DeFi liquid staking protocol Lido Finance plans to end support for its services on the Polkadot and Kusama networks.
A proposal posted to Lido’s governance forum on Tuesday presented a structured timeline for sunsetting liquid staking on the two ecosystems.
Kosta Zherebtsov, chief product officer at Lido’s partner developer firm MixBytes, said that his team would no longer develop and technically support Lido on Polkadot and Kusama by August 2023.
“We intend to make the sunsetting process as straightforward and seamless as possible for our users and partners who have supported us,” said Zherebtsov.
He attributed the decision to market conditions, protocol growth, limited capacity and alignment of priorities.
As per the timeline, new staking deposits into Lido on Polkadot and Kusama would be stopped as early as March 15, while rewards and redemptions would come to a halt in June. In the following month, all funds would be relocated to parachains and services would be officially terminated by Aug. 1.
MixBytes is seeking $20,000 per month from the LidoDAO to support technical maintenance efforts for the five months leading up to this date.
“We continue to believe in and support Polkadot’s potential as a blockchain network and remain dedicated to pursuing development and contributing to the ecosystem,” said Zherebtsov.
Polkadot (DOT) is an open-source multichain protocol that facilitates blockchain interoperability. Kusama (KSM), often described as Polkadot’s “wild cousin,” is a standalone network which works as a sandbox environment for developers to test early versions of their projects in an environment with real economic value.
After Ethereum, Polkadot and Kusama are the leading blockchains in terms of development activity. Meanwhile, Lido is DeFi’s largest protocol with around $9 billion worth of assets locked.
At the time of writing $22.46 million DOT and $2.37 million KSM were staked through Lido, as per data from DeFiLlama.
