Welcome to Issue #32 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

It’s a quieter week as the ecosystem settles down from last week’s major EigenCloud rebrand.

The EigenCloud team is doubling down this week on the cloud narrative with a new campaign that lets verifiable AI judge social engagement on X, built entirely on EigenCloud and inspired by Kaito.

Also in this issue:

• Predicate and Uniswap team up to discuss institutional onboarding.

• BitMax, Korea’s largest public BTC holder, stakes with Babylon.

• Sentient launches phase two of its Data Consortium for aligned AI.

• Layer showcases four new verifiable services across key use cases.

…and more.

Let’s go! 🚀

Protocol News

Latest updates on restaking protocol developments across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems

EigenCloud (formerly EigenLayer) introduces Vibescore, a new campaign dogfooding the EigenCloud stack to deliver a Kaito-like product judged by verifiable AI. Users tweet in response to a prompt, and an AI running natively on EigenCloud evaluates the impact and effectiveness of each post.

Nader breaks down the EigenCompute product in a short video — check it out! (Ignore the thumbnail 😅)

If you’re interested in building on EigenCloud, Wes walks through the current components, roadmap, and shares the key repositories you’ll need to get started following the EigenCloud rebrand.

Korea's largest public BTC holder, BitMax, is staking its Bitcoin with Babylon.

Verifiable Service Ecosystem

News on the latest AVS partnerships, feature releases, and innovations in the restaking ecosystem

Check out the podcast with Predicate and the Uniswap Foundation on how Predicate's Institutional Hook enables smoother institutional onboarding to Uniswap.

Curious about building a verifiable service? This article walks you through Othentic’s stack and how it all comes together.

Openledger is kicking off its Cookie Campaign, featuring $350k in total rewards.

Learn how Fermah helps divide proof tasks, cutting overall proof costs and improving proof efficiency.

Sentient announced the second phase of its Data Consortium, enabling the company to build more aligned AI models powered by specialized, high-fidelity data assets.

Stake's multi-VM AMM contract is now undergoing audit by Nethermind Security and will be available to users once the audit is complete.

Check out 4 verifiable services building on top of Layer (WAVS), covering use cases from social trading and generative art to lending and proof-of-location.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #31 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

You’ve probably seen the headline, EigenLayer has rebranded to EigenCloud, signaling a bold move beyond restaking into the world of verifiable cloud infrastructure. Backed by a fresh $70 million investment from a16z, this pivot positions EigenLayer to directly challenge traditional cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud.

In this issue, we break down what EigenCloud really means, how it impacts the AVS ecosystem, and why this may be one of the most important inflection points in restaking's evolution.

Also in this issue:

• Predicate and Paxos publish a whitepaper on onchain compliance and regulatory alignment, timely as crypto enters a new era of scrutiny.

• Skate Network’s Siddharth drops a thread breaking down how they approached verifiability, a core but often-overlooked piece of AVS design.

• Othentic ships slashing support, unlocking a new level of economic security for the many AVSs already built on its framework.

• Lagrange partners with NVIDIA, becoming the only crypto-native team working with them to deliver verifiable and secure AI.

• Earnifi wins Best Financial Services App at the 2025 American Business Awards, powered by Opacity’s zkTLS network and EigenCloud.

…and more.

Let’s dive in! 🚀

EigenLayer Becomes EigenCloud: A Vercel Moment for Verifiable Services

This week, EigenLayer announced a series of major updates under a new name: EigenCloud.

Framed explicitly around the emerging verifiable compute thesis, the rollout includes two new product primitives — EigenCompute and EigenVerify — alongside a renewed $70 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz.

Taken together, these moves mark a strategic inflection point: more than just an expansion of EigenLayer’s capabilities, but a reframing of its core identity. What began as a coordination protocol for restaking is now positioning itself as a vertically integrated platform for verifiable services.

This shift shouldn’t come as a surprise to long-time readers. For months, we’ve noted EigenLayer’s steady progression from a generalized restaking layer toward a more opinionated product thesis — one focused on onboarding application developers, abstracting operator complexity, and ultimately owning the full stack of verifiable infrastructure.

With EigenCloud, the thesis is finally productized, narrative-aligned, and capital-backed.

Let’s break it down.

What’s New

1. $70M Strategic Investment from a16z

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has committed an additional $70 million to EigenLayer through a public acquisition of EIGEN tokens, subject to a lock-up period. This investment signals growing institutional confidence in EigenLayer’s long-term vision. It reflects a shift in perception from restaking as a financial primitive to verifiable services as a strategic infrastructure layer that expands web3 and connects with web2.

