Lido Slashes 15% of Contributor Workforce – Efficiency Play or Bear Market Blues?
Lido, the leading liquid staking protocol, just dropped a restructuring bombshell. Their contributor teams face a brutal 15% headcount reduction—right as ETH staking yields start looking like traditional savings accounts.
Behind the 'streamlining' buzzword
The DAO-approved cuts hit amid growing pressure to maintain profitability. With staking rewards compressing across the board, even blue-chip DeFi protocols aren't immune to spreadsheet realities.
Market watchers note the irony: a project built to decentralize Ethereum now centralizing its own operations. Maybe next they'll launch a tokenized severance package.
Source: Vasiliy Shapovalov via X.
Lido earned $41.56 million during the year
Lido has collected $44.68 million in revenue this year. The staking protocol received $446.76 million in fees, and incentives stood at $3.12 million, resulting in total earnings of $41.56 million.
DeFiLlama also reports Lido’s annual operational expenses. The DAO has 83 people on its payroll, with salaries totaling 2,400 ETH (about $8.384 million). Operational expenses are similar, at 2,424 ETH (about $8.449 million). However, these figures reflect the DAO’s 2022 budget.
Lido’s earnings for this year exceed the protocol’s budget by 147%
At the time of writing, Lido’s total value locked (TVL) stands at $31.323 billion, ranking it second after Aave. The DeFi protocol is deployed on seven chains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Base, Gnosis Chain, Unichain, and Soneium. DeFiLlama shows that 99.96% of Lido’s TVL resides on the Ethereum network.
Lido Labs is not the only DeFi company that has decided to reduce its workforce. Last month, Eigen Labs let go of 29 employees, resulting in a 25% reduction in its workforce.
The decision was not driven by cost savings but rather to refocus on building EigenCloud, a decentralized cloud platform. Sreeram Kannan, Eigen Labs founder, shared his plans on X and said, “Today is one of the hardest days we’ve had at Eigen Labs … This morning, I shared plans for a restructuring of the company, streamlining our operations, and concentrating our efforts on building and scaling EigenCloud. Unfortunately, this means saying goodbye to brilliant colleagues.”
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