LEGO Q4 2024 - Report
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LEGO Q4 2024 - Report

Let's take a moment to review the achievements of LEGO in the fourth quarter of 2024.

This quarter, LEGO has invested heavily in Protocol Development, as well as the Decentralization 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 Q4 of 2024. 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 fourth quarter of 2024.

In this quarter, Protocol Development grants led with a total of DAI 195K. Following were allocations for Decentralization Support (DAI 121K), Research (DAI 50,2K), Social impact and infrastructure development (DAI 45K), Analytical Tools Development and Support (DAI 25K) and Community Support (DAI 7K) and Decentralized Governance (DAI 6K).

Overall, the disbursed grants for Q4 2024 amounted to whopping DAI 449,2K!

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

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

As we can see absolute most of grants were disbursed by LEGO Council (~95%), this is due grants sizes and inline with the usual procedure (grants of more than DAI 10k should be approved by the majority of LEGO Council). Speaking of individual grants pools - Izzy takes the first place with DAI 12K 🥇, congratulations! Followed by Alex🥈 with DAI 7,3K and TheDZhon🥉 with DAI 2,1K.

The diagram below illustrates LEGO Council members participation in signing transactions:

1. Decentralization Support

1.a Aestus MEV Relay

Aestus is an independent, non-censoring MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) relay, built on the original Flashbots implementation. It enables validators to auction their block production rights to builders, ensuring a more decentralized distribution of MEV rewards. By mitigating centralization risks, Aestus helps maintain a healthy validator ecosystem and prevents large entities from dominating block production.

Since February 2023, Aestus has been actively used by multiple Lido node operators, processing hundreds of millions of requests daily for thousands of clients across both L1 and L2 networks.

Unlike centralized relays, Aestus operates without service fees, ensuring an unbiased and transparent relay infrastructure. Until now, Aestus has relied on public goods funding.

Recognizing its critical role in decentralization and validator fairness, the LEGO council reviewed the grant request and agreed to participate in Aestus’s fundraising efforts. In Q4 2024, a DAI 50,000 grant was disbursed to help cover ongoing operational costs.

1.b CSM integrations

In Q2 2024, contributors from the Lido DAO Community Staking team issued an RFP (Request for Proposals) targeting software providers specializing in node and validator setup. The goal was to enhance existing tooling by incorporating a user-friendly pathway for community stakers to participate as Node Operators (NOs) in the Lido Community Staking Module (CSM) and Lido Simple DVT Module (SDVTM).

In Q4 2024, the next scheduled grants were disbursed to support the following shortlisted participants for completing CSM integrations according to the RFP terms:

1.c EthaEarn - Rewarding Loyalty with Crypto

LEGO has approved a grant to support EthaEarn, a blockchain-built loyalty program that enables businesses to reward customers with Ethereum cryptocurrency.

EthaEarn allows businesses of any size and industry to seamlessly integrate crypto-based rewards into their customer engagement strategies, lowering the entry barriers to Web3 and simplifying the process for both merchants and customers: any merchant can add the free EthaEarn app to their store and start rewarding customers with Ethereum (without requiring prior crypto experience), and customers receive Ethereum rewards directly into their decentralized wallets and can manage their rewards whenever they want.

The LEGO committee recognized EthaEarn’s potential to drive broader Web3 adoption by eliminating technical barriers and making cryptocurrency rewards easy to use. The program fosters greater engagement with Ethereum while simplifying the onboarding process for merchants unfamiliar with crypto.

The LEGO grant of USDC 10,000 will support the development of EthaEarn’s smart contracts and fund a security and integrity audit to ensure the program’s robustness and reliability, covering part of the project’s total cost of USDC 166,000.

2. Social impact and infrastructure development

2.b Impact staking with Lido

In Q3 2023, Lido DAO supported a grant proposal presented by Launchnodes for their "Impact Staking with Lido" initiative.

This initiative promotes the concept of Impact Staking, where stakers allocate a portion of their staking returns to support projects tackling global challenges such as climate change, infrastructure development, and inequality.

In December 2024, Launchnodes announced the successful completion of a security audit conducted by Oxorio. The report confirmed no Critical or Major issues.

Per the grant milestone schedule, DAI 45,000 (representing 15% of the total grant) was allocated after the successful completion of an external security review.

3. Analytical Tools Development and Support

3.a Integration of Beacon chain data to Dune

Dune is the leading platform for blockchain data, providing the tools to query, analyze, and visualize public blockchain data in stunning dashboards, making blockchain data accessible and actionable.

It was proposed to make a sub-set of Ethereum mainnet Beacon Chain data publicly available on Dune, including validator performance data with daily granularity and complementary tagging for Lido-related validators, modules, and node operators.

This initiative will empower Dune users with transparent insights into validator performance, fostering better analysis and collaboration within the Ethereum community.

The total allocated grant amount is USDC 50,000. The first part of USDC 25,000 was transferred after grant approval, while the second part will be disbursed within one year upon successful integration and proper maintenance.

