Chun, co-founder of F2Pool and founder of stakefish, stated that Oleksii Trofimchuk filed a lawsuit against Lido Finance and Stakefish in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California, on September 8, claiming that after his wallet was stolen, competing MEV bots used high-priority fee transactions to claim the relevant ETH.

Chun's position is that Stakefish, as a validator, only packages legitimate transactions according to Ethereum protocol rules and should not determine off-chain ownership or competitive asset claims. If validators adhering to the protocol are required to recover rewards based on unverifiable off-chain claims, it will force nodes to filter transactions based on ownership narratives, leading to legal uncertainty in staking rewards and undermining Ethereum's decentralization and trusted neutrality.

The incident dates back to April 2023. The plaintiff claims that his long-used wallet and funds related to nine validators were stolen, resulting in a loss of about 600 ETH, valued at approximately $2.2 million at the time. After the hacker gained control of the withdrawal address's private key, they initiated a withdrawal; the funds are expected to be available around October 2024, during which white-hat MEV and the hacker raced to claim the high fees on-chain. Some of the high fees flowed into service contracts related to stakefish. The white-hat party publicly requested a refund but received no response. The lawsuit alleges that Lido and stakefish improperly profited by about $1.25 million and claims that validators, after charging service fees, should distribute the remaining rewards to staking clients, constituting conversion of property, unjust enrichment, and unfair business practices.

The plaintiff earlier publicly stated that he was forced to send transactions to unfamiliar addresses at nearly 100% fees, with an intermediary taking about $1.25 million in fees while arguing for "neutrality." Chun cited on-chain records from two years ago regarding this "race to claim," pinpointing the dispute to the struggle for control after the theft of the withdrawal address's private key, rather than validators actively selecting stolen funds.

From a market mechanism perspective, this is a judicial request for neutral pricing in the protocol. The buyers are those hoping to write off-chain ownership into block selection, while the sellers are validators and MEV searchers packaging transactions at the highest priority fees. The beneficiaries are node operators who continue to auction blocks based on gas without reviewing cases; the pressured parties are Lido and stakefish's compliance exposure, as well as all staking service providers that may be required to "determine who the owner is before packaging." The flow of funds is that the stolen ETH is intercepted by high-priority fee transactions when released from the withdrawal queue, with fees going to proposers and related contracts, and the remainder distributed according to staking shares; the court is now pursuing whether this intercepted fee belongs to the proceeds of the crime.

On-chain supplement: The dispute centers on the moment of receipt after the withdrawal certificate was stolen, rather than a direct breach of the protocol treasury. Lido has internal penalties for nodes regarding "MEV theft," addressing deviations of reward addresses from the protocol treasury, which is not the same set of rules as the current "filtering transactions based on off-chain ownership claims."

Source: Public Information