido’s own Q1 2026 report shows a thin operating surplus, about $9.42M revenue against $6.44M of expenses, while the treasury fell from $157.5M to $121M over the same window as the stETH it holds lost USD value. A roughly $3M quarterly margin on a treasury shrinking on its own mark is not spare cash. The serious proposal here, NEST buyback-and-make, is at least gated on a real surplus, and that gate is the point: there is nothing to gate right now. So leadership is not blocking tokenomics reform, the proposals exist, they are just waiting for a surplus that is not there. A buyback funded from anything else does not return capital, it routes the treasury to the largest holders, the same whales your own post calls an oligarchy, and the last people a DAO should spend its treasury to protect.

5. Value accrual has not saved a single governance token.
Every governance token of this generation is down hard regardless of mechanism (CoinGecko, June 2026): UNI about 93%, COMP about 98%, CRV about 98% even with veCRV, LDO about 96%. The one that does exactly what you demand, revenue-sharing plus buybacks, is AAVE, and it is still about 86% below its high, with a buyback that ran roughly 7% underwater by late 2025. Uniswap took about five years to switch on its fee mechanism, then routed it through a token burn under a legal wrapper specifically to avoid paying holders directly, because direct revenue-share invites securities treatment. There is no proven tokenomics that fixes this. Anyone who tells you there is has not looked. LDO price is the symptom, not the disease, and it is the last thing to optimize.

6. An RFP cannot fix a concentrated token, it just hands it to the whales.
About 64% of LDO genesis supply went to insiders and investors, and on-chain votes clear at a 5% quorum, so an open RFP for core roles is decided by, and awarded by, the same concentrated holders you call an oligarchy. That does not remove the oligarchy, it formalizes it. Aave ran this exact play last quarter: it restructured its service providers, and control consolidated into its incumbent lab while the leading independent provider walked. You have to dissolve the concentration first, and no DAO has cracked that yet.

Where I agree with you. Voter apathy and concentration are serious and unsolved. But Dual Governance does not fix them. It lets stETH holders slow a decision they object to, and past a high threshold their exit blocks it from executing at all. It cannot choose or appoint anyone, so it does nothing for representation. And yes, delegates have a structural incentive not to vote against the budgets that fund them. None of that is solved by an RFP or a buyback. It is solved, if at all, by new mechanism design that nobody has working yet.

Net: two of your five problems are worth taking seriously. None of your fixes are new, and the ones that have been tried, restaking yield, value-accrual tokenomics, and competitive RFPs to replace teams, have failed or backfired everywhere. The work worth doing is hard and unglamorous: design de-concentration and sustainable economics from scratch, model the risks, and roll them out slowly. The LDO price is the last number on that list, not the first.

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Thank you for the detailed feedback. It is always valuable to hear the perspective of a curated node operator, especially one whose revenue model naturally aligns with maintaining the status quo. However, your response fundamentally misinterprets the goals of my proposal, shifts the blame for operational failures onto “market health,” and advocates for a defeatist attitude toward LDO tokenomics.

Let’s address your points directly:

1. The “Failure” of Competitors vs. Lido’s Inertia

I am not suggesting Lido blindly copy VC-subsidized token models or slash its staff. My point is about technological and market agility. While competitors were building modular architectures, Lido stood still. The fact that Symbiotic and EigenLayer captured millions of ETH in TVL out of nowhere proves there is a massive market appetite for modern infrastructure. Lido shouldn’t copy their mistakes; it should leverage its massive size to build better, safer versions of these technologies instead of ignoring them until it’s too late.

2. The “Losing Share is Good” Narrative

Claiming that losing market share from 32% to 23% is “good for Ethereum” is a convenient excuse for underperformance. If Apple loses market share to Samsung, its board doesn’t celebrate it as “improving smartphone ecosystem health.”

Furthermore, your data actually contradicts your point. You state the decline is driven by institutions like BitMine and Grayscale entering direct staking. Why are they staking directly or choosing other venues instead of using Lido? Because Lido’s current leadership has failed to deliver institutional-grade, flexible, or competitive products that adapt to post-Merge and restaking realities. We are losing because we are failing to compete, not because we are doing a favor to Ethereum’s decentralization.

