Lido, which accounts for over 20% of Ethereum staking, has finally introduced 0x02-type validators. Lido’s validators, previously split into 32 ETH units, have been consolidated into 2048 ETH units, potentially reducing the total number of Ethereum validators by over 200,000 (Lido’s estimated validators: 880,000 → 620,000). The greatest benefit this brings to the Ethereum mainnet is a significant reduction in signing overhead for consensus. With 260,000 fewer validators, the number of attestation messages (block votes) per epoch is estimated to decrease by approximately 29%. This is because the number of validators directly determines the number of signatures the network must aggregate and verify at every slot. This aggregation burden has long been a bottleneck for Ethereum’s efforts to reduce block times and implement single-slot finality. In fact, staked ETH continues to grow rapidly; had validators continued to be created in 32 ETH increments, this would have become an even larger problem. https://t.co/rX93h8ASAI