Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 737 Ethereum Staking Is Going Institutional - Lido Explains Why
Transcript
- 0:08[SPEAKER_00]: all right everyone welcome back to the crypto 101 podcast we hope everyone is having a good morning or evening because no matter where you're coming in from in the world you're certainly in the right place here today man the crypto market has been wildly let me tell you what we have seen all sorts of new volatility it's been a pretty wild rough year so far right some pretty big moves down but despite that we always like to call these the builders markets
- 0:36[SPEAKER_00]: because the ecosystems and the projects inside of cryptos continue to be built.
- 0:41[SPEAKER_00]: The back ends continue to grow.
- 0:43[SPEAKER_00]: We see all sorts of new technologies and upgrades and updates.
- 0:47[SPEAKER_00]: We love talking to founders in different industry leaders about what's going on behind the scenes.
- 0:52[SPEAKER_00]: And that's exactly what we're going to do here today.
- 0:54[SPEAKER_00]: So today we're joined here by Keen Gilbert.
- 0:57[SPEAKER_00]: He is the head of institutional relations for a Lido for Lido's ecosystem foundation.
- 1:03[SPEAKER_00]: Keen, it's good to have you.
- 1:04[SPEAKER_00]: And thank you for coming on.
- 1:06[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me, you're very kind.
- 1:09[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, this is going to be an exciting one.
- 1:11[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of the listeners out there, they've probably heard of Lido before.
- 1:16[SPEAKER_00]: Brief introduction on Ethereum, you can do something called staking, right?
- 1:21[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, a number of years ago, Ethereum switched over from being a proof of work, blockchain, and a proof of work consensus mechanism to being a proof of stake, blockchain, and a proof of stake consensus mechanism.
- 1:35[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we'll talk about what this means, but inside of that, you know, if you want to stick natively on Ethereum, you have to have quite a few Ethereum.
- 1:42[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's around 32 right now and for the average investor, you'll look at that and you go, man, 32 Ethereum times its current trading price of around, you know,
- 1:52[SPEAKER_00]: $1,500 to $2,000.
- 1:53[SPEAKER_00]: It's not cheap.
- 1:55[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's where something like Lido comes in where you can actually stake.
- 1:58[SPEAKER_00]: It's substantially smaller amounts.
- 2:00[SPEAKER_00]: You can make sure that your funds are liquid so that you can interact with defying stuff.
- 2:05[SPEAKER_00]: But that's really where Lido comes in here.
- 2:07[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the dominant player in the liquid-staking space.
- 2:10[SPEAKER_00]: So I know I'm not gonna do it justice.
- 2:12[SPEAKER_00]: So Keen, again, once again, thank you for coming in here.
- 2:16[SPEAKER_00]: just introduce us to what Lido is and how it kind of works and what its role is inside the Ethereum ecosystem.
- 2:24[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, and transparent, I think you've hit most of the nails on the head to be on a so this fantastic.
- 2:30[SPEAKER_01]: But effectively, like LIDO, like you mentioned, is the largest liquid-staking provider.
- 2:34[SPEAKER_01]: So effectively, people take their teeth, they comb, stake it to LIDO's middleware, and in return they're given teeth or ST teeth.
- 2:41[SPEAKER_01]: And you can effectively think of teeth as like a certificate of deposit.
- 2:45[SPEAKER_01]: And LIDO is really trying to address probably two main
- 2:51[SPEAKER_01]: So, one of the main issues with native-staking is you're basically taking your teeth.
- 2:56[SPEAKER_01]: You're locking it away effectively and escrow, but when it's in escrow, you can't transfer it.
- 3:02[SPEAKER_01]: So, that's where the liquid-staking token comes in, which is teeth.
- 3:06[SPEAKER_01]: So, you can effectively take your teeth token, deploy it into defa, use as collateral, borrow against it, or ultimately, if you want to get out of your
- 3:21[SPEAKER_01]: Where we're probably seeing a huge amount of interest right now is more on the entry side.
