Lido DAO’s main-phase vote on Curated Module v2 and Community Staking Module v3, on-chain vote #203, closes July 18 at 14:07 UTC. LDO has climbed roughly 23 percent over the past seven days a
Lido DAO’s on-chain vote covering Curated Module v2 (CMv2) and Community Staking Module v3 (CSMv3), the two staking modules rebuilt on the new Staking Router v3 framework, reaches the end of its main voting phase at 14:07 UTC on July 18. The proposal bundles Lido Improvement Proposals LIP-33 and LIP-35, changing how the protocol assigns roughly 9 million ETH in deposits across curated professional operators, permissionless community stakers, and distributed validator clusters. The vote lands in the same week LDO climbed from around $0.305 to $0.378, a gain of about 23 percent, while a separate run of protocol updates qualified new node operators and began retiring an older staking module.
Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade raised the maximum effective balance a single validator can hold to 2,048 ETH, well above the old 32 ETH ceiling that forced Lido to spin up a new validator for every incremental deposit. Staking Router v3 gives the protocol a shared routing layer that can consolidate existing stake into these larger validators and shift deposits between modules through a process that cryptographically checks each transfer before it settles, rather than requiring a withdrawal and a fresh deposit each time an operator’s allocation changes. Fewer validators doing the same job means lower aggregate gas spend for the network and less operational overhead for the operators running the infrastructure.
ProposalMechanismStatusDeadlineCMv2 + CSMv3 bundleOn-chain vote #203Main phase liveJuly 18, 14:07 UTC0x02 CSM LandscapeSnapshot signalLiveJuly 20CMv2 Penalty FrameworkSnapshot signalLiveJuly 20A related Snapshot proposal, live through July 20, would create a new permissionless module for validators using 0x02 withdrawal credentials, the validator configuration Ethereum introduced alongside Pectra that unlocks the 2,048 ETH balance cap described above. It gives community operators a path to run these larger validators while posting proportionally less collateral per validator than they do today, the kind of change contributors describe as improving capital efficiency, without touching the CMv2 vote itself.
The Curated Module currently secures close to 89 percent of Lido’s total value locked, and until now operators earned that allocation largely on track record. Posted collateral wasn’t part of the equation. The CMv2 Penalty Framework, live on Snapshot through July 20, sets out how incidents, operational failures, and other forms of misbehavior get assessed once bonding requirements take effect, assessing each incident on its own facts rather than applying a fixed penalty schedule, weighing factors like how the failure occurred, how quickly the operator responded, and whether it could have been prevented. An operator that fails to meet its obligations loses locked assets, not just standing within the DAO. Contributors describe this as CMv2’s core de-risking mechanism.
Lido DAO Governance Update
The on-chain vote for the Curated Module v2 and Community Staking Module v3 upgrades, built on Staking Router v3, is now live.
Voting window (main phase): July 15 → 17, 2PM UTC
Vote here: https://t.co/Jt6cwV8am2pic.twitter.com/N06ypHiHbc
— Lido (@LidoFinance) July 15, 2026
Figures shared by Lido on X show the shift clearly at the module level. Community Staking Module deposits rose by 99,232 ETH over the past 91 days to 747,744 ETH, and registered operators grew from 560 to 602. The fifth Identified Community Staker assessment roundapproved 11 additional operators for enhanced staking parameters, and the inaugural Identified DVT Clusters (IDVTC) round approved four DVT clusters, groups of operators that split a single validator’s duties across multiple independent parties for added resilience. That opens a more capital-efficient path for ICS-qualified operators to run validators collaboratively. Applications for both tracks stay open through the next assessment window in September.
