EEA Taps Lido to Unlock Liquid Staking for Institutional ETH Treasuries

TL;DR:

• Lido received an allocation from the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance treasury, which now holds stETH as a liquid asset.
• The EEA chose Lido’s liquid staking to avoid the operational costs of native staking and validator entry and exit queues.
• stETH is available through custodians such as Bitgo, Fireblocks and Copper, facilitating its integration into existing institutional workflows.

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) deployed part of its institutional treasury through Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, and received in return stETH, the liquid representation of staked ETH. The EEA is a key player in fostering liquid staking adoption within the institutional sector centered on Ethereum.

Institutions holding ETH on their balance sheets face a practical dilemma: leaving that ETH unstaked means forfeiting rewards, but native staking demands validator infrastructure, specific custody processes, internal risk controls and exposure to the network’s entry and exit queues. Currently, the entry queue to the validator set sits at around 56 days, while the exit queue approaches 7 days plus an additional delay of nearly 8 days for the rewards sweep.

stETH: Treasury Infrastructure

Liquid staking on Lido resolves that problem differently. ETH participates in staking while the resulting stETH remains liquid and operable within existing workflows. Redwan Meslem, executive director of the EEA, summed it up in three decision criteria for a treasury: the ability to exit when needed, compatibility with the current custody stack, and prior validation by regulated institutions. According to Meslem, stETH answers affirmatively to all three.

The availability of stETH on platforms such as Bitgo, Fireblocks and Copper supports that argument. Treasury teams can operate in liquid staking without abandoning the systems and processes they already use. WisdomTree’s European product on staked ETH and the use of stETH as collateral in the DeFi market strengthen the asset’s reach within the onchain markets infrastructure.

LIDO: From Observation to Operation

Kean Gilbert, head of institutional relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, noted that the EEA’s decision proves there is a shift within the institutional ecosystem from observation toward the operational use of Ethereum.

The public visibility of protocol data, governance records and node operator performance reports complete the criteria that treasury teams need to evaluate infrastructure before committing to it.