- 3:26[SPEAKER_01]: So, again, for context for your listeners, there is an entry queue before you can start earning rewards on your ETH.
- 3:34[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the entry queue right now is around 53, maybe 54 days.
- 3:38[SPEAKER_01]: So that's 54 days where you're not actually earning stake in awards.
- 3:43[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas with Lido, the many you start stake in your eeth, you get stake in rewards within one day.
- 3:48[SPEAKER_01]: So that's incredibly attractive when I'm speaking to different institutional clients where they may not want to rotate their eeth or they want to start earning rewards quicker.
- 3:57[SPEAKER_01]: That's what Lido effectively offers.
- 4:01[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's important to understand because I was just at, we sometimes we have these in-person events and little conferences.
- 4:09[SPEAKER_00]: And I had someone come up to me and they were asking me about LIDO.
- 4:13[SPEAKER_00]: We actually did a little bit of a presentation.
- 4:15[SPEAKER_00]: I did one of those tutorials and walk through of how to partake in LIDO and specifically the liquid staking side and afterwards people came up.
- 4:25[SPEAKER_00]: They were super interested and they had a number of questions.
- 4:27[SPEAKER_00]: Because
- 4:28[SPEAKER_00]: When you look at staking, people have a couple of different ways of approaching it.
- 4:32[SPEAKER_00]: Either A, they take the easy route, they go on to an exchange, they stake through there, and that's fine.
- 4:38[SPEAKER_00]: You know, usually get pretty good security.
- 4:41[SPEAKER_00]: And the caveat, or maybe the downside, is that the exchanges are going to take a bigger piece of the pie.
- 4:46[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to say, hey, we're going to make convenient, we're going to make it easy, we're going to make sure you don't mess things up for yourself.
- 4:51[SPEAKER_00]: But we're going to take a little bit of your rewards.
- 4:53[SPEAKER_00]: And so some people go, well, I'm pretty smart.
- 4:55[SPEAKER_00]: I can do this myself.
- 4:56[SPEAKER_00]: So then they want to stick natively.
- 4:58[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's where some speed bumps come in for Ethereum, because it's going to say, hey, it's like you said, there's a queue, there's a delay.
- 5:06[SPEAKER_00]: It takes a little bit longer.
- 5:07[SPEAKER_00]: Your funds are not liquid.
- 5:09[SPEAKER_00]: They're locked up once they're inside of this.
- 5:11[SPEAKER_00]: And then on top of that, you know, you've got to have, I think it's close to like what, almost $50,000 in Ethereum, that kind of meet the bottom threshold.
- 5:21[SPEAKER_00]: So, that kind of removes another group of people, you know, people who say, hey, I have some money in Ethereum, but I don't got, you know, 50,000 are close to that.
- 5:29[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have 32 Ethereum in Ethereum.
- 5:33[SPEAKER_00]: So, that kind of removes another group of people, and then there's the people who say, you know, I want to go into liquid-staking, which I think,
- 5:40[SPEAKER_00]: really captures the most attention because it's saying, hey, we're not going to take massive amounts, like the exchanges well, we're not going to take significant amounts.
- 5:47[SPEAKER_00]: And you're also going to have these funds and this this token that goes along with them called the liquid sticking token, which is the STE to the Steath and
- 5:56[SPEAKER_00]: Um, for people who don't understand what the ST means.
- 5:59[SPEAKER_00]: I already know people that are listening, you're going to go Steath.
- 6:02[SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean?
- 6:02[SPEAKER_00]: ST. Well, it stands for state E, right?
- 6:05[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little abbreviation there.
- 6:07[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but what you can do with these tokens is you can continue to take part and defy, right?
- 6:12[SPEAKER_00]: So you have this Steak D token.
- 6:14[SPEAKER_00]: and then you can go and you can use that steak deep token to go and earn a yield somewhere else or you can go and you know put it up somewhere else and borrow against it.
