Ethereum Staking Platform Lido Taps Layer 2 Networks Arbitrum, Optimism

Lido, the crypto staking service provider, launched on the Ethereum Arbitrum Bridge and Optimism layer 2 networks.

Lido first revealed its plans to expand stETH through the growing Layer 2 decentralized financial ecosystem in July of this year. The move is expected to further improve the accessibility of Ethereum staking.

• According to the officer tweetThe wstETH expansion, which is essentially a “wrapped” version of the stETH staking coin, will allow traders to stake tokens directly on layer 2 networks.
• In an earlier proposal, Lido said that the rebasing nature of stETH, connecting it to other networks is difficult, and therefore the wrapped version of stETH, i.e. wstETH, was chosen.

“wstETH is Lido’s wrapped, non-rebase version of stETH. For our initial deployment on L2, we have made the decision to support only wstETH. This is due to a number of reasons, including simplified bridge contracts and the ease of integration, both with bridges and the general DeFi space.

• The announcement also revealed that Lido is allocating 150,000 Lido DAO Tokens (LDO) in rewards per month starting October 7 for wstETH across each network, starting with liquidity mining incentives to various DeFi partners such as Balancer, Curve and Kyber Network.
• Lido noted that Arbitrum and Optimism were chosen after considering several parameters, including DeFi activity, TVL, the technological difficulty of connecting assets, network security histories, and the presence of the protocol’s long-standing partners of liquid staking in the aforementioned networks.
• It was previously reported that both Optimisme and Arbitrum managed to outshine their sidechain counterparts this year.
• Both Layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum maintained an upward trajectory in terms of transaction count and unique active wallets.
• The data suggests that Arbitrum had a market share of over 50.8%, behind which Optimisme was at 30.63%. Their respective TVLs stood at $2.41 billion and $1.45 billion