Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Lido Poolside: Tokenholder Update, February 2026
Recorded: Feb. 26, 2026 Duration: 0:56:49Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hey everyone, and welcome to the first token holder update of 2026.
So we had an update last November when the Lido leadership team covered Q3 results,
the protocol and its key product direction, and what's next for the LDO token.
Today we're going to discuss current market conditions,
the Lido protocol's 2025 results, the current state of both the market and the Lido DAO.
So after that, we'll open the floor for questions.
You can post them and your comments on whichever platform you're watching the stream right now,
be that X, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
So without further ado, let me pass the mic over to Vasily, Executive Director at Lido Labs.
After the presentation, I will be back to host a Q&A with the overall sort of leadership team.
So don't be shy and share your questions now.
So again, Vasily, the floor is yours.
Hey folks, as usual, like always on this call,
it's me, Vasily Eshpavolov, co-founder of Lido,
executive director of Lido Labs. I used to be CTO, research lead, now
like Lido Labs ship.
A reminder of why users choose Lido. It's because we are making simple, secure,
low cost, very easy staking that is
capital efficient for DeFi red liquidity using many DeFi protocols, deep liquidity across DeFi,
and designed for fast and staking, easy exit versus via secondary markets.
And again, to remind what's my role in the whole LIDO ecosystem is, LIDO the DAO that
is governed by the LDO tokens, by the token holder worlds.
LIDO has control over protocol upgrades, LIDO protocol upgrades, and gets all the fees from the protocol in the token
holder control treasury. LIDO also sets the goals and grants for a set of foundations that
can develop smart contracts for the upgrades or do any other activity that is set in the
LiDARDAO approved goals set in the Goose process and with the grant approved in the ecosystem
grant request process.
So LiDAR foundations are also controlled by LIDO DAO with potential for token holders to change leadership in the world.
The leadership team we have right now is me as a creative director, Izzy, you know, and love as a chief of staking in the LIDO ecosystem foundation,
and Kate as a deputy chief operating officer of Lido Labs.
Sam Kim used to be chief operating officer,
but he quit in the end of December for personal reasons.
So Kate is now handling this set of responsibilities.
And I'll ask these fine folks to introduce themselves.
You're muted, Kate.
Yeah, I was muted for that.
So a quick intro from my side. Hi, everyone. I'm Kate. I've been with LIDA for four years already. Previously, I led the operations team, and I'm really proud of what we built there,
especially the due diligence and all governance processes.
Now I lead the operations unit, which currently has legal, finance, operations,
and people and culture teams within it.
My background is in math and computer science.
So I'm naturally quite logical and process driven.
I care a lot about clarity, accountability, and making sure things actually get done.
And as for operations, I truly believe that strong operations are invisible when they work well.
And I genuinely enjoy taking messy, complex situations and turning them into something structured and reliable.
So I'm here for the long game, I hope.
And I'm excited to help make LIDA Labs more effective and the protocol even more resilient.
Looking forward to building together.
And I passed my mic to Izzy.
Thanks, Kate. And welcome to the role. I'm definitely sure you're going to do a lot of really,
really great things. Okay, so yeah, I'm Izzy.
I've been contributing to LidoDAO for a little over four years now.
I think I was actually the first person that started contributing via governance proposal.
So that's a wild thing.
I think that's still up there on the forums.
If nobody wants to go check out that piece of history.
I used to be the lead of Node Operator Mechanisms, which is kind of like supply chain management, if you want to think about it.
And recently joined the leadership team as chief of staking.
And that basically means that I'm running the staking business unit, which consists of engineering teams, product teams, marketing teams, etc.
Just basically trying to make Lido staking uh the most decentralized and
most effective staking protocol on ethereum uh and yeah with that said let's get to the meat of
why we're here today and i'll pass the mic back to vasili uh thank you uh thank you for introduction
uh we will be all three of us will answer the question at the end of the call.
So don't say your farewells yet.
The success we measure by making the best taking product in Ethereum while growing long-term
treasury surplus. And the agenda for today is financials for the beginning of the year and later in 2025
with a few words about the current market conditions and what does it mean for Labs and for LegaDAO.
for LeadLabs. I'll touch on buybacks on the market state and on the focus for the second
quarter of the year. And after that, we can answer some questions.