- 6:23[SPEAKER_00]: You can do all these different things and earn extra yield or just be active with those tokens so you don't have the set completely inactive.
- 6:31[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the only difference there is that, you know, obviously if you want to come back and redeem the Ethereum that you state, you got to have those liquid tokens with, yeah.
- 6:37[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's where the benefit of something like this really comes.
- 6:41[SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the, the, the big questions that I got from this in-person event was,
- 6:46[SPEAKER_00]: Guys, can you talk about the security differences?
- 6:51[SPEAKER_00]: What does it look like from a security or like a risk standpoint?
- 6:54[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, you know what, this is a great question because I'm going to be talking to some of the light of guys here just a week later.
- 7:00[SPEAKER_00]: So can you kind of walk us through that, you know, for people who are wondering,
- 7:03[SPEAKER_00]: um especially in light of some of the the hacks and exploits and stuff that we've seen this year I think it's freaked people out and they say I don't I don't want to do anything too crazy with my funds here What are like the main differences?
- 7:18[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know I'm looking I couldn't agree to more like I've definitely got more questions than I ever have from clients asking well
- 7:25[SPEAKER_01]: had was LIDO secured, and many smart contract ordering events, so taking place is there ever been any slashing events.
- 7:32[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, which what's happening with AI, it's become a real hot topic.
- 7:37[SPEAKER_01]: And I think ultimately, it's up to the end user to decide what level of Isopos involvement they want to have.
- 7:44[SPEAKER_01]: like you mentioned at the beginning there, there's obviously a tens of thousands of people using centralized exchanges to stake, which should be almost kind of blows my mind, why would you spend 25% on fees to stake your ease when you could go with order of providers like LIDO and only end or spend 10%.
- 8:03[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 8:04[SPEAKER_01]: And you're getting the same product, but like ultimately, staking is kind of a sticky business.
- 8:08[SPEAKER_01]: Like once people start staking, they tend not to rotate it down much.
- 8:12[SPEAKER_01]: And I suppose the key difference with LIDO and one of the things that we're incredibly proud of is that LIDO is heavily bottled tested.
- 8:21[SPEAKER_01]: It's thrown around for a significant event of time.
- 8:23[SPEAKER_01]: There's never been any slashing events.
- 8:26[SPEAKER_01]: We've spent millions, I think, four or five million non-smart contract, auditing, we've opened bookbenties.
- 8:32[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that I think most people are quite proud of, a LIDO is that it's a middleware.
- 8:38[SPEAKER_01]: So, without a mean, it's actually state with LIDO.
- 8:41[SPEAKER_01]: It's distributed or decentralized, depending on what language you want to use, among 900 different node operators.
- 8:48[SPEAKER_01]: So, one of the big benefits of that is there's no single point of failure.
- 8:52[SPEAKER_01]: So if you go and compare that to a centralized exchange, that means it's centralized.
- 8:57[SPEAKER_01]: It's one provider that they manage everything at the end end.
- 9:00[SPEAKER_01]: And again, like you mentioned, they do that incredibly well, but there is that centralization risk.
- 9:05[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas with Lido because it's so diverse and valid in decentralized, you don't have that single point of failure.
- 9:11[SPEAKER_01]: And there's huge problem with that.
- 9:13[SPEAKER_01]: And that's definitely something that, again, as we're speaking to more clients, there are ALI and the risks around that,
- 9:22[SPEAKER_01]: LIDO is the largest liquid-staking protocol.
- 9:25[SPEAKER_01]: I think $15 billion TBL, $9 million each staked.
- 9:29[SPEAKER_01]: There's a huge amount of trust there.
- 9:32[SPEAKER_01]: And there's an incredible amount of work happening behind the scenes to make sure that.
- 9:37[SPEAKER_01]: Smart contracts are audited.
- 9:39[SPEAKER_01]: We recently got web pretty soft compliance, search a certification.