4. Community Support

4.a Other community support grants

5. Protocol Development

5.a. Grant to Help Support Vyper Development (2024-2025)

A DAI 100,000 grant was disbursed to support the development and audit costs of Vyper for 2024-2025.

Vyper is a Pythonic smart contract programming language designed for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and is the second most widely used EVM language. Vyper is actively used for various integrations and operational contracts.

Vyper’s Roadmap for the upcoming year Includes:

  • new language features such as traits, generics, abstract functions, built-ins for proxies;
  • continued development of the Venom backend with better code analysis and optimizations;
  • enhanced security with the implementation of state of the art compiler verification methods and work towards a full formal verification of the compiler;
  • development and support of tooling such as Titanoboa, Gaboon or Snekmate;
  • outreach events, communications and branding.

For more details visit research forum.

LEGO is excited to contribute to Vyper’s ongoing evolution and looks forward to seeing its continued growth within the developer community.

5.b. Commit-Boost Grant Proposal for Lido Community

Commit-Boost is a community-driven, open-source project developing an unopinionated validator platform to enable safe interactions with commitments.

The initial grant, requested in September 2024, supported three key areas:

  1. Development (including preparations for audits of Core Commit-Boost functionality, ensuring backward compatibility, and enhancements to the PBS module, including extensions, transparency measures, and metrics implementation);
  2. Adoption (including participation in industry events to drive engagement, subscriptions for essential services, and documentation improvements);
  3. Sustainment (including legal analysis of the optimal entity structure, entity set-up, and operational support).

For more information visit the research forum.

The first installment of DAI 47,500 was disbursed in October, and at the end of December, the audit results were received and the remaining DAI 47,500 was disbursed.

6. Research

6.a. Economic Viability of Preconfirmations

Nethermind proposed to deliver a comprehensive analysis of the economic viability of preconfirmations to improve the understanding of their impact.

The final report contains a thorough analysis of the economic viability of preconfirmations, with a conclusion on how likely (under what conditions and assumptions) are preconfirmations to be economically viable, and clear next steps protocols and transaction supply chain actors could take to improve preconfirmation revenue and reduce implicit and explicit costs/risks of preconfirmations.

The total requested amount for this proposal is USDC 65,000 , the grant was split into two parts:

  • USDC 25,000 upfront (was disbursed in Q4'24);
  • USDC 40,000 on completion of the deliverable.

6.b. stETH-based Swaps using ERC-6123 research paper

In November 2024, the research report (which was initiated in September 2024) analyzing the risks and opportunities of stETH-based Ethereum Staking Rate Swaps for the Lido ecosystem was completed.

The research aimed to evaluate the demand, benefits, and risks associated with introducing an Ethereum staking rate swap product within the Lido ecosystem, specifically considering:

  • Lido stETH APR as the benchmark rate;
  • stETH as both the collateral and settlement asset;
  • Management as a Smart Derivative Contract (SDC) using ERC-6123.

The full report is available here: Research: stETH-based Swaps using ERC-6123.

Following the completion of the report, the remaining 70% of the grant (DAI 25,200) was disbursed.

7. Decentralized Governance

7.a. Governance services by Snapshot

Snapshot has long been successfully used for decision-making within Lido DAO, and this year, funding of USDC 6,000 was once again requested to support all existing services for the 2025 year.

As Snapshot remains a crucial component of Lido DAO’s governance process, the LEGO committee approved the grant.

LEGO Q4 2024 Results

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Overall budget used during Q4 2024 was DAI 449,2K using daily average prices of LDO where appropriate, which constitutes 89.8% of total DAI 500K allocated per quarter!

Token budget split of 20% / 80% LDO / DAI set out previously looks to stay relevant. As we can see grants by tokens split for 12 months of 2023 was 91.3% stables and only 8.7% LDO, whereas Q4 2024 structure is 0.6% LDO and 99.4% USD stable tokens.

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Community Lifeguards Initiative

This quarter, the CLI Sub-Committee has been actively supporting the CSM on Mainnet launch, onboarding CSM operators onto Mainnet, launching the Lido Community Staking Tribes initiative, organizing and participating in conferences and other events (including Devcon, Lido Connect 2024, Web3 Fam Intro to web3 x CSM Meetup in Barcelona, NodeBridge Nigeria Meetup).

The CLI Sub-Committee spent DAI 19,300 (32.2% of the grants budget) on grants this quarter between event sponsorships, first batch of CSM Tooling and small grants for community staker social media outreach.

Also this quarter DAI 8,154.67 (40.77% of the total DAI 20K budget) was used. In increase of about 18.71% over the past quarter’s DAI 6.8K. Most was used for travel expenses, followed by miscellaneous expenses and software subscriptions.

For more details about CLI achievements during this quarter please refer to CLI Q4 2024 report.

Stay tuned, stake safe!