Lido expects staked Ethereum withdrawals in May

Liquid staking protocol Lido (LDO) has set a May target for staked Ethereum (stETH) withdrawals.

The protocol explained that its timeline was affected by the 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 aim to fix any vulnerabilities that impede the protocol’s performance.

“$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 timeline for staked Ethereum on its platform has been affected. According to the protocol, its upgrade has been shifted to next week, after which there will be a 3 – 4 weeks gap to implement and test validator exits.

Lido said:

“stETH withdrawals won’t launch on mainnet until all audits concerning on-chain code are completed (expected end of April). Adding another 2 weeks as a safety margin, the current expectation is for mainnet withdrawals to be live around mid-May.”

Goerli testnet processes stETH withdrawals

Meanwhile, the Goerli testnet’s Shapella hard fork occurred on March 14, allowing validators to withdraw their asset.

The hard fork happened at epoch 162304 around 10:26 UTC but was not finalized until 15 epochs after because of low validators’ participation.

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko blamed the delayed finalization on Goerli ETH’s lack of commercial value, saying the Ethereum mainnet fork should be seamless. Beiko added:

“Another possible cause is the large # of withdrawal credential changes processed right at the fork. Given this is the first time people can submit those changes, there are many more that need to be processed, which can lead to missed blocks/attestations on low-resource nodes.”

Meanwhile, crypto investors’ fear that the Shanghai upgrade would increase the selling pressure on ETH has been mitigated. The Ethereum Foundation said the upgrade limits the number of validators that can remove their staking deposits and rewards to between 1,125 to 2,200 daily.

“The amount of activations scales with the number of active validators.”

Besides that, validators are required to manually update their credential prefixes to 0x01 and set their preferred withdrawal address.

These processes would limit withdrawals to about 60,000 ETH daily, ensuring that it takes several months before all staked ETH can be withdrawn.