2. Expansion of the EigenPrimitives Framework

EigenLayer is launching two new primitives that significantly enhance its developer-facing capabilities:

• EigenCompute provides a container-based compute environment that abstracts away the operational complexity of managing external operators. It enables developers to deploy custom logic with minimal setup, while EigenCloud handles execution and trust coordination. The model is comparable to existing serverless platforms like AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Workers, but with verifiability as a core feature.

• EigenVerify introduces verification-as-a-service. Developers can integrate standardized verification modules directly into their applications, eliminating the need to design and maintain bespoke trust frameworks. This simplifies development and shortens the time-to-market for new verifiable applications.

These new primitives complement existing components such as EigenDA (for data availability) and the EIGEN token (for governance and off-chain forking). Together, they form a more complete infrastructure platform. While detailed technical documentation is still forthcoming, especially regarding operator interactions within EigenCompute or implementation details in EigenVerify, the direction is clear: simplify and standardize the developer experience with end-to-end product offerings instead of simple SDKs.

3. Verifiable Service Composition & Cross-chain Support

One of the less headline-grabbing, yet strategically important updates is the introduction of Verifiable Service Composition and Cross-Chain Support. Together, these features enable applications to interact with existing Actively Validated Services (AVSs) through a standardized API interface, with unified models for payment, authentication, and trust. Crucially, these services are now designed to operate across any L1 or L2, further expanding their applicability.

The best analogy comes from traditional cloud infrastructure. In AWS, developers can seamlessly combine services like S3 (storage), Lambda (compute), and IAM (identity). EigenCloud is now building toward the same modularity — enabling AVSs to be composed like building blocks. Rather than each AVS implementing its own custom interfaces for integration, every AVS can now plug into a shared framework. This standardization dramatically lowers the friction for developers and accelerates composability across the ecosystem.

If successful, this could trigger a flywheel effect: as more AVSs adopt the common interface, each one becomes easier to integrate, and every new AVS launched within EigenCompute instantly gains distribution across the existing service graph. What was once fragmented becomes interoperable. What was once siloed becomes synergistic.

This is the kind of infrastructure-level glue that, while subtle, compounds over tim. And this may prove to be one of the most important architectural decisions EigenLayer has made to date.

Why Now?

The decision to rebrand from EigenLayer to EigenCloud is not just about naming. It reflects a convergence of timing, strategic leverage, and opportunity — all of which make this the ideal moment to shift the narrative from restaking to verifiable services.

1. Timing: Crypto’s Entry into the Mainstream

Mainstream adoption of crypto is no longer theoretical. With the rise of stablecoins and regulatory clarity on the horizon, applications supporting stablecoin flows — from payments to fintech to gaming — are set to multiply. But scaling these apps on traditional L1s or rollups is expensive, complex, and often overkill for the trust guarantees they actually need.

Verifiable services offer a more efficient path to scale. They allow developers to build applications with trust-minimized guarantees, but without the cost or overhead of spinning up a new chain. In this context, EigenCloud becomes a logical backend for the “verifiable app” era, just as AWS was for cloud-native apps. (We covered this thesis in depth in Restaking Weekly #17).

2. Leverage: Restaking Was a Trojan Horse

The term "restaking" worked well with crypto-native audiences — VCs, validators, and yield-seeking participants all understood the value of unlocking dormant capital. But it has also become a limiting frame. Restaking is a financial primitive, not a product. It resonates with the supply side of crypto, but the long-term battle was always on the demand side: developers.

What EigenLayer is now undertaking, building a modular, generalized framework for verifiable services, is no less ambitious than inventing Solidity and Ethereum itself, perhaps even more. It’s a complete framework and service for programmable trust. The early restaking narrative created economic leverage, aligned stakeholders, and bootstrapped attention. But that phase is ending. The name EigenCloud signals the end of the restaking era and the beginning of the transition to the real endgame.

3. Opportunity: Institutional Power and the Path to Web2 Integration

As Marc Andreessen once noted, the most underappreciated leverage a venture capitalist has is power — the ability to amplify narratives, recruit top talent, and open critical doors. The $70 million Series B investment from a16z is just that. It is political and strategic endorsement from one of the most powerful firms in tech.

We’re already seeing the downstream effects. EigenLayer has begun hiring from major cloud providers like AWS and Azure. If the ambition is to become the bridge between Web2 and Web3 — to compete not just with blockchains, but with the cloud itself — this is the moment. The market timing, institutional alignment, and product maturity are converging.

