Read the original proposal on Discourse

TL;DR

• Proposal to whitelist LDO (Lido DAO).
• Proposed co-investment is 500K BNT.
• There are no apparent security concerns that would prohibit whitelist status.
• Lido is an established platform for Ethereum 2.0 staking

Token Address: 0x5a98fcbea516cf06857215779fd812ca3bef1b32

Project Website: lido.fi

Token Security

LDO does not have an elastic supply or rebase mechanism. The token contract appears to implement the standard MiniMe Token 1.

LDO currently has a 1,000,000,000 fixed supply of which 24,539,272 are circulating. The contracts and addresses with the highest concentration of LDO tokens are the DAO treasury (rank 1), Lido Dao Vault Contract (rank 2), paradigm capital given the recent wallet history and purchase (rank 3), Founder’s wallet (given that they received ~50M each in tokens and its age) (rank9), and Proxy Contracts (rank 4, rank5, rank6, rank 7, rank 8, rank 10).

Project

Lido is a staking solution for ETH 2.0 backed by several industry-leading staking providers. It makes staked ETH liquid and allows participation with any amount of ETH.

When using Lido to stake your ETH on the Ethereum beacon chain, users will receive a token (stETH), which represents their ETH on the Ethereum beacon chain on a 1:1 basis. It effectively acts as a bridge bringing ETH 2.0’s staking rewards to ETH 1.0.

As a user’s staked ETH generates staking rewards from ETH 2.0, the user’s ETH balance on the beacon chain will increase. stETH balances will update correspondingly once per day allowing you to access on ETH 1.0 the value of your staking rewards received on ETH 2.0.

Users can use stETH in all of the same ways that they can use ETH: sell it, spend it and, since it is compatible to be used in DeFi, use it as collateral for on-chain lending. When transactions are enabled on ETH 2.0, users can also redeem stETH for ETH.

Tokenomics

The LDO token is the governance token for Lido DAO. It is used to vote on protocol parameters and govern the constantly growing Lido DAO treasury.

Upon the launch of the Lido DAO, 1 billion LDO tokens were minted. Founding members of the Lido DAO received 64% of LDO tokens. These tokens are locked for one year, after which they will vest over the following year.

The allocation of LDO tokens is as follows:

• DAO treasury - 36.32% - These are locked for one year, after which they will be vested over one year. (360,000,000 LDO)
• Investors - 22.18%
• Validators and signature holders - 6.5%
• Initial Lido developers - 20%
• Founders and future employees - 15%

LDO holders that participate in the DAO have the following responsibilities:

• Launching Lido:
• Deploy protocol smart contracts;
• Set fees and other protocol parameters;
• Select the threshold signature scheme participants among reputable individuals or organizations willing to provide the service;
• Facilitate the multi-party computation ceremony to create the threshold signature account for staking rewards;
• Assign initial DAO-vetted node operators.
• Propose and update Lido’s parameters;
• Approve incentives for parties that contribute towards DAO’s goals (e.g., stETH liquidity providers);
• Propose and update Lido’s implementation for incoming Ethereum 2.0 features using DAO treasury funds;
• Assign oracles to deliver reward/slashing rate feed to help establish stETH token balances;
• Scout and qualify new node operators and penalize the existing ones slashed by Ethereum 2.0’s rules;
• Manage the Lido DAO’s insurance and development funds;
• Manage unbonding and withdrawals once available in Ethereum 2.0;

Investors

Lido raised $2 million in a Dec. 2020 round backed by Semantic Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Terra, KR1, Stakefish, and Staking Facilities, among others. Angel investors, including Rune Christensen of MakerDAO, Stani Kulechov of Aave, and Kain Warwick of Synthetix, also participated in the round.

Lido also recently (May 2021) raised $73 million in a round led by paradigm capital.

Community and Communication

The Lido team operates an official Twitter, Blog, and Reddit account. The repositories for their code is hosted on GitHub. There is a Telegram and Discord channel that is available to their community. The official documentation is hosted on GitHub. There is also a governance forum that’s available to their community members.

Available Audits

There are three audits available from different firms for Lido:

Quanstamp
Sigmaprime
MixBytes

Market and Trading Data

• LDO price at the time of writing is $1.88
• All-time high: $5.74 (May 08, 2021)
• All-time low: $0.50 (Mar 27, 2021)
• Price 90 days ago: $0.84
• 24,539,272 tokens in circulation
• 1,000,000,000 maximum supply.
• The current market capitalization is $44,666,374
• Token Fully Diluted market Capitalization is around $1,820,199,567
• The LDO token is available on DEX (Uniswap, Sushiswap, and 1inch)
• The highest 24-hour volume on DEX (Sushiswap) is around $2.1M.