Dominant Staking Pool Lido Causing ‘Long Lasting’ Damage to Ethereum, But Aims to Improve

cryptonews.com:

Lido Finance, a third-party staking pool operator for Ethereum (ETH) 2.0, is under fire from the community for what is called an “unwavering commitment to being a monopoly” that accusers say damages Ethereum’s status as a decentralized blockchain. However, the operator says it aims to fix this.

The latest attack on the dominant staking pool was shared on Twitter by Ryan Berckmans, an Ethereum investor and popular community member, who also said that Lido is causing “extensive and long-lasting” damage to Ethereum.

“Already our opponents are citing Lido as another reason that [ethereum's] [proof-of-stake – PoS] is unreliable,” Berckmans further said, while suggesting “an open fork of Lido” as a better way forward.

Berckmans’ Twitter thread continued by saying that Lido was created by the popular crypto trader Cobie (Jordan Fish), who he hinted does not have Ethereum’s best interest at heart since he “has been sponsored by [crypto exchange] FTX since [solana (SOL), a competitor of Ethereum] was in the single-digits.”

“Why do you think Lido was so quick to go multi-chain,” Berckmans followed up by asking.

Cobie later replied to the accusations by saying that Berckmans revealed himself as “not an intellectually honest participant” in the debate, and said the majority of staked ETH would have been held by centralized exchanges if it wasn’t for Lido.

Despite the harsh takes on the protocol by some of Ethereum’s supporters, Lido has been popular among users.

The main benefit of using a service like Lido, known as a staking pool, is that stakers do not need to run their own node or put up ETH 32 (USD 100,000) that are necessary to stake directly on Ethereum 2.0. As the dominant staking pool today, Lido currently controls about 86% of