Lido has unveiled NEST, an automated LDO buyback mechanism that ties protocol revenue more directly to token accumulation. Under the framework, once Lido’s annualized staking revenue rises above a $40 million baseline, 50% of the excess will be allocated to NEST and used to buy LDO automatically through CoW Swap. The system starts with a daily repurchase cap of $50,000 and a rolling 365-day cap of $10 million, calculated on a cumulative basis. If protocol revenue falls short and the running balance turns negative, buybacks will stop automatically until future revenue restores the surplus. At launch, NEST will run in Treasury mode, meaning purchased LDO will go to the DAO treasury rather than being burned. Lido also said the mechanism could later switch to an LP mode through DAO voting, where half of the funds would buy LDO and the other half would be converted into wstETH before both are deposited into a Curve liquidity pool. Backtesting by Lido showed that applying the mechanism to roughly $94.18 million in total reward revenue from 2024 to 2025 would have produced about $7.09 million in cumulative buybacks.

Foresight News’ latest weekly Web3 roundup pulls together a dense mix of stories that shaped industry conversation over the past several days. At the center were the death of Quantum Fintech Group founder Harry Yeh in Paraguay, a fresh count showing that more than 300 Web3 projects have gone quiet over roughly 588 days, and renewed attention on Li Lin’s return through Avenir Group-backed UMX. Bitcoin also saw an old fault line reopen after BIP-110 triggered a chain split and cost Luke Dashjr his BIP editor role. The security section was just as busy. A DeFi whale lost roughly $25 million to $26 million in minutes, Trezor disclosed a ShipMonk-related data breach affecting close to 14,000 customers, Harmony was hit by an exploit that expanded ONE supply, and ZachXBT detailed a social-engineering scam tied to at least $5 million in losses. Foresight also reviewed Bybit’s effort to recover funds from the 2025 theft attributed to Lazarus Group, with recovered and frozen assets totaling about $78.9 million so far. On the project side, Vitalik Buterin’s updated Ethereum Strawmap elevated privacy and post-quantum security, Justin Drake said Ethereum would drop Poseidon at L1, Bitwise continued launching products while shutting eight ETFs and cutting staff, and Trump Media & Technology Group showed how far it has moved beyond a pure social-media business.

Lido DAO has published a breakdown of its NEST, or Network Economic Support Tokenomics, framework, a mechanism designed to connect protocol revenue with LDO token value through automated onchain buybacks. Under the initial setup, once staking revenue rises above a baseline of $40 million on an annualized basis, or about $109,000 per day, 50% of the excess revenue will be used to repurchase LDO through CoW Swap. The model also includes a daily cap of $50,000 and a 365-day cumulative cap of $10 million. At launch, NEST will run in a treasury-only mode, meaning purchased LDO will go directly into the DAO treasury. Lido said the DAO may later switch to an LP mode through an onchain vote if market conditions are suitable. In that version, half of the funds would be used to buy LDO, while the other half would be converted into wstETH and deployed as liquidity on Curve. Lido said NEST is a core part of its broader LDO value alignment strategy. The protocol described the design as transparent, adjustable and free of manual intervention, with safeguards including daily funding limits, governance-based parameter changes, oracle protections and an emergency pause. Based on backtesting using 2024 to 2025 revenue data, Lido said the model would have supported about $7.09 million in LDO buybacks, in line with its target spending scale.

Lido DAO has published an overview of NEST, short for Network Economic Support Tokenomics, a mechanism designed to connect protocol revenue with the value of the LDO token through onchain automation. Under the framework, when revenue from Lido’s staking business rises above a preset benchmark, part of the excess income will be swapped into LDO via CoW Swap, creating a recurring buyback flow. The stated goal is to give LDO holders a more direct way to share in the protocol’s growth. According to the initial parameters released by Lido DAO, the NEST revenue benchmark is set at an annualized $40 million, or about $109,000 per day. Of revenue above that threshold, 50% will be allocated to LDO buybacks. The mechanism also includes a daily buyback cap of $50,000 and a rolling 365-day cap of $10 million. Buybacks are set to run daily through a permissionless onchain process. At launch, NEST will begin in Treasury-only mode, with purchased LDO sent directly to the DAO treasury. Lido DAO said the system could later switch, through an onchain vote and if market conditions are suitable, to an LP mode in which half the funds would buy LDO and the other half would be converted into wstETH to provide liquidity on Curve.

