Lido has migrated its first Lido Core validator to 0x02 withdrawal credentials, beginning a consolidation of about 8.4 million staked ETH from its legacy Curated Module into Curated Module v2. Lido's DAO approved the new module in July, and September brought the first live consolidations.

The migration is set to merge more than 265,000 existing validators into roughly 4,000 larger ones. Ethereum's Pectra upgrade made this possible by allowing a single validator to hold far more than 32 ETH and compound rewards on the full balance.

If completed as planned, the process would reduce the number of validators across the entire Ethereum network by around a third, from about 880,000 to about 628,000. The share of staked ETH secured by compounding validators would rise from about 32% to about 52%.

Fewer validators means less duplicated work and lighter messaging for the network, and lower operating overhead for node operators. The migration will take time because consolidations queue on the beacon chain. Its pace, and any operational problems, will be the practical measures to follow.