Yup, anyone paying attention knew this was inevitable. It's only set to get worse due to the centralising pressures of costless production, staking derivatives and MEV. Wouldn't be surprised to see Lido hold > 50% this time next year.
I'm seeing so much confusion from ethereans on this, too... they keep equating staking pools to mining pools, which have similar distributions. They don't understand that switching pools is trivial (see Poolin), or that pools don't have custody over the ASICs. What exactly can they do if Coinbase is ordered to stop paying yield? Fuck all. And even if the code to withdraw was written (which could be years away), there's no guarantee that Coinbase would let them. We know how frequently exchanges blow up.
Ethereum is destined for state capture. Unfortunately for now, we'll have to brace ourselves for the monumental wave of ESG bullshit coming our way.
I wrote a Twitter thread yesterday around this comparison. It really does feel like people forget about how important nodes are because they can't stop thinking about miners
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