Lido proposes Staking Router v3 accounting and deposit architecture

What happened

Lido published LIP-35 for review, proposing Staking Router v3 as the foundational upgrade for supporting validators with effective balances up to 2,048 ETH.

What changed

If approved and executed, Lido would replace count-based consensus-layer accounting with balance-based accounting, add proof-gated validator top-ups, introduce a consolidation pipeline, reserve buffered ETH for consensus-layer deposits, and add bounded Easy Track control over module share limits.

What did not change

The June 3 record was a design and implementation proposal awaiting a vote. It did not establish a mainnet upgrade, final deployed addresses, completed audits, or an operative change to stETH accounting or withdrawals during the June event window.

Confirmed

• The proposal supports validators with effective balances between 32 and 2,048 ETH.
• The proposed accounting model tracks validator balances rather than multiplying validator counts by 32 ETH.
• A proposed TopUpGateway would require on-chain Merkle proofs of consensus-layer state.
• The proposed consolidation pipeline would support migration from Curated Module v1 to Curated Module v2.
• The proposal would protect part of buffered ETH for consensus-layer deposits and add a bounded Easy Track factory for module share limits.

Still open

• The proposal's vote and execution outcomes after the June event boundary.
• Final audits, deployed contract addresses, parameters, pausers, proof assumptions, and module-share bounds.
• How the deposit reserve would interact with withdrawal demand under stress.
• Whether implementation testing demonstrated correct totalPooledEther and reward accounting for large validators.

What it means for an advisor

• Review the Lido memo's validator-accounting, withdrawal-liquidity, and module-allocation assumptions before treating Staking Router v3 as operative.
• Verify final contracts, audits, governance execution, reserve parameters, and proof-verification controls on-chain.
• Do not infer that the proposed architecture improves safety or that any Ketju approval changed.