The Lido Liquid Staking (LDO) protocol has set a May target for staking Ethereum (stETH) withdrawals.
The protocol explained that its schedule was affected by ongoing audits of its V2 platform.
Lido spent $1.2 million on seven audits
In a March 14 Twitter thread, the DeFi protocol said it had spent $1.2 million on seven audits of the Lido V2 platform. These audits are intended to correct any vulnerabilities that impede the performance of the protocol.
“$1.2 million has been spent on 7 V2 audits, the results of which will be made publicly available upon completion.”
The protocol tweeted that it has identified and fixed several issues highlighted by these audits, and its updated contracts are being tested on the Zhejiang testnet.
Due to these audits and fixes, the withdrawal schedule for Ethereum staked on their platform has been affected. As per the protocol, its update has been moved to next week, after which there will be a 3-4 week gap to deploy and test the validator outputs.
Pool saying:
“stETH withdrawals will not be released on the mainnet until all audits related to the on-chain code are completed (expected by the end of April). Adding another 2 weeks as a margin of safety, the current expectation is for mainnet withdrawals to be active by mid-May.”
Goerli testnet processes stETH withdrawals
Meanwhile, the Shapella fork of the Goerli testnet occurred on March 14, allowing validators to retire their asset.
The hard fork occurred at epoch 162304 around 10:26 UTC, but was not finalized until 15 epochs later due to low validator participation.
Ethereum developer Tim Beiko blamed the delayed completion on Goerli ETH’s lack of commercial value, saying the Ethereum mainnet fork should be seamless. Beiko aggregate:
“Another possible cause is the large number of withdrawal credential changes processed right at the fork. Since this is the first time people have been able to submit those changes, there are many more that need to be processed, which can lead to block/certification loss on low-resource nodes.”
Meanwhile, crypto investor fears that the Shanghai update will add to the selling pressure on ETH have eased. The Ethereum Foundation said that the update limits the number of validators who can remove their participation deposits and rewards between 1125 and 2200 per day.
“The number of activations scales with the number of active validators.”
On top of that, validators need to manually update their credential prefixes to 0x01 and set their preferred withdrawal address.
These processes would limit withdrawals to around 60,000 ETH per day, ensuring that it takes several months before all staked ETH can be withdrawn.
