Bitwise collaborates with Lido on Ethereum validator consolidation in landmark CMv2 rollout

Bitwise has carried out the first validator consolidation on Lido Core and is now operating as a node operator under Lido’s new Curated Module v2. The milestone represents one of the most consequential structural upgrades to Ethereum’s staking layer since the Merge. The consolidation is part of a broader migration that aims to restructure approximately 8.4 million staked ETH, worth roughly $16.5B at the time of the announcement, from legacy validators into a leaner, more efficient architecture. What CMv2 actually changes To understand why this matters, you need to know how Ethereum validators have worked until now. Under the old system, each validator was capped at 32 ETH in effective balance. That meant staking operations managing large pools of ETH needed thousands of individual validators, each one generating its own attestation messages every epoch. Ethereum’s Pectra hard fork, which went live in May 2025, changed the rules. Through EIP-7251, it introduced a new validator type, called 0x02, that can handle up to 2,048 ETH in effective balance. That’s 64 times the previous limit per validator. Lido’s CMv2 migration takes advantage of this by consolidating legacy 0x01 validators ...