So in the end of December, we had a process of setting goals for LeadLabs and setting
ground size for LeadLabs. And there was over 3,000 at the time, like 3,500 or something like that.
5500 or something like that. And we aimed at projected cost of 2700 at the time,
so way below the market price at the time. But now we are sitting at about 2000, so this is
not something we planned for. We said the goal for data across core models to be increased
from 5% to 6% in 2026, and this is something that we've done right off the bat. So right now average stake rate is about 6.11%. Pretty good.
We aim for average DAO stake rate in stake towards about 359 and to grow them over the year to a million ETH. Right now, due to market conditions and
Bitmine clogging the entry queue, it's early to assess how realistic this is and how it's going to
be. This really put a dampener to early start with the staked walls. We want to grow by 15%
We want to grow by 15% to 41 million ETH,
15% from December numbers.
And this is almost cleared in February 2026,
it's about 40 million.
And LIDO market share to get to 27%.
Now it's hitting at 23%,
again, mostly driven by Bitmine
entering the stake in the game,
something we didn't plan for happened early.
Didn't expect.
We can't plan that.
LIDAR core
to grow by
17% to 10 million ETH,
which is pretty close to that.
We are pretty close to that.
And it takes volts to grow to a million.
Right now we have about a couple of thousand, so very under this number.
And we're aiming for a significant growth for LIDAR EARN to 240,000 ETH and $8 million annual
current revenue.
Right now we have about 61,000 ETH and 1 million annual gross revenue. What impact does it have on the projections and the Lido Labs budget and
the expectation? So at the time of requesting grant and planning, we expected the net revenue from staking fees, including staked vaults, and
in 2026 to be about 45 million. Now it's projected at current prices to be 33.
And total revenue again like higher than it's expected to be at current prices.
And this puts the red line into total treasury surplus for 2026,
if we continue with all the same plans and all the same spending as we planned for,
to be 20 million in the red.
I do not think that current market state is a long-term thing. I think it's a temporary setback,
but just in case it's not something like that, we are on Lab's side really cautious about increasing
spending, increasing recurrent spending, the hiring folks, et cetera, et cetera,
I'm acting the gatekeeper on all the big spending lines.
And as a result, at current price,
even you can see that February actuals are actually in the black.
We have a small but existing surplus.
I don't think we should, even if the price stay this way,
we should drop all the planned growth spending
and discretionary spending because a lot of that
is very important for us to diversify the revenue streams
and put more products in the market.
But there is definitely things that make sense to attempt at average yearly price of 2700s
and don't make sense to spend on the average price of like 2000 to floor. The plan is to put a dumpner to increase spending, wait a bit for the market
turbulence to settle, and make a decision later depending on which direction the
market will go. In general, fundamentals for Ethereum and crypto are really good.
So I'm not seeing how this can be a long-term thing, but I'm not the person who decides which way markets go.
It's something we'll have to see.
to see. And now for the 2025-year rope up, it's been a challenging year, but with a lot
of challenges and a lot of things we did right. So there had been a big market pressure with
eth outflows, API compression staking, shifting staking demand,
materially constrained growth across the whole staking sector,
and particularly for LIDO.
What we did about that is we did leadership and operational
reset for the foundation.
We enforced much more clear cost discipline,
and we did a strategic repartization, We enforced much more clear cost discipline.
And we did a strategic repartition,
as in instead of reliance on staking growth,
we increased focus on protocol resilience,
taking module economics, and diversified economic inflow
sources with starting to develop and learn new products.
We also did a lot of good things
on the decentralization side,
which I'm going to be talking a bit later.
So these are the financial numbers for 2025
using the accounting system we settled on that correctly accounts on an accrual basis
on TRP and other expenses that are multi-year in nature. And as a result, in 2025, we are ending at about 4 million in the red.
This is including TRP, which hasn't been included into grant requests since 2022.
But that's below the initial 2025 request and below the spending in 2024,
despite 2025 being a year of heavier research and development.