- 9:43[SPEAKER_01]: I think an eight plus rating there.
- 9:45[SPEAKER_01]: So being able to say that we're this battle tested and we're so focused on mitigating and managing risk is kind of the big draw for our clients right now.
- 9:55[SPEAKER_00]: know, it's a great point.
- 9:57[SPEAKER_00]: I know Ethereum as an ecosystem right now is under a little bit of maybe stress or under a little bit of fire, right?
- 10:07[SPEAKER_00]: You kind of see the sentiment online, crypto to it or other places, just a little bit of disgruntled behavior from maybe the average retail person.
- 10:17[SPEAKER_00]: And I see you kind of previously talk about this.
- 10:19[SPEAKER_00]: I think you said Ethereum was
- 10:24[SPEAKER_00]: And despite kind of the major institutional adoption that we've seen, there's still maybe this feeling of just unloved right now.
- 10:30[SPEAKER_00]: Now, maybe that is frustration from just price being down.
- 10:34[SPEAKER_00]: I think farther than people expected.
- 10:36[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's just price being down longer than people expected.
- 10:39[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's probably playing a pretty big role here.
- 10:43[SPEAKER_00]: But do you think that sentiment has like genuinely shifted from last year to this year from 2025 to 2026?
- 10:49[SPEAKER_00]: And what kind of drove the change if any?
- 10:54[SPEAKER_00]: in this sentiment that you're seeing.
- 10:57[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I genuinely think the sentiment is improving from an institutional perspective.
- 11:03[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I can definitely say from the institutional department that I wrote, like,
- 11:08[SPEAKER_01]: We've never had so much eat being state from institutions, so much institutional conversations, wisdom tree launched the first LIDO state DEC, ETP in December.
- 11:18[SPEAKER_01]: Like there's been terrific things happening.
- 11:20[SPEAKER_01]: You can also see, well, the data've achieved.
- 11:24[SPEAKER_01]: Like I think that's a terrific moment and that's happened a half and last year.
- 11:29[SPEAKER_01]: You can see what BlackRock has done with the ETHB product and getting that launched.
- 11:34[SPEAKER_01]: But I think the tailwinds are not really cryptospecific.
- 11:39[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a lot of macros stuff happening, and obviously with the AI hype right now, I think that's probably taken a lot of money out of the market.
- 11:48[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of the money that would have went into all coins, like ETHER SLIMA.
- 11:53[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's probably sitting on the sidelines right now, where may have gone into AI.
- 11:58[SPEAKER_01]: and maybe it's waiting to see what happens with the SpaceX IPO.
- 12:02[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a lot of interesting things in the market right now, but from an Ethereum perspective, like I'm incredibly bullish.
- 12:09[SPEAKER_01]: Like my view on this is if you're going to place a bet on a network, you place a bet on the one with the most money behind it and the most developers, and that is effectively Ethereum.
- 12:20[SPEAKER_01]: And then the other thing I always say is the big guys, like the black rocks, the fatalities, the frappe temperedums, they don't place bad bets.
- 12:27[SPEAKER_01]: And they're all building on Ethereum for a reason.
- 12:31[SPEAKER_00]: So you said that you've seen more activity and maybe more love from the institutional side, especially when it comes to staking.
- 12:38[SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean that the
- 12:41[SPEAKER_00]: negativity that we're seeing is mostly retail reaction and that the institutional side is doubling down is there like a divergence or a disconnect there between maybe how retailers looking at this in behaving and then how the institutional side is.
- 12:56[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, to your point before, like people want price to go up and, unfortunately, like anything in life, you know, like the tide goes out, tide comes in, price goes up, price goes down, whereas I think if you're an institutional investor or you're a big black rock or a big institutional
- 13:19[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 13:19[SPEAKER_01]: So again, I think the average retail investor wants to see profits in credit quickly, whereas again, the big guys know they look at a longer time horizon.
