Lido DAO announces official wstETH on Base

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Lido DAO, Lido’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), launched Wrapped Staked Ether (wstETH) on Coinbase’s Base network on November 8, allowing for trading and utilization in Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

“Today, Lido DAO contributors are pleased to present the launch of wstETH on Base. Led by KyberSwap, Beefy and Superbridge, the availability of the wstETH Base bridge opens up the benefits of staked ETH to the Base ecosystem, further enhancing Ethereum liquidity and stability,” said Lido.

Lido said the availability of wstETH on Base builds upon the success achieved in previous launches on Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon and Cosmos. Base, launched in August, has solidified its position as a prominent Ethereum Layer 2 solution with significant user growth, distinctive applications and a thriving developer community.

“Lido is on @BuildOnBase. You can now bridge your staked ETH to Base,” said LidoDAO in a social media post.

Marin Tvrdić, a contributor to Lido DAO, expressed that the presence of wstETH on Base represents a significant achievement in the effort to expand wstETH adoption.

“Expanding the protocol’s network of compatible L2s bridges the gap between scalability limitations and the growing demand for decentralized staking to benefit the broader Ethereum ecosystem,” Tvrdić said.

While this deployment had backing from Lido DAO members, not all wstETH versions have gained official acceptance. LayerZero introduced a wstETH version for Avalanche, BNB Chain and Scroll, which faced criticism for being considered “proprietary” by various protocols. The status of this version is still under discussion by the DAO, and no vote has been conducted on it as of now.

Nine protocols raise concerns about LayerZero’s wstETH token

In a joint statement on October 27, Connext, Chainsafe, Sygma, LiFi, Socket, Hashi, Across, Celer and Router criticized LayerZero’s token standard for wstETH, labeling it as a “vendor-locked proprietary standard” and asserting that it restricts the flexibility of token issuers.

The protocols said in their joint message that LayerZero’s new token is a “proprietary version of wstETH for Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Scroll, not endorsed by the Lido DAO.” They described it as being tied to “provider-specific systems” controlled by the bridges implementing them, which poses “hard-to-measure systemic risks” for projects. They recommended using the xERC-20 token standard for bridging stETH instead of LayerZero’s.

On October 25, LayerZero introduced wstETH on BNB Chain, Avalanche and Scroll. Before this launch, stETH had not been available on these three networks.

Since any protocol can create a bridged token, LayerZero launched wstETH without needing approval from Lido’s governing body, the Lido DAO.

Furthermore, both BNB Chain and LayerZero announced the token’s launch on social media, with BNB Chain mentioning the Lido development team in its announcement. Later, members of the Lido DAO claimed that these actions were an attempt to mislead users into thinking that the new token had support from the DAO.

On the day LayerZero introduced wstETH, it suggested that the Lido DAO should endorse this new token as the official stETH version on the three new networks. It even offered to hand over control of the token’s protocol to the Lido DAO, giving up its administrative authority.

In reaction, several Lido DAO members expressed concerns that this move was aimed to pressure the DAO into accepting the proposal.

“There appears to have been a coordinated marketing effort between Avalanche, BNB, and LayerZero with a series of twitter posts and slick videos implying that the Lido DAO has already officially accepted the OFT standard,” Lido DAO member Hart Lambur posted to the Lido Dao forum.

In response, LayerZero claimed that its wstETH token protocol is secure and decentralized, saying, “The omnichain fungible-token (OFT) standard is a multiaudited, open-source set of reference contracts used by more than 75 projects to enable native, horizontally composable transfers between layer 1s and between layer 2s. More than $3 billion in value has been transferred by contracts that have integrated OFT.”

LayerZero emphasized that wstETH developers have the inherent capability to independently choose their validation layer and integrate additional bridges within the unalterable LayerZero framework.