Lido Unveils V2 Upgrades

Table of Contents

• First Upgrade - Staking Router
• Second Focus - Withdrawal Feature 
• Lido V2 Rollout Roadmap

The team behind the protocol has revealed the proposal for Lido V2, which will be the protocol’s largest upgrade to date. 

First Upgrade - Staking Router

On Tuesday, the technical contributors behind Lido presented the proposal for the V2 upgrade, which is slated to further the protocol’s move toward complete decentralization. According to the announcement published on the official Lido website, the upgrade will focus on two major areas - staking routers and withdrawals. 

Currently, the protocol uses a singular NodeOperatorsRegistry, where a DAO selects node operators and incorporates them into a smart contract. However, the upgrade will introduce a new modular architectural design that users can employ to develop on-ramps for new Node Operators like solo stakers, DAOs, DVT clusters, etc. This will lead to the creation of a more diverse validator ecosystem. 

According to the master validator and protocol developer at Lido, Isidoros Passadis,

“A variety of different types of validator pools could be more easily accessed by the Lido protocol, including ones that solo and community stakers have a large participation in, which would not only drastically increase the total number of node operators who participate in the Lido protocol but also the diversity of the validator setups.”

Second Focus - Withdrawal Feature 

The second focus of the upgrade will be to implement withdrawals. Lido users will be able to use this feature to unstake their stETH and withdraw ETH at a 1:1 ratio. Since the upcoming Shanghai upgrade on the Ethereum network will allow users to withdraw their staked tokens for the first time ever, Lido has designed withdrawals to be processed in three separate steps of request, fulfillment, and claim. However, since Ethereum functions differently, and validators can exit through two different stages, Lido has also prepared for withdrawals to be possible in two different modes, just for the sake of being prepared. These two modes are the turbo mode and the bunker mode. The former is the default mode, where withdrawal requests are fulfilled quickly, using all available ETH from user deposits and rewards. The bunker mode will kick in to process withdrawals under catastrophic scenarios and will slow down the process to ensure that no one takes advantage of the situation. 

Lido V2 Rollout Roadmap

The team also revealed the rough roadmap of the V2 upgrade, which has already started in February with code freeze and security audits. Toward the end of the month, a signal snapshot vote on the upgrade will be called in, along with overall design buy-in from the DAO. The focus in the next month will be testing all on-chain and off-chain codes, as well as Oracle and NO automation on Goerli. This testing stage will be followed by a withdrawal credentials rotation ceremony, a pre-hardfork protocol upgrade, mainnet contracts deployment, Aragon regarding protocol upgrade, and the scheduled Shanghai/Capella hardfork. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.