A DeFi whale lost roughly $25 million to $26 million after multiple wallets were drained within 15 minutes early on Aug. 13, according to Scam Sniffer and on-chain tracking cited by Foresight News. The stolen assets included DAI, WBTC, aUSDC, LDO, sUSDe, and native ETH. Analyst Ember said three wallets were affected, including one address with no prior token approval history, a detail that suggests the incident may have involved direct private key compromise rather than a standard approval-phishing attack. On-chain records show the victim’s main wallet and a related address moved assets to a newly created recipient wallet around 5:05 on Aug. 13. Within about an hour, tokens including WBTC, cbBTC, LDO, USDS, CRV, and sUSDe were swapped into DAI and ETH. Of that amount, 20 million DAI was sent to a downstream address labeled by Arkham as a separate entity and had not moved again as of publication. Other ETH was split into batches, routed through smart contracts, swapped to USDC on Uniswap, sent to Circle’s Token Minter, bridged to Arbitrum through CCTP, and then deposited into Hyperliquid. The same victim had already suffered a phishing loss of about $24.23 million in September 2023 after signing a malicious increaseAllowance transaction.

A draft Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-8363, has triggered one of the sharpest governance fights in the network’s recent history by proposing a gradual burn of validator issuance rewards as the staking ratio approaches half of ETH supply. Backers argue the mechanism would cap excessive staking, slow net supply growth, and reinforce ETH’s scarcity case. Critics say it could do the opposite of what it intends: squeeze out independent stakers, leave exchanges and custodians with an even larger role, disrupt DeFi’s implicit benchmark rate, and weaken the economics behind liquid staking. The debate reaches well beyond protocol researchers. Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Lido, ether.fi, and several listed ETH treasury companies have all become part of the conversation because the proposal could cut a meaningful share of staking-linked revenue. Under estimates cited in the source article, validator issuance returns at the current staking ratio could fall from about 2.6% to around 1.2%, while total validator returns would decline by less because fees and MEV would remain untouched. The proposal is still at the Draft stage and was not included in the confirmed proposal list for the Hegotá upgrade, but the fight has already exposed a deeper split inside Ethereum over how much staking is enough and who should be paid for securing the chain.

A dense stream of updates hit crypto and AI markets between Aug. 12 and Aug. 13, spanning venture funding, protocol incidents, regulatory moves, exchange actions and large on-chain transfers. PANews’ roundup included Lovable’s $400 million Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation, Wintermute’s plan to spend about $1 billion over five years on high-frequency trading and AI data center infrastructure, and Tencent’s second-quarter results showing higher capital expenditure tied to AI spending. In digital assets, Harmony said it had traced fraudulently minted tokens across 409 wallets and was considering a rollback, while Solana briefly came close to a network-freeze threshold after a data center routing issue knocked nearly 29% of staked SOL offline. Anchorpoint also began the first phase of distributing its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HKDAP, and Coinbase said it will suspend 10 perpetual contracts on Aug. 26. Whale activity remained active as well, including an Ethereum ICO participant moving 2,000 ETH to Coinbase, a wallet sending 2,300 BTC to Wintermute-linked deposit addresses since June 25, and a leveraged ETH trader closing out positions for a reported $4.3 million profit. The period also brought new product releases from Grok and DeepSeek, a major SEC no-action letter tied to Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund, and fresh scrutiny of prediction markets from U.S. regulators and New York City lawmakers.

ScamSniffer's monitoring flagged a crypto holder whose two wallets were drained within 15 minutes, with losses of roughly $25 million, in what appears to be a private key leak rather than a typical approval phishing attack. The two addresses, belonging to the same victim, moved all assets — including DAI, WBTC, aUSDC, LDO, sUSDe and native ETH — to a newly created address. Within an hour, the stolen funds were swapped into DAI and ETH: 20 million DAI were transferred to another address, while about 3,000 ETH remained at the consolidation address. The affected wallet has a history of security incidents. In September 2023, the same address lost 4,851 rETH and 9,579 stETH (around $24 million) after signing a phishing increaseAllowance transaction. At that time, the attacker eventually returned roughly 90% of the stolen funds. This time, ScamSniffer's monitoring points to a private key compromise, making the latest attack distinct from the earlier approval-based phishing.