$16.5 Billion ETH Staking Migration Launches, Lido Plans to Cut One-Third of Validators

Odaily Planet Daily News Lido has initiated its biggest 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 about one-third and decrease network witness messages per epoch by approximately 29%, thereby lowering the consensus layer load without directly impacting gas fees or transaction speeds. The upgrade will transition the existing 34 professional node operators to Curated Module v2, and for the first time, requires them to stake an ETH bond, taking on financial responsibility for node performance and security with their own capital. Lido estimates that this migration will slightly reduce the protocol's overall annualized staking yield by approximately 0.28%.