We also got first revenue for a new product, LiDAR-EARN, and
TRP accrual costs that are included into these financials are under the previously approved
22 million budget that was approved, I think, in 2022 or 2023. So it hasn't been shown in the
grant request since then. What was achieved on our side in staking? We launched permissionless
community staking module, two versions of them.
Now the biggest permissionless staking model by amount of it is staked on VM, which I think is a
huge success for Lido and VM. We addressed the economics of curated module by token
holdable to be more in line with current staking market, which increased DAO effective staking
day rate by 23%. Launched staked walls, expanding product line beyond LIDAR core, creating
potential for tailored staking products. There had been a Wisdom3 ETP, which has StakeTeeth Insight launched,
first liquid staking ETP in Europe with about $36 million
assets and management at current time.
We expanded the set of node operators,
boarding hundreds of new operators,
increasing home st stakeholder participation in security
medium.
This increased diversification of supply chain,
reduced reliance on a single operator,
and increased competition amongst operators.
And dual governance, the first of its kind safety
mechanism for stakeholders.
It's a mechanism that reduces tail risk for stakeholders,
reduces the counterparty risk for stakeholders,
which is a big talking point among the more sophisticated
market participants.
And I believe it supports long-term institutional
adoptions better than LecoVid.
I'm sleeping better now that I know that governance attack
on LIDAR is not nearly as possible or effective as it
was before the governance.
So this is not purely 2025, this is over the years, but we are in a pretty good spot in
governance and token holder alignment, as in all the protocol fees flow to DAO treasury.
Entities that are developing the code and doing other things for the DAO protocol are grant-funded, publishing
financial statements. We have these token holders calls. Token holders have exclusive authority
over treasury allocation just by the vote, and DAO has oversight that is well defined and intervention rights over these legal
entities. One thing that would lack from this list is economic ties from protocol performance to
tokenomics which can be done via automated buybacks or something like that.
And we are working on that.
So this has been voted in at the end of December,
and is under development now.
This creates a direct link from protocol performance to LDO,
activates only when market
and protocol conditions are favorable, and scales automatically with improved protocol economics.
It's also expected to be lightweight by design, low cost to implement and maintain,
and no structural bond to dial treasury. So the IDEA system acquires LDO-Agin protocol-generated stake rewards and
deploys an LDO-ROP-staked ETH LP position held by the DAO via Argon-Engine.
The logic that had been voted in, and this is all token holder controlled so if the DAO wants to change the
logic to be for example more exhaustive buybacks or otherwise like wants to have everything
go into the treasury you can do that.
The activation parameters are when each price is over 3000, revenue is over 40 million,
analyzed staking revenue is over 50 million dollars, and it has an annual curve of 10
million dollars, and the allocation logic is spending 50% of daily revenue for the buyback and deploying into the
automated market maker LP position.
The overall idea behind this system is that when the ETH is under 3,000 in revenue, analyzed as under lot of sense, it's better to reinvest it.
If it is price is good, but revenue is not great, then we need to work on discipline and growth of revenue. And if all both of them are good, then it's time to,
and this is going to be very accrual to spend some of this revenue and some of the surplus for
DAO-proofed buybacks.
The main focus of Goose 2026 is growth, so that's what we are focusing on. Expanding
the stake in ecosystem with the staked walls and ETPs, scaling DAO revenue streams with
a LIDAR urn, exploring other expansions and integrations of the products and ensure protocol resilience with Lido core upgrades.
The market states from Q4 to Q1 is as follows.
The Lido is number one staking vehicle currently
as for a long time, but the share had been decreased mostly for, like not mostly, like fully for the reasons of big players entering the market. In absolute numbers,
this time had been a time of growth for Lido, but in relative Bitmine and Grayscale did huge deposits to
staking and staking entry queue is about two months. So if you stake the usual wait not with
Lido and you deposit it right now, you will start getting staking rewards in like 50-60 days.
staking rewards in like 50-60 days.
And this had been the theme of the first few months of 2026.
Our TVL is getting better.
As you can see, we've had recovery started in Q4 2025.
We've got a lot of ETH staked.
