On the Beacon Chain, Lido controls approximately 40% of the staked ETH.
Lido Finance, one of the biggest providers of Merge staking, has launched on Arbitrum and Optimism, two layer-2 networks. It claims that this makes Ethereum staking more accessible and reduces gas fees.
The team acknowledged that several layer-2 networks had "demonstrated economic activity" in July, and the new deployment to L2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism launched on Oct. 7.
Lido offers liquid staking, which gives stakers more flexibility because they can withdraw their funds whenever they want, as opposed to directly staking Ethereum and locking it up.
Alesia Haas, the chief financial officer of Coinbase, and other industry leaders have stated that institutional staking will not gain traction unless the problem of asset lockup can be resolved.Lido has gained popularity because it offers this liquid or flexible staking option.
The linking of Lido's Wrapped Staked Ether (wstETH) token to the two networks is made possible during the initial phase of the layer-2 rollout.
Lido issues stETH, the Ethereum liquid staking token, in proportion to Staked ETH. The wrapped version of stETH keeps a fixed balance of stETH for use in DeFi applications that require a constant balance mechanism.
Additionally, from the day of launch, Lido will distribute 150,000 Lido DAO (LDO) token rewards to wstETH bridged across each network.On DeFi partners like Balancer, Curve, and Kyber Network, the initiative aims to increase wstETH liquidity for farming incentives.
