Demex Daily #174: Lido Partners with Mellow and Symbiotic to Strengthen DeFi Presence

What’s Interesting Today:

Lido, confronted by EigenLayer's growing presence in Ethereum DeFi staking, has introduced "Restaking Vaults" in collaboration with Mellow Finance and Symbiotic. This move is part of Lido's reGOOSE strategy and the Lido Alliance, aiming to reinforce the importance of stETH in the DeFi space. Mellow Finance provides vaults where users can deposit stETH, which curators will deploy in various protocols to generate extra returns. These vaults offer personalized risk and investment strategies, unlike traditional models that use a standard approach. Supported by Lido’s primary investor Paradigm, Symbiotic facilitates these vaults to accept any ERC-20 token, providing a broader range of asset acceptance compared to EigenLayer's more limited options. This initiative seeks to strengthen Lido’s market position by maximizing stETH's established liquidity and network benefits in the face of EigenLayer’s increasing influence.

Cardano is preparing for its Voltaire upgrade, the final stage in its roadmap to achieve a fully decentralized blockchain ecosystem, expected to occur this June. Co-founder Charles Hoskinson stated that the Cardano Node is upgrading to version 9.0, which is necessary for the forthcoming hard fork marking the transition from the Basho to the Voltaire era. This upgrade will shift control from the IOHK development firm to the community. The Voltaire phase will introduce advanced blockchain governance features, including annual budgets and a treasury, empowering ADA token holders to vote on development proposals within the Cardano ecosystem. Despite these developments, ADA tokens have seen a slight decline, performing better than many major tokens.