Not enough to keep the share low because of Bitmine and Grayscale having more ETH to stake.
Staking segment sizes are keeping pretty stable except for expansion of lower-risk institutional staking segment
with Bitmine and Gravescale again.
And soon to be BlackRock is also
exploring staking for the ETF.
So this is the staking segment that
is continuing to be growing over 2026,
as far as I understand the market.
And the rest are going to be slowly declining
with a stable-ish relative size.
So our share within the segment is also pretty stable,
but we're focusing on low risk staking
as a main growth driver for 2026 with Staked Walls and institutional products.
So on Staked Walls side, Phase 2 went leave on January 29.
Defy Europa, which is a Staked Walls expansion kit that allows custom DeFi strategies
for your staked ETH is also live.
TVL is on the low side right now, slightly lower than 2,000
ETH.
Integration is underway.
The main reason for low adoption of staked walls for now
is a huge stake in entry queue.
Not a lot of people want to stake with staked walls and wait for 60 days to
stake to activate when they can stake in LIDO core and have staked rewards straight away. And the second reason is that the main growth channel
for Staked Vaults is channel partners,
and like node operators or DeFi strategy managers.
And they need to integrate Staked Vaults
as a technical solution.
And this takes some time. So some of them are already
ready, some of them are working on it. Anyway, it's currently underway and
like many products that are expected to be there are not launched yet. We'll have to see the adoption and how good is the product market
fit when both these factors are cleared.
Long staking queue and integrations finalized.
Current market state also don't help.
The direction of stake is actually for many people.
The other way, people try to unstake and sell. This also is an important factor.
On institutional side, there is a wisdom 3.tp deployed.
There are custodian integration progress for StakedEath
and StakedVaults.
And there had been a filing by Vanecv to do LIDA Staked
ETF, which is filed but not approved right now uh
um we also address in the apr maxi segment which is uh um going like going low in share but is
and low in share, but is one of the most lucrative in terms of margin.
Current TVL is about 60 thousand teeth.
It's been growing pretty steadily over last month until beginning of February,
when people started withdrawing for the vaults. As far as we can see, based on on-chain analytics, about two-thirds
of it are people making the flight to safety. They just keep their withdrawal stake teeth
in staked form to have presumably more liquidity, less risks, and more optionality.
And about one third of it is going to centralize exchanges. So it probably means that they are
selling for stables. There are two meta-volts coming, EarnEath and EarnUSD.
EarnEth and EarnUSD. The goal for them to have multi-creators set up with adaptive rebalancing,
integration and customer plan, a single product approach. So there is no like the whole...
When we want to integrate something into a wallet or some other product, there is default vault integrated.
Meta independent and feature proof.
LiDAR Earn-If is going to abstract strategy GV and DVE vaults. User will be able to upgrade to
Earn-If without withdrawals and curated allocations across existing and future strategies,
it will allow for greater allocations.
EarnUSD is pretty similar.
Start line up with a conservative and experimental set
of sub-strategies allowing USDC and USDT deposits.
There is a proposal on the Governance Forum for
LIDO to put parts of its own treasury in a sort of junior trench to put DAOs money where the
LIDAR-Berantes, which I think is going to be, if approved, very positively taken by the
stakers, as in LIDAR, not just building products, but using it themselves.
And our focus for the second quarter of the year is institutional stake in momentum,
scaling liquid stake in the practical path for signed liquidity,
growing institutional adoptions, expanding stake towards go-to-market,
rollout of meta-volts for ETH and USD,
and deploying automated buybacks, as said in the proposal in December.
I think that is the end of my deck. So I probably need to pass the mic to Galen.
I probably need to pause the mic to Galan.
Great.
Okay.
So thank you, Vasily.
That was a very comprehensive overview of 2025.
And yeah, excited to get into it with the wider team.
So we're going to move over to Q&A right now.
Quick reminder to everybody watching, you can continue to submit questions
on X, LinkedIn, or YouTube. We're going to do our best to address all of your questions,
but we have about 30 minutes now, so we're going to wrap this up on the hour at 3 p.m. UTC.
So let's start with questions we've received through the async form. And the first one here.
So, ST Vault's TVL is currently around 1k ETH.