3. Risk vs. Stagnation (The rsETH Exploit)

Mentioning the April 2026 rsETH/Kelp bridge exploit to dismiss high-yield or restaking innovation is fear-mongering. The exploit happened due to a smart contract vulnerability in an external bridge (LayerZero/Kelp), not because the concept of restaking is fundamentally broken. By this logic, DeFi should have stopped developing in 2020 after the first flash-loan attacks. Innovation requires rigorous risk management, not a complete shutdown of new product lines. Retreating into a defensive shell while the rest of the industry solves these risk puzzles is a guaranteed way to become obsolete.

4. Treasury Dynamics and the Tokenomics “Chicken-and-Egg” Dilemma

You argue that Lido cannot reform tokenomics because there is “no surplus to spare,” pointing to a thin Q1 2026 operating surplus. This is a chicken-and-egg fallacy. Why is the surplus shrinking? Because market share and revenues are dropping.

If we wait for a massive surplus to appear under the current failing model before we fix tokenomics, we will wait forever. Tokenomics reform (like the NEST buyback-and-make or governance-staking rewards) is precisely the tool needed to realign incentives, attract long-term capital, and stop the bleed. A treasury losing value because it holds an asset (stETH) that tracks a declining relative market position is an argument for immediate structural reform, not against it.

5. Defeatism on Governance Tokens

Your argument that “no governance token has been saved by value accrual” is purely defeatist. Pointing at a market-wide downturn (UNI, COMP, CRV) to justify why LDO holders should accept zero utility is unacceptable. AAVE, which you mentioned, has hold up significantly better institutionally precisely because it has a safety module and revenue-accrual mechanics. If the stance of Lido’s core contributors and operators is “tokenomics are unfixable, so let’s optimize LDO price last,” then why should any independent participant hold LDO or trust this DAO? LDO holders absorb immense regulatory and smart-contract risks; treating them as a secondary priority is economically unsustainable.

6. The RFP Model and the Oligarchy

You claim an RFP model would just hand control to the current whale oligarchy. This completely misses the structural power of an open RFP. Currently, the incumbent team operates in a black box with absolute bureaucratic inertia. An open RFP forces transparency. Even if whales vote, they will have to vote on public, competing bids with clear KPIs, prices, and technical deliverables. It introduces market competition where there is currently none.

Conclusion

Im agree that voter apathy and concentration are critical issues. But your conclusion is to do nothing, move slowly, and accept a declining market share while protecting the cash flows of curated operators.

My proposal aims to break this stagnation. We cannot wait for “perfect mechanism designs that nobody has working yet.” We need independent financial and risk firms to audit our status, design a viable path forward, and inject competition into our development cycle.

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This proposal is already implemented years ago, and even more than that.

  • tokenholders have full control over treasury
  • every year there’s a proposal to set the goals for Lido’s next year (goose) and grant money to organizations to execute it (EGG), and it’s not gated on any organization - that’s the RFP process you propose
  • the majority of governance tokens in circulation is not in founders hands directly or indirectly
  • lido labs doesn’t have any assets of note, only works on what treasury gives it
  • lido labs board can be changed by token vote

I can easily understand dissatisfaction with how Lido is doing currently or my leadership of Lido Labs but I want to highlight that we have been working for years to make executing on these feelings streamlined for tokenholders. You are in control as it is, there’s not much I can imagine to be done in practical terms to improve it.

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@vsh Thank you for joining the discussion, your response perfectly highlights the exact friction point of this proposal: the massive gap between Lido’s theoretical governance design and its operational reality.

1. The Illusion of the Goose/EGG RFP Process

You mention that the GOOSE and EGG frameworks act as our RFP process. On paper, yes. In practice, these processes have become highly insular. When Lido Labs or core insiders pitch a direction, it is fast-tracked. When outside users/companies propose structural changes, they face bureaucratic inertia or radio silence.

An open RFP model means actively soliciting, evaluating, and funding competing architecture and product bids from external teams (like Nethermind, Gauntlet, etc.) with transparent, public KPIs—not just renewing the mandates of the same incumbent sub-DAOs year after year while market share slides from 32% to 23%.

