Overview
ether.fi is a non-custodial liquid restaking protocol on Ethereum. A user deposits ETH and receives eETH (or its wrapped, DeFi-composable form weETH), a liquid token that represents a position which is staked on the beacon chain and simultaneously restaked through EigenLayer. Unlike custodial staking services, node-operation keys stay with the staker rather than the protocol, which ether.fi frames as its core "non-custodial" design (see the protocol documentation).
By 2026 ether.fi had grown into the largest liquid restaking protocol and one of the largest liquid-staking protocols overall, second only to Lido by total value locked – live figures are tracked on DeFiLlama. Governance and the protocol treasury are directed by holders of the ETHFI token through the ether.fi DAO.
From staking to restaking
ether.fi sits one layer beyond classic liquid staking. Protocols like Lido (stETH) and Rocket Pool (rETH) issue a liquid receipt for ETH that is only validating Ethereum. ether.fi's eETH is additionally restaked into EigenLayer, where the same ETH secures actively validated services (AVSs) in exchange for extra rewards – and takes on the extra slashing surface that restaking introduces.
This makes ether.fi the reference example of the liquid restaking token (LRT) archetype: a governance-bearing DAO wrapped around a staking position whose risk and reward are a function of a separate restaking market it does not itself control. Its EigenLayer dependency is why the two projects are tightly coupled in this directory – ether.fi is consistently among EigenLayer's largest single sources of restaked ETH.
ETHFI: the governance token
ETHFI is the ether.fi DAO's governance and coordination token, announced in March 2024. Key parameters from ether.fi's own announcement:
- Fixed supply: 1,000,000,000 ETHFI, with "no further issuance."
- Initial circulating supply: 115,200,000 ETHFI (11.52% of max supply) at launch.
- Airdrops: Season 1 distributed 6% of supply, claimable from 18 March 2024 over a 90-day window; Season 2 distributed a further 5% (snapshot 15 March 2024), with unclaimed Season 1 tokens rolling into Season 2. Whale wallets were subject to a 3-month vest.
- Full distribution is scheduled to complete by the end of 2030.
The announcement scopes what ETHFI actually decides: the Grants Program, "protocol longevity, vision, and key economic parameters, such as protocol fees," greenlighting of node operators and contributor permissions, and treasury-diversification activities. Holders can also stake ETHFI, receiving sETHFI. The staking documentation describes a vault that restakes the deposit on Karak for loyalty and Karak points rather than paying a share of protocol revenue, and it is explicit that staking does not cost the holder their vote: staked ETHFI votes through the etherfi-dao.eth Snapshot space — 8,637 followers and 15 proposals when the space was read off Snapshot's public API on 1 September 2026 — though staking re-delegates away from any delegation previously made through Agora.
How governance works
ether.fi's process is documented in the official governance resources:
- Discussion: proposals are posted on the Discourse forum "with context and discussion before and during the voting window."
- Voting: votes are cast on Snapshot (etherfi-dao.eth) with a 4-day window. A vote can be opened at the same time a proposal is submitted.
- Quorum & threshold: "1M ETHFI is required for quorum in order for a vote to be valid," and a proposal "passes if it receives at least 1M ETHFI in approval votes."
- Weight & delegation: voting power is proportional to ETHFI (and sETHFI) held, counted across Ethereum and Arbitrum both as a raw balance and as on-chain
ERC20Votesweight. Delegation happens by callingdelegate()on the token; the space registers no Snapshot delegation portal, and the Foundation's own portal atvote.ether.fi/delegatesis no longer publicly readable (HTTP 401, checked 13 August 2026). - Who may propose: not holders. The Snapshot space sets
onlyMembers, so only three allowlisted addresses can open a vote (see below).
The Foundation-and-multisig model
ether.fi separates deciding from executing through the ether.fi Foundation. A Proposer "submits proposals for the protocol changes and governance decisions, including treasury spend, initiating community votes for token holder approval." A Multi-Sig Committee then "implements these decisions, handles emergency actions, and ensures proposals align with the Foundation's objectives."
This is a distinct archetype from the fully on-chain Governor-style DAOs elsewhere in this directory: the binding tally is an off-chain Snapshot vote, and a trusted multisig carries out the result. The Foundation states that "further governance mechanisms will be rolled out in phases," aiming toward "full decentralization with an ecosystem of active contributors" – a candid progressive-decentralization posture rather than a claim of already-trustless execution. That gap between an off-chain vote and a multisig that executes it is exactly the failure mode this wiki catalogues in how DAOs fail.
Governance in practice
Beyond parameter changes, the ether.fi treasury and its product surface (Stake, Liquid, and the Cash card) give holders real economic levers. Treasury-diversification and token-value questions – including proposals to deploy treasury toward ETHFI buybacks – have been brought to the DAO's Snapshot, exercising the "key economic parameters" and "treasury diversification" mandate the token was given. Because these are Foundation-executed multisig actions rather than trustless on-chain execution, they are a live test of the phased-decentralization promise above.
What the record shows
Everything the Foundation documents about this DAO is checkable at source. Snapshot's public GraphQL hub returns the etherfi-dao.eth space's live configuration and its full proposal history, and the chains return the token state underneath it. The readings below were taken on 13 August 2026 – Ethereum block 25,742,725, Arbitrum block 493,948,614.
The published numbers hold
The space's voting.period is 345,600 seconds, which is exactly the four days the Foundation documents, and voting.quorum is 1,000,000, matching the “1M ETHFI” threshold quoted above. Both are settings on the voting venue rather than protocol code, so the space's admins could change either without a vote – but as configured they are what the DAO says they are. The space has 8,632 followers and 14 proposals.