What adoption milestones validate product marketing fit?
And we're going to pass this over, I think, to Izzy.
Yeah, so it's a good question.
ST Vaults are essentially a platform type type product so it means that it's
contingent upon builders using it to build out uh different end user products resulting from that
so defy wrapper is kind of off the shelf way for builders to be able to get up and running quickly
um but even with the existence of something like that, you face kind of like exogenous challenges.
And the main hurdle right now to any kind of adoption in staking is the really, really long entry queue,
thanks to the stake that has come into the consensus layer by Grayscale and Bitmine the last two months.
So in terms of what adoptions milestones we're looking at over the next couple of months is in general, ETH staked via ST vaults to increase as more vaults get launched out as end user products, whether those are for institutional facing users or retail users.
I think we will also see this in other ways as well.
So you might have like very, very bespoke staking products,
but you might also have more general products
such as platforms integrating SD Vaults.
And the thing that we will see hopefully in the very near future
is Linnea with their turbo, sorry, yield boost feature,
which is just got recently renamed.
So in the next couple of weeks, from what I understand,
Millennial will start staking this as well.
So apart from just like a TBL perspective,
we're going to see a variety of different products
from like native staking adjacent products
built using ST Vaults
to very DeFi forward products using ST Vaults.
So we anticipate to see usage both in a TBL perspective,
but also from a breadth of end user products perspective.
Okay, before I move on to the next question, could we just go a layer deeper on the entry queue?
So yeah, I'd love to love to just hear you unpack, what are the second-order challenges for operators
or whatever on that entry queue right now?
And are there any things that Lido is doing
to offset that as well?
Yeah, great question.
Essentially, a long entry queue means that
from the time that a user deposits their ETH,
they need to wait a certain number of days
for this ETH to arrive on an active validator, which means that during this time, this ETH is not gaining rewards.
There's a kind of like very clear second order effect here, which is opportunity cost. So
you could be deploying this ETH into something else in the meantime, potentially getting rewards
or potentially not, given the way that the market is going these days. But if you're in the queue, you're for sure not getting rewards.
Other possible second order effects might have to do with whether
the whether people need ETH for different things.
So do the market downturns?
Maybe it's better for ETH to be on lending markets, or maybe people need
this ETH to supplement their lending positions.
In terms of what Lido contributors and the DAO
are doing to kind of help alleviate or mitigate some of these challenges, for vaults that are
above a certain amount of TBL, the DAO has basically greenlit for the SDVaults committee
to employ like a fee holiday, if you want to think about it this way, at least for the infrastructure fee related to Ethan vaults and potentially for other fees if builders or node operators or even at some point end users make a case for why that might make sense.
Great. Yeah, I think that covers it.
Okay, Kate, I think next question here, probably most appropriate for you. So will Lido Labs reduce costs or headcount if staking revenue declines further?
that reducing headcount is the right move.
So if it's more at significantly lower levels
or say around 1000, or stayed at 2000
for a long period of time,
that would require some reconsideration, but now not.
And right now it feels more like a temporary setback and we don't believe that
it makes sense to act preventively in this case. What we are doing is staying disciplined,
avoiding expansive investments with very long or uncertain playback horizons,
and being more lean in how we approach to spending overall.
Okay, nice and clear. I appreciate that. And then let's pass the next one over to Vasily. So
And then let's pass the next one over to Vasily.
So the viewer expresses, looking forward to the call.
I wonder what the current state of proposals
on the question of how value accrues to LDO token holders.
I follow various government proposal discussions
about the topic, but I'm missing a clear action plan,
concrete action points, and events on the agenda
where this will be dealt with.
So thanks if you can address some of this.
Yeah, if you can put up my slides back,
it's going to be easier for me to answer.
Yeah, thank you.
So, in general, there are value accrual and has two parts.
One is governance rights of the token holders, like what they can do actually about the protocol,
the DAO, the treasury, etc., etc.
And on this front, I think there is not much left to do, like not much you can do here.
The protocol fees already go into the DAO treasury.
Lido labs are not something that has equity that is competing for value of the token.
