• Aave governance participants recently voted to distribute Lido staking rewards on Arbitrum and Optimism.
• Lido is a staking system that allows users to stake tokens in return for daily rewards.
• Ethereum’s Shanghai hard fork will soon allow users to earn interest by staking ether.
Aave Votes to Distribute Lido Staking Rewards
Aave, a leading DeFi lender, recently conducted a community vote which concluded with over 99% of all governance participants voting in favor of the proposal to distribute Lido staking rewards on its v2 platform, which is deployed on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
What is Lido?
Lido is an Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) application that allows users to stake their tokens in return for daily rewards and receive a derivative token that represents the actual staked token. It currently has the largest locked value of over $8.48 billion as of Tuesday. One key benefit of using Lido is that it requires no minimum amount of ether (worth over $52,000 at press time) before users get any rewards – unlike becoming a validator on Ethereum which does require this minimum amount before one can start earning returns.
Ethereum’s Upcoming Hard Fork
Following the Merge event last year, Ethereum’s next major upgrade – known as the Shanghai hard fork – is expected take place in March and will allow users to earn interest by staking ether. The new protocol upgrade also promises faster transactions and more efficient network usage than previous versions of Ethereum.
LDO Stake Rewards Distribution
As part of its efforts to attract more users, Lido has announced that it will be rewarding stakers who put up their Ether on Arbitrum or Optimism with 150,000 cumulative LDO tokens – which are used for governance purposes within the DeFi app – distributed across Aave upon completion of the community vote mentioned earlier.
Conclusion
With Aave’s decision to distribute LDO stake rewards across its platform and Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork offering increased efficiency along with higher returns for those who choose to stake their ether, DeFi looks set for further growth in 2021 as more people flock towards these innovative financial products and services.