Lido was established by Konstantin Lomashuk, Vasiliy Shapovalov and Jordan Fish in 2020. The organization was helped to launch by a collective of financial firms and angel investors.

The finance firms include Semantic VC, ParaFi Capital, Libertus Capital, Bitscale Capital, StakeFish, StakingFacilities, Chorus, P2P Capital and KR1.

The handful of angel investors who also helped Lido get off the ground include Stani Kulechov of Aave, Banteg of Yearn, Will Harborne of Deversifi, Julien Bouteloup of Stake Capital and Kain Warwick of Synthetix.

Lido aims to make staking more accessible to a wider range of users by pooling staked ETH from multiple users, which negates the need for any technical expertise on behalf of users. Users also don’t need to commit a minimum amount of 32 ETH to run their own validator, which lets more people stake their ETH.

Lido Liquid Staking V2, or Lido V2, is the latest major release of the Lido DAO protocol. It was designed to provide a more efficient and versatile staking solution for Ethereum 2.0.

One of Lido V2’s key features is its "Liquid Staking" model, which allows users to deposit ETH into the Lido pool and receive stETH (staked ETH) tokens in return. These tokens can be traded on secondary markets or used on “LSDFi” protocols, providing users with a more liquid form of staked ETH that can be used for other purposes.

Overall, the Lido DAO network is a robust and secure system that enables users to participate in governance and earn rewards while helping the network to stay secure.

As of June 2023, the total circulating supply of Lido DAO tokens is 879,588,042 LDO, around 88% of the total supply. The max supply is 1,000,000,000 LDO.

Looking at the tokenomics of LDO, the allocation of these tokens is as follows:

DAO treasury — 36.32%

Investors — 22.18%

Validators and signature holders — 6.5%

Initial Lido developers — 20%

Founders and future employees — 15%

Funds are secured within a smart contract, making them inaccessible to validators. Subsequently, LDO token holders vote in the Lido DAO to vet, select and onboard new node operators, and penalize existing ones slashed by chain rules.

Lido also has a $2,000,000 bug bounty program with the Immunefi platform, a leading DeFi bug bounty program. Lido Bug Bounty programs focus on avoiding user fund losses, denial of service, governance takeovers, data breaches and data leaks. Lido has already awarded $250,000 for 7 Bug Bounties.

Read about Ethereum (ETH) Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), Polkadot (POL), and Kusama (KSM) — the chains that Lido supports.

What is staking? Learn more with the CMC glossary.

Check out our guide to the DAO ecosystem.

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