Lido Founder Konstantin Lomashuk borrows 85M USDT from Aave for ETH acquisition

Lido’s Founder, Konstantin Lomashuk, was loaned about 85M USDT by lending protocol Aave, which he used to buy ETH. Arkham’s data showed that Lomashuk first sent 80M USDT to the Amber Group, which deposited all the funds into an exchange.

Lookonchain reports revealed that the Lido Founder later withdrew approximately 15.81K ETH, worth about $59.75M, from the exchange. According to Arkham’s live data, his portfolio currently holds about 69.619K AETHWSETH worth over $318M. It also has about $5M worth of ETH left and slightly over 2K DAI valued at $2.08K.

The Arkham data also showed that Lomashuk’s overall portfolio had increased by at least $9.48M, with the value of AWSTETH holdings jumping from $315.84M to $325.32M in a week (from July 22 to July 29). The holdings remained at $69.8K, but the price of AWSTETH surged from ~$4.5K to ~$4.6K within the same period. However, the total value of the holding dropped by 3.46% in the past 24 hours to $324.65M.

Lomashuk says Ethereum is the world’s ledger

The Lido boss recently claimed that the Ethereum protocol was the world’s ledger. He and Artem Kotelskiy, the Head of Crypto Research at Cyber Fund, published a report in May claiming that Ethereum was the foundational infrastructure for DeFi. The duo further pointed out that Ethereum had over 25 million global users and processed more than 40% (~$0.5T) of weekly stablecoin volumes. They added that Visa and Stripe have exponentially adopted Ethereum as the base layer.

The two industry KOLs said they had been building and investing on top of Ethereum for over a decade because they believed in the “vision of permissionless, horizontal coordination.” They also revealed that they had substantially increased their ETH holdings by 10x over time. Lomashuk and Kotelskiy added that Ethereum was their “highest conviction bet.”

Lido’s Lomashuk previously teased that he would be building the second generation of Ethereum before he was quickly made to swallow his words following online backlash from industry players. He jokingly stated that he was just messing around with random tweets, saying that “a tweet was just a tweet…”

“No actual second foundation has been created yet…If a second foundation ever does form, it must have a clear purpose that complements the enormous work of current contributors.”

–Konstantin Lomashuk, Lido Founder

However, the Lomashuk and Koteskiy report asserted that Ethereum’s most important upgrades were EIP-1559, which redesigned the fee mechanism in the Summer of 2021, and “The Merge,” which transitioned the protocol to Proof-of-Stake in the Fall of 2022.

ETH is dubbed “ultrasound money”

According to the Lomashuk and Kotelskiy report, ETH was dubbed “ultrasound money,” referencing Bitcoin’s sound money narrative. Ethereum’s upgrade from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake made the protocol 8,000x more energy efficient, as the issuance required to reward nodes securing the ecosystem each year dropped from more than 4% to below 1%.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, outlined plans for the Ethereum Foundation’s major restructuring in January of this year. He pointed out that the reorganization would address inefficiencies and streamline decision-making. However, his remarks sparked criticism as some argued that the restructuring undermined the network’s decentralization ethos.

Lomashuk recently claimed that Ethereum was the “ultimate world computer,” saying that Ethereans could help achieve the network’s growth, transformation, and success. He appreciated the support from all Ethereum ecosystem users, adding that more organizations needed to contribute to the network.