has gobbled up more than $16 billion in ether deposits – digital assets that will theoretically be used to help secure upstart cryptocurrency protocols.. New restaking startups seem to arrive every week, and entire cottage industries,"actively validated services" and"liquid restaking" platforms, have seized on the hype with their own takes on the tech.
In contrast to proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin, where"miners" expend compute power to keep a chain secure, proof-of-stake blockchains like Ethereum and Solana are run by"validators" who"stake" currency to help run the network.Validators earn interest as a reward for their work. The bigger their stake, the more they'll earn in rewards.
The specifics might look different on other blockchains, but the gist is the same. On Solana, for instance, users will be able to restake SOL they've staked on that network to earn extra interest and to help secure other apps.Restaking via a platform like EigenLayer typically means depositing one's ETH into the protocol, spinning up an operator, and then selecting which AVSs to secure in exchange for interest.and Renzo.
With the rise of LRTs comes an even larger fear of a mass catastrophe. If protocols start leveraging people's trust by allowing them to stake tokens, liquid staking tokens, and also liquidAlthough versions of pooled security have existed for a while – most notably in the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem – the modern formulation of"restaking" remains more theory than reality.