MARSEILLE — Competition in Ethereum's liquid staking race continues to heat up, with heavy hitters Coinbase, Lido, and Rocket Pool already investing heavily to win market share in the lucrative liquid staking derivative (LSD) business. However, up-and-coming Lido fork Speed Finance claims a new product will allow it to "zoom" past incumbents.

"We heard the pleas from DeFi's heaviest users saying the pitiful 5% yield they were getting on some LSDs wasn't enough to really feel anything. We wanted to give our users something a bit harder", said Speed's young French founder, Annette Cristal.

"Looking around the landscape, we see too many of our competitors putting big VCs first while retail users are dealt an unfair hand. Today, we're fixing that. Today, we're dealing mETH."

While Speed hasn’t yet announced a governance token for the protocol, contributors are currently in discussions with Popsicle Finance for a potential merger. Said a representative from Popsicle Finance, "We see significant synergies from working with Speed, and suspect together we could create a product so concentrated, it is bound to get yields incredibly, unbelievably high. We feel a certain kinship with the Speed community and believe we can unite under a shared governance token. We're happy to share some of our ICE with other DeFi users."

However, differing views on protocol control have threatened to halt discussions, with Popsicle's rigid procedures conflicting with Speed's more “go with the flow” attitude. "It's important to us that tokenholders are able to adjust protocol parameters, for example optimizing revenue or tokenholder voting power. We're strongly in favor of users tweaking whenever they want to", said Cristal.

When pressed about mounting rumors of Speed's plans to launch its own blockchain, Cristal was coy. "While we are adamant believers in the Ethereum roadmap, we want to be sure our blockchain moves as fast as we do. Data sharding may not happen until 2024 or even 2025 and we want our users to have access to shards of mETH as soon as possible.”

While unable to be reached before press time, SEC Chair Gary Gensler is said to be working on a new educational video warning about the dangers of using Speed, concerned users may experience financial gain from the protocol.

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