LEGO Q1 2025 - Report
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LEGO Q1 2025 - Report

Let's take a moment to review the achievements of LEGO in the first quarter of 2025.

This quarter, LEGO has invested in Research, Protocol Security and Development, Social Impact and Infrastructure Development and Community Support.

Through this report, the LEGO committee aims to provide you with a clear understanding of the progress and vitality within Lido and Ethereum ecosystem during Q1 of 2025. We hope you find the advancements we've made inspiring!

Issued grants structure

To ensure maximum transparency, the LEGO committee has produced a regular report highlighting the accomplishments of the first quarter of 2025.

In this quarter, Research grants led with a total of DAI 40K. Following were allocations for Lido on ETH Protocol Security (DAI 35K), Protocol Development (DAI 23K), Community Support (DAI 12,7K) and Social Impact and Infrastructure Development (DAI 5K).

Overall, the disbursed grants for Q1 2025 amounted to DAI 115K.

Please refer to the following chart for a visual representation of grants by categories:

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On the next chart you may find grant amounts by initiators:

This quarter the most productive grantor is Kadmil with $21,000 đŸ„‡, congratulations! Followed by AlexđŸ„ˆ with $10,000 and KethfinexđŸ„‰ with $2,650!

1. Social impact and infrastructure development

1.a. Switzerland for UNHCR - Lido Impact Staking (LIS) Grant Proposal

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Lido Impact Staking (LIS) is a platform powered by Launchnodes that allows stakers to leverage Lido’s staking middleware to stake their ETH, stETH, or wstETH, and donate any percentage of their staking rewards to an established charity or other available cause.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a global leader in providing protection, assistance, and sustainable solutions for millions of refugees, forcibly displaced individuals, and stateless people.

LEGO has approved the proposal from UNHCR and LIS regarding using the LIS platform to enable UNHCR to receive staking rewards and crypto donations.

The collaboration between UNHCR and the LIS team has been proposed, which includes the following key initiatives aimed at integrating UNHCR into the LIS ecosystem and leveraging existing infrastructure:

  1. Inclusion of UNHCR within the LIS platform, as an option for any visitor or staker to pledge rewards to
  2. Provision of technical and workflow guidance to UNHCR - regarding custody, workflows, and other best practice learnings
  3. Creation of a dedicated UNHCR LIS portal, with full UNHCR branding - enabling UNHCR to direct prospective donors to a branded UNHCR ‘walled garden’ microsite
  4. Provision of an initial 10 ETH by the LIS team for 12 months, with 100% of net staking rewards being donated to UNHCR
  5. Inclusion of UNHCR within LIS marketing plans, including engaging family offices and charitable foundations to increase donations to UNHCR
  6. Support from multiple Lido Operators that are backing LIS with community and marketing support, and financial backing

The LIS team has already developed a prototype portal for UNHCR, accessible here.

This grant helps to support empowerment for some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. As such, LEGO approved and has already disbursed a $5,000 (in DAI) grant to partially fund UNHCR’s onboarding onto LIS and cover the costs of implementing and maintaining the dedicated UNHCR portal for 24+ months.

Launchnodes has committed to achieve a minimum of 10 ETH staked for at least 1 year. In the event the UNHCR portal does not go live within 6 months, the grant will be returned in full.

2. Protocol Development

2.a. Deployment and Support of Safe on Hoodi by Protofire

Protofire DAO CTO Ivan Bandaryk has proposed leading the deployment of a Safe Multisig wallet on the emerging Ethereum testnet Hoodi to ensure a smooth transition of all Lido testnet-related operations and functionality from Holesky, which is expected to be phased out in the near future.

The project includes two key stages:

  • Deployment of the latest canonical version of Safe Multisig using the official Safe GitHub repositories
  • Support & Maintenance, covering code updates (Safe components), meaningful integrations (e.g., extra Wallets support, Safe Apps), infrastructure costs, monitoring and optimization, user support

The target go-live for Hoodi Safe was March 24, and the deployment was successfully completed.

To fund this initiative, $10,000 was requested for deployment and $6,000 for three months of support. The total grant of $16,000 in DAI has been disbursed.

2.b. Holesky Safe Support and Maintenance in Q4 2024 - Q1 2025

Protofire team has been actively supporting Holesky Safe, with a strong focus on maintaining its stability and security. The team has performed a few regular updates, resolved issues, and implemented various new features in Q4 2024 - Q1 2025, all of which have contributed to increased utilization and an improved user experience for Holesky Safe.

Below is a list of some tasks and activities completed:

  • [Update] Integrate Monitoring - Sentry
  • [Issue] Sentry Error, missing beamer product Id
  • [Issue] Sentry issue monitoring
  • [Feature] Create support page with embedded CickUp form
  • [Update] Remove links to unrelated support pages
  • [Issue] Unable to execute transaction via Wallet Connect

For the full task list, see the detailed post here.

To cover infrastructure expenses and support services provided in Q4 2024 - Q1 2025, Protofire requested a grant of $6,000 in DAI. The grant was approved by the LEGO Committee and has already been disbursed.

3. Lido on ETH protocol security

3.a. RISC Zero Proposal for a Lido Accounting Oracle Second Opinion

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The LEGO Committee previously issued several grants to support the partial replacement or supplementation of the existing Lido Accounting Oracle contracts using zero-knowledge proof oracles. The rationale behind funding multiple solutions in parallel was to introduce multiprover redundancy for this function. This approach helps reduce the risk associated with any single oracle implementation having security or performance issues.

As part of this initiative, the RISC Zero team proposed to build a ZK-based oracle. The team has already developed a minimum viable product (MVP), which is available on GitHub, and has applied for a grant to bring it into production. Additionally, there are plans to integrate the oracle with the upcoming Boundless decentralized proving service, which is expected to offer highly cost-effective proving alongside greater decentralization.