- 13:28[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I genuinely have never been more bullish like all the conversations and having these guys are actively looking at the space, not just from a staking perspective, but also from a tokenization perspective.
- 13:41[SPEAKER_01]: And like I have an encrypt of 10 years like when I used to walk into meetings you'd spend the first 50 and 20 minutes trying to explain to someone that blockchain and Bitcoin wasn't the same thing.
- 13:53[SPEAKER_01]: And now I'm attending ETF conferences and the entire conference is about tokenization.
- 13:58[SPEAKER_01]: Like I never thought that would happen.
- 14:02[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, tokenization has come a long way.
- 14:04[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you what, it feels like every podcast of interview that we do over here.
- 14:08[SPEAKER_00]: It comes up in one way or another.
- 14:11[SPEAKER_00]: And I think people have a hard time understanding just how much these institutions want to bet on it or they want to believe in it.
- 14:20[SPEAKER_00]: They hear about it.
- 14:21[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think it goes over,
- 14:23[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of people's heads initially because it's not happening instantly, right?
- 14:29[SPEAKER_00]: It's not something like, oh, to anization hasn't been finished in the year two years, three years.
- 14:33[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not like that.
- 14:34[SPEAKER_00]: I think things again move a little bit slower.
- 14:36[SPEAKER_00]: And so that,
- 14:40[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, maybe makes people have less conviction in it, because I guess it doesn't fully adopt it yet.
- 14:44[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, well, that's not how traditional finance works.
- 14:47[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very slow process over there.
- 14:49[SPEAKER_00]: And over here in crypto, we're used to things moving out of a million miles an hour.
- 14:53[SPEAKER_00]: So we adopt things really fast.
- 14:55[SPEAKER_00]: We don't things really fast.
- 14:56[SPEAKER_00]: We also break things really fast, which is why we get some volatility in the price action and you get some pretty big market moving events.
- 15:04[SPEAKER_00]: But
- 15:05[SPEAKER_00]: You know, to your point from earlier, I want to talk about some of these ETS and ETPs because you've seen a big push to get staking into all these different traditional financial products in relation to Ethereum, but, you know, even other products that you can stake.
- 15:22[SPEAKER_00]: I know the wisdom tree-staked Ethereum ETP is a big one for you all because that's actually using
- 15:34[SPEAKER_00]: involved like a 450 due diligence questions and like a year's time or something which is just a lot that goes into it and so what that shows to me is that like
- 15:46[SPEAKER_00]: Number one, they care.
- 15:47[SPEAKER_00]: This spending a lot of time effort resources to make sure that this stuff works for them as like a major institution.
- 15:54[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you're talking about multi-billion, sometimes multi-chilling dollar asset managers that are looking into this stuff.
- 16:00[SPEAKER_00]: And then the other one, just in regards to Ethereum staking as a whole, was, you know, Grayscale, right?
- 16:06[SPEAKER_00]: Grayscale distributed a, it's Ethereum staking rewards directly to ETF holders for the first time in US history just a little while ago.
- 16:15[SPEAKER_00]: And so you see this process from the institutional side getting increasingly more involved and interested in the staking side.
- 16:26[SPEAKER_00]: Any thoughts on any of that?
- 16:29[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well it kind of goes back to like what you mentioned there were like retail ones things now and institutions it just takes so long like
- 16:38[SPEAKER_01]: And with the Wissantry example, so we are definitely speaking to them for probably a year, year and a half, 350 questions, I think maybe 450 questions, but that's the kind of level of detail you have to get into.
- 16:52[SPEAKER_01]: So, like getting them comfortable with the smart contract risk, again, how do you manage events if there is a slashing incident?
- 17:00[SPEAKER_01]: Anything in everything you can think of right down to the what you do for training outside.
- 17:05[SPEAKER_01]: That's the level of granularity these guys get into.
- 17:08[SPEAKER_01]: Because ultimately,
- 17:10[SPEAKER_01]: It's its reputation on risk, like these are tier one public institutions and their clients trust them tremendously.
