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.