Lido Finance Expands ETH Staking to Layer-2
- Lido has already integrated its bridged staking services with Argent and Aztec, and will reveal more partnerships in the coming months.
- The company will initially support bridging and staking of wrapped stETH (wstETH) on layer-2 networks, but will eventually allow of staking of ETH directly on layer-2 networks.
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Crypto staking service provider Lido Finance is planning to bring staked Ether (stETH) to Ethereum’s layer-2 decentralized finance (DeFi) space, the company said in a blog post on 18 July.
According to the announcement, Lido’s expansion into layer-2 will begin with support for bridging and staking of wrapped stETH (wstETH) on layer-2 networks, though the company plans to eventually allow users to stake their ETH directly on layer-2 “without the need to bridge their assets back” to Ethereum. Lido’s team said in the blog post that:
“Ethereum is scaling, and Lido is following suit. We’re beyond pleased to unveil our expansion plans for Lido on L2, starting with the expansion of stETH across the growing L2 DeFi ecosystem. For Ethereum stakers, this means staking with lower fees and access to a new suite of DeFi applications to amplify yields.”
Prior to the announcement, Lido had already partnered with privacy-focused layer-2 network Aztec and layer-2 wallet provider Argent, integrating its bridged staking services with both projects. The company also noted that more partnerships and integrations will be revealed in the coming weeks, and that plans to expand to all layer-2 networks that have “demonstrated economic activity”, starting with Arbitrum and Optimism.
Lido is a DeFi protocol for liquidity staking of proof-of-stake (PoS) assets. The project claims to have more than 4.2 million ETH (worth around $6.5 billion) staked on its platform, which accounts for around one third of all ETH staked on the Ethereum 2.0 network. While it is primarily used for ETH staking, Lido also provides rewards for a number of other assets, such as Solana (SOL), Kusama (KSM), Polkadot (DOT), and more.
- Coinbase’s Base blockchain was made available to the public on Wednesday, featuring over 100 dApps and services as part of its ecosystem.
- In order to show its capabilities and promote its mainnet partners, Base has also launched an event called “Onchain Summer” that will allow users to mint exclusive NFTs on the network.
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- Celsius filed a lawsuit against StakeHound, claiming that the liquid staking platform failed to return 25,000 stETH, 35,000 ETH, 66,000 DOT, and 40 million MATIC.
- The bankrupt crypto lender had exchanged these tokens for “stTokens”, but StakeHound argued it had “no obligation” to exchange these tokens for other crypto.
- Coinbase’s protocol security team and over 100 external security researchers were involved with testing the upcoming layer 2 Base blockchain over the past six months.
- The project said it has now completed four out of five criteria for Base’s mainnet launch, with the remaining one being to demonstrate “testnet stability”.