Lido Institutional is a new liquidity staking service from Lido Finance that is made for significant customers like exchanges, custodians, and asset managers.
The Lido Institutional middleware solution “combines the reliability and security necessary for enterprise-grade staking with the liquidity and utility required for diverse institutional strategies,” as Lido wrote in a post on X.
Lido is the most significant liquid staking protocol at the moment, and it holds more than 28.5% of all staked Ether. This share has gone down from 32% in December, but the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) made it clear in its news that it still represents a significant portion of institutional customers.
Lido Faces SEC Scrutiny
Lido Institutional was launched after working together with infrastructure companies. The liquidity staking service teamed up with Taurus in February, and at the EthCC event in July, Lido and Fireblocks announced that they would be working together. On its website, Lido Institutional lists both companies as places where it can store its funds.
Lido was founded in 2020 and is run by the Lido DAO. It provides a liquid staking option. It lets people stake any amount of ETH in a pool and get benefits without having to stake at least 32 ETH directly on the network. Lido Staked ETH (STETH) users can also do other things with their tokens. The liquidity staking service takes 10% of staking rewards and splits it between node owners and the DAO’s bank account.
Based on a lawsuit filed against Consensys in June, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that Lido and its competitor Rocket Pool are selling securities that have not been registered with the SEC.
These investment plans have not been registered with the SEC by either Lido or Rocket Pool, the SEC said. The SEC also said that Consensys’ MetaMask platform helped with transactions through the Liquidity staking service and Rocket Pool, working as a go-between for unregistered securities deals. It is clear that the SEC does not agree with Lido or Rocket Pool, even though it has not taken direct action against them.
