Liquid staking app Lido has started moving the bulk of its staked ETH onto Ethereum’s larger post-Pectra validators, and the operators running them are now putting up their own capital for the first time. Liquid staking lets users deposit ETH to help secure the network while receiving a tradable token in return, so their funds stay usable across the wider DeFi ecosystem instead of being frozen.

The main idea is that Lido’s curated node operators stop running thousands of identical 32 ETH validators and collapse them into far fewer, much larger ones. Fewer validators means less overhead, simpler infrastructure, and a leaner set of on-chain entities to monitor and coordinate.

B in ETH Moved

Ethereum’s Pectra hardfork, activated in May 2025, raised the maximum effective balance per validator to 2,048 tokens through what are known as 0x02 credentials. A validator is the software identity that proposes and attests to blocks, and until Pectra each one was capped near 32 ETH. Curated Module v2 is the piece of Lido Core that now supports the higher limit natively, with Phase 1 going live on Monday.

The scope is the Curated Module itself, the permissioned operator layer that has handled well over 90% of Lido’s staked ETH since the protocol launched in 2020. That covers more than 265,000 existing validators and more than 8 million ETH, worth about billion.

It’s worth knowing Lido is doing this in a tighter market. As CryptoPotato reported, its revenue fell roughly 25% last year, and its share of all staked ETH slid from more than 28% in 2024 to just over 24% in December 2025.

No Longer Trust, Operators Now Must Post Bonds

Basically, trust alone is no longer enough, and operators have skin in the game. This means they have to lock up their own ETH as collateral, so if they misbehave or fail operationally, that ETH can be taken. Tying an operator’s own money to its performance aligns incentives and gives users a cushion against downtime or penalties.

Their bond is smaller than in Lido’s permissionless modules because they’re still considered more trustworthy than open applicants. The governance update also removes unnecessary DAO votes for routine administrative tasks like changing an operator address, reducing bureaucracy and speeding up day-to-day decisions.

The migration will take months because Ethereum limits how quickly validators can exit and be restaked. While they’re offline, they stop earning rewards, which Lido estimates will cost about 738.5 ETH. The 117-day figure is the fastest Ethereum theoretically allows, while six months is the practical estimate.

Source: CryptoPotato