Boosting Ethereum Consensus Client Diversity with Grandine

Saulius Grigaitis (Grandine)
Lido Community Call 2025 06 17

Why Client Diversity Matters

• Ethereum relies on multiple clients to stay resilient.

• A monoculture increases the risk of fatal errors, bugs, and centralization.

• Lido is committed to supporting a multi-client validator set.

Grandine History

• The development began in 2019
• First binary release in 2021
• Opensourced in 2024
• Completed multiple audits at the end of 2024
• The current market share ~1-2%

Why Grandine

• A modern Ethereum consensus layer client written in Rust.

• Highly optimised for the best performance.

• On average, Grandine wins against most of the other clients when using Vouch (speed of block production etc.)

• Built with tree-states from the beginning for efficient memory usage.
• Focused on security, performance, and maintainability.
• Open source and actively developed.

Lido LEGO Grant

• The grant will help to boost diversity with focus on:

  • Work directly with node operators to ease migration to Grandine

  • Implement deployment-specific features to improve operability and performance

  • Improve onboarding documentation and community support

  • Conduct additional interoperability testing with other clients

  • Participate in client diversity initiatives and collaborative testing networks

Research

• Rust-KZG - a high-performance KZG library for blobs scaling.
• Beacon Chain Snarkification - Beacon Chain STF proofs with zkVMs.

Questions