- 17:18[SPEAKER_01]: So wisdom tree in order is have to go through a significant amount of DD if they're to launch any asset.
- 17:25[SPEAKER_01]: And like I'm incredibly proud to work together with the wisdom tree team there, they're fantastic at what they do.
- 17:30[SPEAKER_01]: And they definitely kept us on our toes, they are incredibly intelligent questions.
- 17:35[SPEAKER_01]: And
- 17:35[SPEAKER_01]: just to be able to work with them and see how they think about launching a product was incredibly interesting.
- 17:40[SPEAKER_01]: So the wisdom tree product is the first Lido State-Death E.
- 17:47[SPEAKER_01]: TPP globally, and it was also the first product to be a 100% state.
- 17:52[SPEAKER_01]: So again, the context of that would be most of, or all of the order, natively state ETPs in Europe, they're typically on a state between 50 and 60%.
- 18:02[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason for that is the keeper proportion, liquid for attentions when people want to get out of our position.
- 18:07[SPEAKER_01]: Well, because state, the so liquid, you're actually able to offer a 100% state product.
- 18:12[SPEAKER_01]: which is far better if you're an investor because instead of you only getting half the reward rate with LIDO and the wisdom tree product you're able to get the full 3% let's say.
- 18:20[SPEAKER_01]: Stay tuned for the rewards rate.
- 18:23[SPEAKER_00]: I think about 25% of Ethereum is steak through right now at the time of us making this.
- 18:29[SPEAKER_00]: Would you expect that number to go up as institutions get more involved?
- 18:34[SPEAKER_00]: Because from my viewpoint, again, like we've talked about, institutions tend to have more of a longer term mindset and approach to this.
- 18:42[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they're gonna keep some on hand for redemption and other things like that.
- 18:47[SPEAKER_00]: But I would imagine that as more of these asset managers
- 18:52[SPEAKER_00]: get in and they want to offer stake teeth.
- 18:55[SPEAKER_00]: You'd imagine that that probably attracts a more long-term investor as opposed to a shorter-term trader.
- 19:01[SPEAKER_00]: And so if that's the case, then you would have to think that the amount of stake to theory in terms of overall percent would likely go up.
- 19:08[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that would be a net positive for the whole ETH ecosystem.
- 19:12[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't know.
- 19:14[SPEAKER_00]: Am I looking at that the right way?
- 19:16[SPEAKER_01]: I think your advice, like my view is like, there's no reason to keep on stake teeth.
- 19:21[SPEAKER_01]: like you should be staking it.
- 19:23[SPEAKER_01]: It is the risk for you right.
- 19:25[SPEAKER_01]: And we have again a ton of clients they view that the exact same way.
- 19:29[SPEAKER_01]: Like why would you get into an ETP or an E-type of fund where 20, 40, 50% whatever may be is left on state.
- 19:36[SPEAKER_01]: Because ultimately that's affecting the rewards that you're getting.
- 19:40[SPEAKER_01]: like it's very easy for me to put two products in front of a client and say one will give you the full 3% stake in rewards rate, the other will give you 1.5 which are you realistically going to choose, especially if the other product is heavily diversified?
- 19:54[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, King, we really appreciate your time here.
- 19:57[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for speaking with us and going through all this.
- 20:00[SPEAKER_00]: If people want to learn more about what you're doing at LIDO, they want to get involved in liquid-staking or maybe they just want to follow either your sulfur or LIDO on the journey.
- 20:10[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, so if you want to reach out to me, it's Keen Gilbert and LinkedIn and that Keen under score, Gilbert, on X.
- 20:16[SPEAKER_01]: And then from Lido, you can find that on Lido.fi and the web size and all the social links will be there.
- 20:22[SPEAKER_00]: Perfect.
- 20:22[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Keen, thank you for joining us and we appreciate your time and men will have to have you back soon as things progress.
- 20:28[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much.