Lido has started shifting the bulk of its staked ETH onto Ethereum's post-Pectra validators, a move that for the first time forces node operators to post their own ETH as collateral. The migration, which kicked off Monday with Phase 1 of the Curated Module v2, covers more than 265,000 existing validators and over 8 million ETH — roughly $16 billion at current prices.
The bond requirement
Operators in the Curated Module now have to put up their own ETH as bonds. It's a new condition that didn't exist before Pectra. The hard fork, which activated in May 2025, raised the maximum effective balance per validator to 2,048 tokens using 0x02 credentials. That change lets Lido consolidate its validators and reduce overhead, but it also shifts some risk onto operators. Lido's Curated Module has handled more than 90% of the protocol's staked ETH since 2020, so the bond mandate affects a huge chunk of the market.
The scale of the move
This isn't a small tweak. The migration involves more than 265,000 validators and 8 million ETH. Lido's share of all staked ETH has been slipping — it fell from over 28% in 2024 to just above 24% by December 2025. Revenue dropped roughly 25% last year. The timing isn't great, but the protocol needs to adapt to Ethereum's new validator architecture or risk falling further behind. The Curated Module v2 is designed to natively support the new validators, and Phase 1 went live this week.
Governance changes
Alongside the technical migration, Lido is streamlining its governance. Routine administrative tasks — like changing an operator's address — no longer require a DAO vote. That's a practical move to speed up operations, but it also reduces the friction that sometimes bogged down the protocol. The governance update removes unnecessary votes, letting the team move faster as the migration proceeds.
Timeline and cost
Don't expect this to happen overnight. Ethereum limits how quickly validators can exit and be restaked. The fastest theoretical exit time is 117 days; the practical estimate is closer to six months. Lido has budgeted 738.5 ETH for the migration costs. That's the price of moving $16 billion worth of staked assets onto a new validator set. The migration will take months, and operators will have to keep their bonds posted the whole time.