There is only DAO,
there is only token holders who vote for protocol upgrades, for spending the money, for
for working on it. Token holders are in control. And
Most of token holders are not like one of the initial token holders.
I'd say like bought on the open market or got tokens in the liquidity mining activities.
The thing that can be added is a mechanism for value accrual that had been voted in December
and is basically will take some of the stake revenue and put it into building up the liquidity for LDO to rob stake teeth pool.
The idea behind it is to spend money for buybacks when it actually makes sense more than spending
and building the treasury or using it for R&D and maintenance and things like that.
This is expected to go leave in Q2.
Yeah, sorry, to be fully correct,
it was proposed in December but hasn't been voted in in December.
Okay, thanks, I appreciate it. Let's take this next one to Basile again. So buybacks
trigger only is more than 3k and DAO revenue is more than $40 million.
So what was the decision behind those key parameters?
The idea for that had been that if ETH price is low, it doesn't make sense to sell it, essentially.
It makes sense to keep it and sell it later when the volatility brings this back to the
higher levels.
And revenue cutoff is basically in line with a more or less average DAOs spending on ADTs and RNG and cost of revenue and stuff like that.
Great. And then, yeah, some more questions. So this, I think we should also go to you, Vasily.
So why prioritize buybacks
over staking LDO? So based on my talks and like our folks talk for the token holders,
a lot of them don't want to do like staking for text reasons. And making staking mechanism versus buybacks
had been preferable for many other token holders
who want the value-crow mechanism.
Great, and then next one again, why don't you buy back LDO on the current market? So
sort of circling around the same subject, but...
Yeah. So I think the current LDO price, especially in each terms, is a bit irrational, as in the market cap is, like yesterday, I checked it yesterday, it was about like 250, 270 million dollars. $170 million. We had over $100 million in treasury and revenue at $45-$50 million. So
it was traded essentially as treasury plus three times revenue, which is a bit unusual
for DeFi protocol. And I think that that could be financially speaking, not financial advice, not financially speaking.
The price is a bit weird right now.
I think that it could be a moment.
On the other hand, Lido Labs doesn't have this mandate.
So we have a grant request that can be used to pay for compensation,
to pay for cost of revenue, to revenue share, to R&D, things like that,
but not to manage treasury fully.
So on the website, we don't have these levels. manage treasury fully.
So on the website, we don't have these levels,
at least currently.
And making a...
And DAO is very convenient to execute things like that.
They get front run by market makers, essentially,
and arbitrageous and all the value that could have been
in that created in this activity goes to the folks
who don't have to have a slot pre-approved five days
slot pre-approved five days to act on market information.
to act on market information.
So the question is really the Audition plus execution and both are a bit tricky.
Interesting.
The front running mechanism or front running dynamic is a very, very neat sort of consideration
to think about here.
So yeah, I appreciate that level of depth.
Okay, Izzy, I think let's shift it over to you.
So at what ETH price do node operators become unprofitable
to the point where the DAO would need to reconsider its take rate?
This is a tough one.
Yeah, so this is a super complicated question. I think ultimately
it doesn't depend on only on ETH price. But let me try to provide like a little bit of context
about it and like my intuition and we've developed some thinking about it and then
kind of end up with the idea that like the best way to get signaling
on this is from node operators themselves.
So I think given that there's an open governance process, node operators should feel free to
basically like bring this up if they think it's a concern.
So what other things affect profitability apart from just like the price of ETH?
So one of the core challenges here is that revenues are in ETH or some revenues and costs
are usually denominated in like the local fiat currency of the node operator, whether
that's dollars, euros or something else.
And it also depends on like the size and scale of the node operator, how many other things
they're doing, all of that different kind of stuff. I think intuitively a sustained ETH price in dollar terms, assuming the dollar keeps the strength
that it currently has, of somewhere between like $1,500 to $1,800 across a year is probably at a
point where a relatively small but still professionally and fully staffed node operator team
is breaking even or not profitable.
But again, it also depends what other things are doing,
how much other stake they're running,
at what kind of margins, et cetera.
So yeah, I think that's basically it.
My intuition, some rough calculations that we've done
is an average price of one and a half to like 1.8 thousand.
