RIADeFiPublished by Ketju Research
Not approved · ETH staking

Ketju memo: StakeWise V3

Not approvedPublished by Ketju Research

This memo sets out what the holder owns, who controls it, how holders could lose money, and whether a position can be sold. The advisor decides any client action and amount. Not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice.

Summary

Ketju does not approve StakeWise V3 (osETH): one vault holds roughly 40 to 45% of all protocol stake, and StakeWise Labs itself ran 45.85% of that vault's validators at the last verified count (LlamaRisk, 2024-06). StakeWise sells operator choice, but its stake is more concentrated than Rocket Pool's, which is spread across roughly 2,000 independent operators. We used the same test as Ketju's review of Ethereum liquid staking: how stake is actually spread across validators. StakeWise V3 has run on Ethereum mainnet since 2023-11-28 and held $702.9M of TVL on 2026-08-13, against $0.99B for Rocket Pool and $17.9B for Lido. Its engineering history is strong. Across five years of V2 and V3 we found no protocol exploit, no known slashing and no osETH liquidation. Three more findings each block approval on their own. We cannot identify the operator of the second-largest vault, which holds 75,533 ETH, about ten percent of protocol stake. The docs describe a DAO power to raise a vault's osETH mint cap to 99.99% LTV. An oracle set of 11 permissioned entities sets the osETH exchange rate, and its V3 source code was private at the last public review.

Review triggers

  • Ketju will review StakeWise again only if every condition below passes together; a failure at another Ethereum staking provider does not stand in for StakeWise evidence
  • A current, reproducible on-chain snapshot shows Genesis below 30% of protocol stake, StakeWise Labs below 20% of Genesis validators, and the Obol migration complete
  • Every vault above 5% of protocol stake publishes its operator identity, fee, admin, upgrade path and realized validator distribution
  • No live vault uses the 99.99% osETH mint tier unless the executed governance vote, collateral buffer and liquidation test are independently approved
  • The live V3 oracle implementation, source, signer set and exact voting threshold are published and mapped to the deployed contracts
  • Every live Genesis, osETH, oracle and optional v4 contract maps to an audit report we have read, and a proposed-size redemption and secondary sale each execute below 50 basis points

Facts

Verdict
Not approved
Type
ETH staking
Chains examined
Ethereum
Instruments
OSETH
Reviewed
Last confirmed

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