🎙 Hasu: Lido's Staked ETH Poses No Systemic Risk to DeFi

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Hasu, strategic advisor at Lido, strategy lead at Flashbots, MakerDAO delegate, researcher at Paradigm and host of the Uncommon Core Podcast. That’s a lot of titles and it goes to show just how deeply plugged into DeFi and crypto this anon researcher is.   In this episode, we’ll focus on Lido, as it’s become a crucial piece of infrastructure for Ethereum. 

Lido currently has the highest share of deposits in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake chain, at 32%, significantly larger than any other party. This is a growing concern in terms of security and it’s prompted an ongoing discussion on the protocol’s governance forum. Hasu talks about how big a risk this is, and what checks and balances can be introduced. Also, in the past few weeks, staked ETH has started trading below ETH. Hasu discusses what the potential outcomes of this are, and how investors can take advantage of this situation.

Lastly, this last cycle has prompted a lot of experimentation around DAOs and governance, with much room for improvement. Speaking from his own experience with Lido and Maker, Hasu discusses his key learnings and provides his take on how DAOs can become a truly better model for organizing businesses.

Podcast audio and video was edited by Daniel Flynn and Alp Gasimov. Transcript was edited by Samuel Haig.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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👀 Only paid subscribers have access to the full interview transcript below.