Why Is Lido Moving $16B in Staked ETH to Pectra-Era Validators?

Liquid staking app Lido has started moving the bulk of its staked ETH onto Ethereum’s larger post-Pectra validators, and the operators running them are now putting up their own capital for the first time.

The main idea is that Lido’s curated node operators stop running thousands of identical 32 ETH validators and collapse them into far fewer, much larger ones.

$16B in ETH Moved Moreover, Ethereum’s Pectra hardfork, activated in May 2025, raised the maximum effective balance per validator to 2,048 tokens through what are known as 0x02 credentials.

Curated Module v2 is the piece of Lido Core that now supports them natively (Phase 1 went live on Monday). The scope is the Curated Module itself, the permissioned operator layer that has handled well over 90% of Lido’s staked ETH since the protocol launched in 2020.