Lido to Migrate $16.5 Billion in Staked ETH to New Validator Architecture, Reducing Validator Count by One-Third

Chainthink

Release Time: 2026/07/27 14:13:12

ETH

$2,697.870.21%

Summary

On July 27, 2026, Lido announced a major ETH upgrade, migrating over 8 million staked ETH ($16.5 billion) to a new validator architecture following Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade. The change will reduce the number of Ethereum validators by one-third and decrease validation messages per epoch by 29%. Lido is transitioning to Curated Module v2, requiring operators to stake ETH as collateral. All 34 operators plan to adopt the new model, with no exits reported. The migration is expected to lower the annual staking yield by 0.28%. This ETH update marks Lido’s largest upgrade since 2023.

ChainThink reports that on July 27, according to CoinDesk, the liquid staking protocol Lido announced its largest upgrade since V2 in 2023, beginning to integrate over 8 million staked ETH (stETH, valued at approximately $16.5 billion) into the new validator architecture introduced after Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade.

Lido states that this integration is expected to reduce the total number of Ethereum validators by approximately one-third and decrease the number of validation messages per epoch across the network by about 29%.

This upgrade migrates Lido’s professional node operators to Curated Module v2 (CMv2) and, for the first time, requires curated module operators to stake ETH as collateral to guarantee their performance.

Lido confirms that all 34 existing operators plan to transition to CMv2, and no operators have exited due to collateral requirements.

Isidoros Passadis, Head of Staking at the Lido Labs Foundation, said this is the biggest change to the Lido Core staking mechanism since Lido V2.

This migration is expected to reduce the protocol's annualized staking yield by approximately 0.28%, and validators will continue to earn rewards until they exit.

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