165 Billion-Level ETH Staking Migration Begins, Lido Plans to Reduce Validators by One-Third

Odaily reported that Lido has initiated its largest upgrade since V2 in 2023, migrating over 8 million stETH (worth approximately $16.5 billion) to a new validator architecture following Ethereum's Pectra upgrade. This migration is expected to reduce the total number of validators by roughly one-third and decrease network attestation messages per epoch by about 29%, thereby lowering consensus layer load, without directly impacting gas fees or transaction speeds. The upgrade transitions 34 existing professional node operators to Curated Module v2 and, for the first time, requires them to post ETH bond, making them economically accountable for node performance and security with their own funds. Lido estimates that this migration will result in a slight decrease in the protocol's overall annualized staking yield by approximately 0.28%.