The Simple DVT Module moved in the opposite direction. Stake fell by 92,160 ETH to 252,160 ETH, active operators dropped from 316 to 219, and active clusters fell by 30 to 46. That decline traces back to the DAO-approved wind-down of Simple DVT regular clusters: SSV regular clusters have already exited, and coordination of validator exits within Obol regular clusters began on July 1. Operators leaving those clusters can move into CSM through the default permissionless path. Those with ICS status get enhanced parameters, while IDVTC lets them keep operating alongside their former Simple DVT peers. The Curated Module, meanwhile, held its stake roughly flat at 8,121,888 ETH, a dip of 89,760 ETH against a base of more than eight million.
ModuleStake (ETH)91-day changeShare of TVLOperators/clustersCurated Module8,121,888-89,760~89%34 active (-1)Community Staking Module747,744+99,232~8.5%602 registered (+42)Simple DVT Module252,160-92,160~4.3%219 active (-97), 46 clusters
According to data from DefiLlama, gross protocol revenue for July stands at $17.55 million, split between $16.96 million in staking rewards and $596,500 in MEV rewards, short for maximal extractable value, the extra revenue validators earn by optimizing how transactions are ordered inside each block. Almost none of that stays with Lido. What the industry calls cost of revenue, in this case the share passed straight through to depositors and operators rather than kept by the protocol, reaches $16.46 million: $15.26 million in staking rewards and $536,850 in MEV go to ETH stakers, while node operators collect $643,000 in staking rewards and $22,620 in MEV. What remains after that pass-through is a gross profit of $1.09 million and monthly earnings of $1.08 million, after incentive spending of $1,830. DefiLlama separately reports token holder net income for July at $2.06 million. Stretched out to a full year, fees run at $737.53 million and revenue at $71.49 million. LDO holders capture $31.88 million of that, and annualized earnings reach $67.22 million.
MetricValueTotal Value Locked$16.86 billionLDO price$0.376Market cap~$312 millionFully diluted valuation$372.59 million24h volume$45.16 millionTreasury$102.19 millionTotal raised$167 millionAnnual operational expenses$16.81 million
Looking at the 30-minute chart, LDO spent the early part of the week grinding between $0.305 and $0.31 before a sharp drop to $0.298 on July 13, a level where the RSI briefly fell near 30, a reading traders generally treat as oversold. Sellers had pushed too far, too fast. The bounce from there built through July 14 and 15, breaking above $0.33 and accelerating into a steep climb that pushed the RSI to almost 78 by July 16, comfortably inside the overbought zone above 70, where momentum traders often expect a pause. Price consolidated between $0.365 and $0.372 for the rest of that session. Then it broke higher again, pressing to a fresh high of $0.378 by midday on July 17. The 20-period moving average at $0.371 and the 50-period average at $0.370 both sit just under the current price, and price trading above both is the setup traders point to as a short-term uptrend. RSI now reads 60.70, above the neutral 50 mark but well off Wednesday’s peak, consistent with a market still favoring buyers without the stretched conditions seen two days earlier. The $0.33 zone, the base of Tuesday’s breakout, is the level likely to attract attention on any pullback, while $0.298 marks the deeper floor from earlier in the week.
Holders of stETH do not need to take any action. Rewards continue accruing daily through the migration, regardless of which module a given validator sits in. Contributors have estimated the physical transition of stake to the new architecture at four and a half to six months, and they have flagged a projected network-wide reward loss of roughly 738.5 ETH across that period as a portion of validators briefly sit idle during reassignment. That cost shows up as a marginal, temporary dip in the actual yearly return stakers receive, not a change to the underlying reward formula.
Builders working on stVaults, Lido’s newer product line for institutions and DeFi teams that want a customized staking setup rather than the standard pooled version, get a separate piece of near-term relief: the 0% Lido V3 infrastructure fee has been extended through August 31 for operators running stVaults holding more than 250 ETH. The next checkpoint for the operator side of this story falls in September, when the second ICS and IDVTC assessment rounds close and contributors are expected to publish the first post-migration validator set update. That is when the bonding requirements under CMv2 face their first real test against operator behavior, not just governance text.
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