2. Decentralization as a Shield for Underperformance

Saying “tokenholders have full control” and “you are in control as it is” shifts the accountability of core leadership onto a fragmented, often apathetic token base. If a CEO tells shareholders, “You own the shares, you fix the supply chain,” the board replaces the CEO.Drawn-out governance processes shouldn’t be an excuse for technological stagnation in the face of Symbiotic, Karak, and EigenLayer. True leadership means proactively introducing competitive products and realigning tokenomics before the community is forced to mount a governance revolt.

3. Lido Labs Board and Token Accountability

You stated that the Lido Labs board can be changed by a token vote. This is exactly what this proposal initiates. We are flagging that the current operational path is unsustainable for LDO value accrual and market dominance.If the current infrastructure is so frictionless for tokenholders, why has every major initiative for LDO revenue-sharing or a sustainable safety module been consistently stalled or dismissed by core contributors as “unfixable”?

4. Community Sentiment

Finally, it is worth noting that one need only open and read the comments on recent posts from the @lidofinance X account to understand some of the reasons for community dissatisfaction and the nature of other emerging questions.

And this dissatisfaction is growing by the day.

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This has never happened with any goose or egg proposal, mostly bc there’s been no other party interested in doing it. For other things there’s a lot of stuff on forums that happened over time, but not much in terms of structural changes. I think this is more or less the first one. I do not support it in current form bc it’s very clear on grievances but not very clear on what the proposal is, actually.

Do you actually expect this to work? Has it worked with any other project out there? Open tenders work good on well-defined, isolated and clear supply chain dependencies, what we have here is not that kind of demand.

You’re not proposing changing a supply chain though, you’re proposing governance changes and repalcing leadership. It’s entirely fair to consider it tokenholders’ area of interest.

Man your AI’s training cutoff is in 2023. Current era bossfights in staking are DATs and ETFs.

Coordination of people that mostly do not agree is not supposed to be frictionless. I am not claiming it is, I am saying that there’s no structural obstacle that prevents you from coordinating and executing your tokenholder powers and these powers are significant. And in terms of buybacks, we have two ongoing tracks, NEST development and treasury buybacks.

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1. On the “Lack of Other Interested Parties” in GOOSE/EGG

You say no one else has tried to pitch structural changes through GOOSE/EGG. But why? When a system is built by insiders for insiders, external teams don’t waste months fighting bureaucratic inertia — they just build elsewhere. The lack of external proposals is not proof that “no one is interested”; it is proof that the current framework is a closed ecosystem. This proposal is explicitly aimed at changing that dynamic.

2. RFPs

Yu ask if open tenders work for complex, non-isolated demands. Look at Aave (via Chaos Labs & Gauntlet splitting risk and optimization mandates) or Arbitrum’s STIP/LTIPP frameworks. They outsourced deeply integrated, core ecosystem architectures to competing external teams with public, transparent KPIs. It works when leadership actively structures the demand. Saying Lido is “too unique” or “too complex” for an open RFP model is a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to protect incumbent sub-DAOs.

3. Today’s Reality

Nice touch with the AI cutoff joke, but let’s look at the actual market reality today in 2026. Yes, ETFs and DVT/DAT are the current battles. But why are we playing defensive catch-up here instead of leading?

Our delayed response to the restaking meta is precisely what allowed the market landscape to shift, eroding our market share from 32% to 23%. Rigid and slow governance caused our late entry into today’s meta. If we don’t fix the core leadership framework, we will lose the ETF and DAT wars the exact same way.

4. Frictionless Coordination vs. Systemic Barriers

No one expects coordination among thousands of tokenholders to be completely frictionless. But there is a massive difference between “natural friction” and “asymmetry of information.” When core teams control the roadmap, engineering resources, and forum cadence, expecting a fragmented token base to self-organize and draft complex, technical counter-proposals from scratch is a deflection of accountability. True leadership means providing the framework that enables tokenholders to execute their power efficiently.