Okay, great, thank you.
And then next one over to Kate.
So what discretionary costs are you
holding back on spending right now?
So, yes, the short answer is yes, we are going to spend them
because I believe that some discretionary spending remains necessary.
Why? Because part of the spending is directly tied to building new revenue streams and if we
stop investing completely we risk ending up in the same strategic position as previously having
limited revenue diversification so our goal is balance and we want to stay flexible even if the environment,
market, anything changes.
Okay, great. And then next one over to Vasily. So as Lido continues to dominate the liquid
staking market, does the DAO see a path towards becoming a sort
of publicly recognized corporation to attract institutional capital? If so, what would the
roadmap look like for transitioning from this sort of DAO governance structure to a more
traditional corporate or foundational model?
Yeah, so I'm not the DAO, so I can't say what the DAO is or not.
I can say my personal view here.
I don't think that right now there is a clear path for that, but I think that regulations
are going to be coming clearly more clear over time pretty fast.
And there will be safe harbor kind of things
where these things like that can happen.
Or there can be benefits to remaining pure DAO. So the gist is I can see it happening in a more clear,
like, regulatory environment.
I don't see it happening now, and I'm not sure that's the best path forward.
Again, because of the unclarity, mostly I can't say for sure.
Great.
Next one over to Izzy.
So let's take it into institutional direction.
So if Vanec approval is delayed,
how exposed is the overall institutional thesis for Lido?
So as like a concise response,
I would say probably between 25 to 30% exposed.
But to provide like a little bit more context around this, there's a lot of different efforts
around the institutional thesis, right?
There's of course the wisdom tree issued SCEETP in Europe.
There's efforts and interest from other issuers
in the United States and in other geographies.
There's of course things like DAT vehicles that are also considering liquid
seeking holdings. And there's STVaults,
which essentially allows for institutional forward
products that use STE to work in different ways than like a pure STE
ETF or EDP might work.
I think most likely what it just means is that
the thesis ends up being delayed.
So within the year, obviously you would see a diminishment
of the total potential addressable capacity
that might be retained by an institutional market segment.
But I think it mostly pushes it into further years rather
than diminishing it in aggregate over time.
Great.
Okay, I appreciate that.
Next up, okay, so from the YouTube comment section, how many LDO tokens does Labs hold?
Why isn't this information public? So, yeah, Kate,
Vasily, either, whoever wants to take that. Actually, the answer is very short. LIDLabs
doesn't hold any LDO tokens unless there are some small amounts that are left after DRP
distribution or something like that. So there could be some small amounts that are left after DRP distribution or something like that.
So there could be some small amounts like dusty things that are left.
But basically, LIDL Labs,
any LIDL foundation doesn't have LDO tokens.
Okay. Okay.
Great.
There are also some amounts that are granted to committees, such as Lego.
And Lego is wrapped by a LIDA Labs foundation, but as a foundation, as an entity, foundations doesn't, they don't have tokens.
In short, there is nothing to disclose. Like the
Labs might have some token balance, but it's a small amount for operational purposes, not for
personal purposes, not for holding or spending on selling or something like that. Labs is
fully living on the grant requests that are given by the DAO. That's the only long-term
budget things holder there is. Same applies to all other foundations in the system, so it's not just labs.
We live grant to grant, essentially.
Okay. With that,
I think we're to the end of our questions for today, so let's
wrap here. Thank you to end of our questions for today. So let's wrap here.
Thank you to all of our speakers and thank you to all of our listeners
and everybody who shared questions.
So yeah, I appreciate the transparency of the team
and I appreciate the sort of directness
of the audience's questions.
So we've got two sort of calls to action
here. The first one is a link up to a Luma page. So if you're coming to ETH CC, we're
gonna be hosting a Lido day there. So scan that link and shoot us a message.
We'd be very happy to sort of to meet you and have a coffee together.
Next up, follow us on X. So yeah, obvious, but follow and subscribe and if you can,
share the live recording because it helps more people in the ecosystem stay connected with the
sort of virtuous work that Lido is doing. So again, thank you all, and see you next quarter. Thank you.
