Lido Launches LDO Automatic Buyback Mechanism with $10 Million Annual Repurchase Cap

Odaily News: Lido has published an article introducing its LDO automatic buyback mechanism, NEST, which further links protocol revenue to the value of LDO. When Lido's annualized staking revenue exceeds the $40 million benchmark, 50% of the excess will be allocated to NEST and used to automatically purchase LDO via CoW Swap.

NEST initially sets a maximum daily buyback of $50,000, with a rolling 365-day repurchase cap of $10 million, calculated on a cumulative basis. When protocol revenue falls short and the cumulative balance turns negative, buybacks will automatically pause until subsequent revenue surpluses restore the balance.

In the initial phase of the mechanism's launch, it will operate in Treasury mode, with LDO purchased through buybacks going directly into the DAO treasury without being burned. In the future, a DAO vote can switch the mechanism to LP mode, where half of the funds will be used to purchase LDO and the other half will be converted to wstETH, which will then be jointly injected into the Curve liquidity pool, with LP tokens still owned by the DAO.

Lido's backtesting data shows that if this mechanism had been applied to the approximately $94.18 million in total reward revenue from 2024 to 2025, the cumulative buyback scale would have been approximately $7.09 million.