This is a timely post with respect to the conversations in the Ethereum community regarding Lido.
Because a liquid staking protocol can have such large economic and social influence over the base protocol, I tend to think that it’s better to enshrine liquid staking natively in the base protocol so that it’s aligned with, enforced by and governed by the same underlying community as the base protocol. From that perspective developing an native liquid staking module would be preferable to outsourcing it to another chain or rollup.
You bring up a good point though that a native liquid staking module could introduce too much application logic or state which would go against one of Celestia’s core values. That said, my hunch is that liquid staking doesn’t need to create much additional state (just an additional token balance per participating address) and the app logic could be made relatively simple as well. Someone more informed should weigh in on this point.
Whatever path the Celestia community chooses to pursue to support liquid staking will have large impacts on the future of the protocol, so different options and their repercussions should be carefully considered.
Aside from LSTs, are there other use cases for ICA that you think are relevant to Celestia?