Lido V3 & Nansen: Transparent Ethereum Staking with stVaults
Product Overview
Nansen is a leading onchain analytics and data infrastructure provider. Following its 2024 acquisition of StakeWithUs, Nansen expanded into staking services across multiple blockchains and has since established itself as a top-tier validator by assets under management, delegator growth, and breadth of supported networks.
In 2026, Nansen will launch its first Ethereum staking product built on the Lido V3 stVaults framework. The product provides users with direct exposure to a specific validator, enabling transparent, onchain attribution of staking performance while earning Ethereum staking rewards. In addition, participants may earn Nansen Points and other permissionless incentives layered on top of core staking yield.
Nansen’s staking participants span retail users, DeFi-native operators, funds, and institutions, all of whom expect strong operational guarantees and verifiable performance. Delegators choose Nansen for its secure infrastructure and consistently high validator performance, and increasingly for a staking experience that introduces additional permissionless incentives without degrading underlying risk or operational integrity.
Initial Approach & Limitations
Traditional Ethereum staking architectures abstract away validator-level performance, offering limited transparency and no native mechanism for clean attribution of rewards, penalties, or execution behaviour. At the same time, redeploying staked assets into secondary yield strategies typically introduces additional custodial, operational, and reporting complexity.
As Nansen’s staking business scaled, this created a structural limitation: the inability to offer validator-specific exposure while preserving composability and optional liquidity. Users seeking transparent attribution and additional utility were forced to choose between staking simplicity and advanced yield workflows.
Lido V3 stVaults address these limitations by enabling staking products that are explicitly tied to a defined validator operator, while still supporting the minting of stETH and integration with additive DeFi strategies.
Why Lido V3 & stVaults?
Decentralisation & Ecosystem Alignment
For Nansen, decentralised staking infrastructure ensures that rewards and value creation flow back into the ecosystem, supporting permissionless participation and transparent economics.
For Lido DAO, the GOOSE-3 roadmap emphasises a permissionless validator marketplace, a diverse operator set, and stronger alignment with Ethereum’s decentralisation objectives. By building on Lido V3 stVaults, Nansen directly supports these goals while enabling validator-level value capture and yield optimisation.
Protocol Resilience & Trustworthiness
The stVault architecture, combined with Lido’s established security track record, extensive audits, and transparent governance, provides a robust foundation for institutional-grade staking. When paired with Nansen’s data infrastructure, analytics capabilities, and operational credibility, the result is a product that allocators can independently evaluate, trust, and integrate into existing operational frameworks.
Composability & Transparency
stVaults allow Nansen to operate a dedicated validator (or defined validator set) where staking rewards, execution performance, and operational behaviour are fully attributable at the operator level. Within this structure, the vault can mint stETH against staked ETH, subject to protocol-defined reserve constraints, and deploy it into additive yield strategies.
This model is particularly well suited for operators outside Lido’s genesis validator set and provides Nansen with a scalable foundation for building additional staking products, strategy layers, and integrations directly on top of the vault architecture.
Integration & Security Approach
Nansen’s integration follows the separation-of-roles model defined in Lido V3. Under this structure, Nansen acts as both the stVault Owner and the Node Operator, retaining responsibility for vault configuration, parameter management, governance, and validator operations.
Validator signing keys are secured using HashiCorp Vault and accessed exclusively via Web3Signer. Keys are never stored in cleartext at rest or exposed to the application layer. Access is governed by strict role-based permissions, IP allow-listing, and enforced segregation of duties.
Validator infrastructure runs on hardened bare-metal servers in Europe, protected by firewall enforcement and private networking via WireGuard. Nansen maintains continuous monitoring for proposer performance, missed duties, slashing risks, signing anomalies, and overall node health. Operational and signing logs are centrally aggregated to support auditability, incident response, and post-event review.
Expected Outcome
By integrating Lido V3 stVaults, Nansen establishes a secure and transparent foundation for its next generation of Ethereum staking products. The stVault architecture advances Lido’s decentralisation roadmap by expanding the operator set, while allowing Nansen to operate at parity with established validators on performance, reliability, and security.
Where Nansen differentiates is in everything built around the validator: optional permissionless rewards, Nansen Points, industry-leading onchain analytics, and AI-native integration with trading workflows. Together, stVaults and Nansen’s product layer enable a more complete staking experience—one that preserves Ethereum’s core staking incentives while supporting richer, modern workflows for both advanced retail users and institutional allocators.
Looking ahead, Nansen will continue working closely with the Lido ecosystem, both as an active governance participant and as a product builder, contributing a data-driven and transparent perspective to the evolution of decentralised staking infrastructure.