Proposal rights are an allowlist, not a threshold
The space sets filters.onlyMembers: true, so a proposal can only be opened by an address on its authorized list, and that list holds three entries: two admins and one member. The Foundation's Proposer role is therefore not a convention the community observes, it is a permission at the voting venue, and no ETHFI balance confers it. A proposal threshold denominated in tokens can always be met by a large enough holder, and a refundable deposit only prices the attempt; an allowlist is the one gate a balance cannot pass. It is the strict end of the space the wiki surveys under proposal throttles and rate limits, and it is what makes the progressive-decentralization framing above load-bearing rather than decorative.
Fourteen proposals, and an electorate that emptied
The complete history, read from the hub:
| Opened | Proposal | Voters | ETHFI cast |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19 Jun 2024 | ETHFI Buyback and Liquidity Pool Seeding | 1,372 | 2,007,327 |
| 25 Jun 2024 | Season 3 and airdrop token allocation | 3,556 | 2,616,009 |
| 2 Jul 2024 | Staking Contract Implementation | 2,212 | 2,063,589 |
| 7 Aug 2024 | Increase to Buyback and LP Seeding Allocation | 540 | 1,252,284 |
| 15 Sep 2024 | Seasonal Rewards and LRT² | 403 | 1,494,242 |
| 22 Oct 2024 | Incentives on Centralized Exchanges | 423 | 1,297,244 |
| 18 Nov 2024 | Season 4 ETHFI allocation | 414 | 1,211,834 |
| 16 Dec 2024 | Enhancing ETHFI Utility and Liquidity | 445 | 1,163,708 |
| 23 Dec 2024 | Treasury diversification into real-world assets | 379 | 1,752,648 |
| 28 Jan 2025 | Season 5 | 370 | 2,552,463 |
| 25 Apr 2025 | Withdrawal Revenue Buyback Program | 134 | 1,254,739 |
| 29 May 2025 | ether.fi Member Rewards | 164 | 1,159,415 |
| 30 Oct 2025 | Treasury Deployment for ETHFI Buy-Back Program | 172 | 5,121,854 |
| 23 Apr 2026 | Treasury Contribution to restore rsETH's backing | 55 | 3,163,434 |
The weight cast per proposal is roughly flat across two years – 1.2M to 5.1M ETHFI throughout – while the number of addresses casting it fell from 3,556 to 55, a decline of 98.5%. The 55 addresses that voted in April 2026 are 0.64% of the space's 8,632 followers. This is the shape the wiki describes under voter apathy, but with a detail worth isolating: the collapse is in participants, not in participation weight.
A weight quorum cannot detect the difference
On the April 2026 proposal, 55 addresses cast 3,163,434 ETHFI between them. The largest single voter, 0x9E27…0bc5, cast 1,862,679 – 58.9% of everything cast, and on its own 1.86× the 1,000,000 quorum. The two largest together carried 79.5%.
Because quorum here is a test of weight and not of headcount, an electorate can empty out entirely without the threshold ever registering it: one holder of that size clears quorum alone, and the vote is valid. That is the structural point behind quorum and threshold design – a weight quorum measures whether enough tokens showed up, never whether enough people did.
The forum stopped before the proposals did
The documented process says proposals are posted on the Discourse forum “with context and discussion before and during the voting window.” The forum's newest topic, read from its own /latest.json on 13 August 2026, is the buy-back proposal of 30 October 2025. The April 2026 Snapshot vote has no thread there at all: a Discourse search for rsETH, the subject of that proposal, returns zero topics. The DAO's most recent decision was taken at the venue but not at the forum the process names, which is the durability problem the wiki tracks in on-chain vs off-chain governance: the binding artifact and the deliberative record are held by two different systems, and only one of them was used.
Weight is counted twice over, on two chains
The space runs eight strategies, which read as duplicates until the network field is included. They are four token positions – ETHFI and sETHFI, on Ethereum and on Arbitrum – each counted by two different accounting methods, erc20-balance-of for tokens sitting in a wallet and erc20-votes for weight that has been delegated on-chain. ETHFI is 0xfe0c…c0eb on Ethereum and 0x7189…dc27 on Arbitrum; sETHFI is 0x86B5…0161 on both. Aggregating an electorate across chains this way is the pattern covered under cross-chain governance.
Reading both methods, rather than ERC20Votes alone, is what makes the tally work. The largest voter above holds 1,862,678.93 ETHFI on Ethereum, and its delegates() returns the zero address: it has never delegated, not even to itself, so its getVotes() reads zero. A space configured only on ERC20Votes would have scored its single largest participant at nothing. This is the activation gap the wiki documents under voting power activation, and here it is answered at the venue rather than left for holders to fix.
Supply, against the announcement
The March 2024 announcement quoted above states a fixed 1,000,000,000 ETHFI with “no further issuance.” Read directly, totalSupply() on Ethereum is 998,535,999 ETHFI and on Arbitrum 7,506,364; sETHFI's Ethereum supply is 91,687,309. The announced figure is a cap and a no-issuance commitment, so the live Ethereum number can only fall below it, and it has – by 1,464,001 tokens. The DAO has passed two buyback programs in that window, in April and October 2025, both listed in the table above.
How Caper approaches this
ether.fi shows the standard shape of a large DeFi DAO: an off-chain Snapshot vote sets intent, and a Foundation multisig is trusted to carry it out. Caper narrows that trust gap in two places. First, vote weight is a product of what a member holds and how they have participated – so holdings still count, but a large bag alone cannot decide an outcome without the participation term. Second, a proposal's on-chain execution is bound to a settled, clamped winner, so what a multisig could do is constrained by what the ledger tallied – the off-chain result and the on-chain action cannot diverge. It is a different point on the same design axis ether.fi is walking down in phases.