5. Proposal

Since you mentioned that the proposal is clear on grievances but lacks a clear actionable framework, let me explicitly state the core pillars of the restructuring we are proposing:

  1. Independent RFP Board: Establish a governance-elected, non-Lido Labs committee tasked exclusively with framing, scoring, and funding competing external development and product bids.
  2. Mandate Expirations: End the automatic budget renewals for incumbent sub-DAOs. Every sub-DAO must re-pitch and defend its KPIs against potential external competitors annually.
  3. Hard Milestones for LDO Value: We know about the “ongoing tracks” for NEST that will be activate only when eth >2700 and treasury buybacks that make 1/10 in 50+ days. We need strict, time-bound deadlines for these tracks, with automatic governance review triggers if they continue to drag on.

We don’t need more open-ended tracks that move at the speed of bureaucratic consensus while market share slides. We need an agile, competitive framework that forces Lido to move faster than the market.

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Are you all-in in LDO? Answer please to the community.

If not, then leave. Like Satoshi from his project.

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After observing the team’s actions and concluding that they disregard their token holders—and considering it acceptable that their token hits a new all-time low (ATL) every week, even while the rest of the market is flat or attempting to grow—the following decision was made:

If the team remains inactive and key contributors do not step in to address the issue, influencers will be brought in to highlight the situation to the general public.

Coz protocol’s governance token—which oversees $15 billion in TVL and is priced at $0.23—remains a subject of ridicule within the community and poses certain risks.

NEST and the buybacks were introduced to support the governance token’s price, but two months after launch, we are seeing further declines and a lowering of the price ratio for buybacks that wasnt agreed with community. @lidoecosystem-ops

Thank you all for your attention.

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Dual Governance has stripped LDO of its core utility, leaving holders with only “governance-only” power and leading to widespread apathy. I propose two shifts to restore value:

  1. Lowering LEGO Barriers: Simplify access to grants and use stETH instead LDO to boost bottom-up innovation.

  2. Optional LDO Insurance: To address operational risks like the Blockscape/OVH incident, we should offer an opt-in insurance model. Node operators can pay an optional fee stETH/ETH to access an LDO-backed safety net for slashing or infrastructure failures.

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plz, stop ignoring users by keeping their messages pending.

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Nobody is blocking anyone here. Discourse automatically queues posts from new accounts that trip standard heuristics, that’s forum mechanics. And frankly, these posts read as AI-generated: the structure, the recycled framing, the factual errors. That doesn’t disqualify the concerns, but it explains the queue better than censorship does.

On price expectations around NEST and other programs, a few points:

  1. A short-term price move was never the goal, and was not promised, not in the proposal, not anywhere else. The intent is different: serve long-term holders, make the protocol economics sustainable, and build a durable link between financial results and LDO. If you’re waiting for a quick spike, this mechanism was never designed to deliver one.

  2. My personal view: no two months of buybacks would move the price in this market. Buybacks are a capital-allocation policy, not a price-support tool.

  3. LDO is falling first of all because the whole market is falling, and this discussion keeps leaving that out fully.

Which is my real issue with this thread: it reads less like a proposal to strengthen governance and more like price frustration dressed up as governance language. If the actual ask is “make the price go up fast,” no governance restructuring (meaning RFP, delegation updates, etc) will deliver that, and saying it plainly would be more productive.

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Thanks for your reply.

No one is expecting or discussing a rapid price surge. Buyback protocols are supposed to at least prevent the price from falling, yet we are seeing the exact opposite.

Yes, the entire market is dropping, but why does LDO stagnate when the market tries to rally? Because there is no interest in buying it; it has no utility other than voting rights. Personally

, I observe projects with both large (top 50) and small (outside the top 150) market caps can growing, while LDO can only stagnate or dump

You state that buybacks were designed to support long-term holders, but in reality, we see the situation worsening month by month. At the same time @lidoecosystem-ops wrote:

The ratio was set lower than the first Batch considering the current market environment and aftermath of the Kelp incident.

Was it discussed with community or holders?On what basis was the decision made?

Here I completely agree with @Ginsing

LDO/Eth is down 92%, 2-year median of 0.00043 which is considered a fair value by the labs (if i understood correctly)

Saying we are afraid to overpay at 0.000163 is mind blowing

You can also simply open the comments on X and read exactly what both holders and ordinary users are saying.

And I’ll repeat the question once more: “How can a DAO token that controls over $15 billion in TVL be worth $0.25?”

Otherwise, my proposal is clearly formulated.

Thank you for your attention.

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