Oracle design executes computations over the historical beacon and execution state within a ZKVM, proving the values defined in the LIP-23 Specification. It uses a proof composition approach to cache prior computation where possible and minimizes the amount of beacon state data needed as input. It also allows the oracle to be stateless minimizing on-chain costs. For further details see the RISC Lido Accounting Oracle.

Acceptance Criteria:

  • Validator set size suitable for Mainnet (around 2M validators at the moment)
  • Latency requirements: 2 hours maximum for the report generation
  • Single proof generation ballpark: not exceeding $50 per report on average
  • All software developed for this grant will be open-sourced under a free and permissive license, currently planned as Apache 2
  • For the avoidance of doubt, the deliverable should work with the Pectra upgrade of Ethereum Mainnet in a timely fashion

RISC Zero has requested a $50,000 grant to help cover both the work completed to date and the remaining development milestones. The first installment of $25,000 (in DAI) has already been paid upfront, with the remaining part to be disbursed upon completion of the last milestone of the project.

3.b. Pcaversaccio's Safe-tx-hashes

In Q1 2025 LEGO approved retroactive grant for the script (https://github.com/pcaversaccio/safe-tx-hashes-util), which allows users to calculate Safe transaction hashes independently of the UI. It gained considerable spreading as a verification tool to double-check the correctness and integrity of transactions before they are executed on-chain. By providing a transparent and reproducible way to compute hashes, the script increases trust and reduces reliance on the frontend, helping validate multisig transactions with greater confidence across various communities.

The LEGO Committee approved a 10,000 DAI grant in recognition of the work completed on improving overall security of operations among various protocols.

4. Research

4.a. Economic Viability of Preconfirmations

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Last quarter, Nethermind proposed to deliver a comprehensive analysis of the economic viability of preconfirmations, aiming to deepen the understanding of their potential impact.

Preconfirmations have the potential to significantly affect the future of the Ethereum ecosystem. Few developments carry as much potential impact as the impact on block proposals. Whether preconfirmations are provided directly by proposers or delegated to third parties, they will introduce many direct and indirect effects to the proposer.

This research aimed to help proposers not only evaluate whether they should offer preconfirmations but also determine which types of preconfirmations are the most economically viable.

The results of this work were delivered in three detailed posts on the Lido Research Forum:

  1. Estimating the Revenue from Independent Sub-Slot Auction Preconfirmations

The study showed that under the current MEV & block-building landscape, proposer rewards would significantly decrease with the implementation of ISSAs, dropping to approximately half of their original value with 8 sub-slots, ultimately stabilising at approximately 26% with continuous pre-confirmations, maintained by time-independent components. This reduction of 74% represents the preconfirmation-specific tips that must be generated through ISSAs in order to compensate for proposers’ loss in revenue compared to today’s block-building revenue.

  1. Analysing Expected Proposer Revenue from Preconfirmations

The study revealed a class of execution preconfirmation protocols that can improve expected proposer revenue compared to the current MEV-Boost block proposal paradigm. Notably, this improvement holds even without additional preconfirmation tips, demonstrating that if there’s any demand for execution preconfirmations, there are protocols capable of making them economically profitable for proposers.

  1. A Pricing Model for Inclusion Preconfirmations

As a result of the research, the model developed for pricing inclusion preconfirmations serves as a valuable reference point for both proposers offering them and users purchasing them. It is formulated as a simple yet expressive closed form formula, easily adaptable to incorporate new training data, updated parameters, or additional predictive variables. The practical considerations outlined are broadly applicable to any preconfirmation pricing strategy and should be taken into account by both buyers and sellers of preconfirmations.

After reviewing the results, the LEGO Council approved and disbursed the remaining $40,000 (in USDC) grant payment.

5. Community Support

5.a. Engineering Academy in Serbia

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LEGO has supported an initiative by a group of engineers from Belgrade, Serbia - Branislav Đalić, Miloơ Todorović, and Vukaơin Tasić - who decided to establish a dedicated engineering education academy.

The program’s curriculum includes specialized sessions focused on Lido’s technology, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of Lido’s staking model and node operations.

The academy’s work aims to foster a community of skilled professionals with expertise in staking, node operation, and smart contract development.

You can read more about the project here.

A $10,000 grant (in DAI) has been disbursed. Wishing the best of luck to the team and the program!

6. Other notable grants

Grant category
Description
Amount
Token

Community Support

$2,000

USDC

Protocol Development

$1,000

DAI

Community Support

$650

DAI

LEGO Q1 2025 Results

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Overall budget used during Q1 2025 was DAI 115K, which constitutes 23% of total DAI 500K allocated per quarter.

During Q1 2025, all grants were disbursed in USD stablecoins (mostly in DAI).

Community Lifeguards Initiative

Similar to Q4 ‘24, the CLI sub-committee’s approach included a mix of content, async support, and synchronous activities. Also this quarter, the CLI subcommittee’s focus was on 2 main goals, each addressing its respective segments in CSM onboarding funnel:

  • Goal #1 — Increase direct conversion of CSM Operators.
  • Goal #2 — Ensure the availability of relevant tools and resources for CSM Node Operators.

The year started with a more modest usage of the budget of $16,670 compared to the previous quarter ($19,300). Most of it was spent on event sponsorships & regular grants, while the rest was used for the remaining CSM Tooling, and our Solo Stakers Guilds as described in a previous section.

This quarter, $5,563.89 (28% of the total $20,000 budget) was used for operative expenses, a decrease of 30% over the previous quarter’s $8,100K. Most was used for travel expenses, followed by software expenses and some miscellaneous.

For more details about CLI achievements during this quarter please refer to CLI Q1 2025 report.