Why EigenCompute and EigenVerify Matter Right Now

For verifiable services to scale — and for EigenLayer to fulfill its long-term vision — the developer experience needs to be radically simplified. Today’s application builders don’t just need trust guarantees; they need seamless access to multiple chains, external data, AI models, and storage. All of this must be easily deployable, secure, and performant. Until now, building on EigenLayer meant standing up and managing your own operator set — a high-friction requirement that excluded most developers.

EigenCompute and EigenVerify change that.

These new primitives offer a managed experience for building verifiable applications. Developers can now upload an app container and go — no need to provision operators or understand the intricacies of staking mechanics. It’s a model familiar to anyone who’s used AWS Lambda or Vercel Functions, but rebuilt for a verifiable, decentralized runtime.

Importantly, EigenCompute is optional. Developers who want to run their own infrastructure still can. But for the majority who prioritize speed and simplicity, EigenCompute becomes the default. EigenVerify complements this by offering plug-and-play verification services, further reducing development overhead and time to launch.

The Uphill Battle

The name change to EigenCloud is not just about narrative.

It strategically positions EigenLayer in a new category, one with a significantly larger total addressable market, where the competitive landscape shifts from crypto-native protocols to global cloud incumbents. While most restaking projects remain focused on bootstrapping validator supply and building yield narratives, EigenLayer has leapfrogged into the application-layer compute market. In doing so, it combines the trust guarantees of crypto with the usability and developer experience of modern cloud platforms, a positioning that few others in Web3 are even attempting, let alone executing on.

But this move comes with its own set of challenges.

Verifiability, is still early and confusing even for participants in crypto, let alone most developers. The vast majority of apps (including crypto apps) still live comfortably inside AWS and Google Cloud. For EigenCloud to succeed, it must not only offer a better experience, but it must also educate the market on why certain applications require cryptographic trust guarantees in the first place.

This is the real frontier and the hardest hill to climb: shaping developer consciousness around what trust, neutrality, and verifiability mean in the context of modern software.

Regardless, welcome to the end of the beginning and the beginning of something far more ambitious.

Farewell, restaking. Welcome, verifiable cloud.

Read More:

• Sreeram’s cloud thesis of crypto thread

• Sreeram’s interview on EigenCloud announcement

• EigenCloud roadmap

Protocol News

Latest updates on restaking protocol developments across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems

Learn more about the technical design of Symbiotic Relay, which enables developers to stake seamlessly across multiple chains on Symbiotic.

SatLayer is partnering with OKX Wallet to distribute 800,000 SatLayer tokens as rewards.

Babylon is partnering with Kraken to launch BTC-native restaking directly within the Kraken app, allowing users to earn $BABY tokens as rewards.

AVS & Restaking Ecosystem

News on the latest AVS partnerships, feature releases, and innovations in the restaking ecosystem

With crypto going mainstream and regulation heating up, Predicate’s solution is more critical than ever. Read their whitepaper co-authored with Paxos.

Othentic introduces slashing to its AVS developer framework, a critical step toward secure and scalable adoption.

Verifiability design is often overlooked in AVS development. Siddharth from Skate Network shares a great thread on how they tackled this core security challenge.

Big win for Earnifi — the zkTLS-powered consumer finance app is named Best Financial Services App at the 2025 American Business Awards. Powered by Opacity Network and EigenCloud.

Hyperlane’s new MCP server allows AI agents to initiate cross-chain bridging through natural language prompts, unlocking a new interface layer for autonomous agents.

Lagrange stands alone as the only crypto partner of NVIDIA, focused on building verifiable and secure AI.

Over 817 million ATH tokens have been staked in the EigenLayer ATH vault. A massive milestone for the decentralized GPU vender’s checker network.

You can now track key EigenDA metrics directly on GrowthePie.

Brevis has successfully generated over 35 million zk proofs, a significant usage milestone for its ZK prover network.

Zeru has launched its zScore API, enabling developers to access onchain reputation data for specific user accounts.

Fermah has officially launched Phase 2 of its ZK prover market testnet.

Infura’s DIN network is collaborating with AltLayer to build a verifiable, EigenCloud-integrated RPC layer for enhanced trust and transparency.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #30 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week’s theme is new token launches. Veteran AVS projects Lagrange and Skate both launched their tokens, signaling the start of aggressive native token staking and restaking initiatives.

Also in this issue:

• Skate AMM hits $500M in volume, with early signs of fee distribution to restakers

• EigenLayer rolls out redistribution on testnet, expanding the design space for economic security

• Predicate and eOracle join Plume’s RWA launch, strengthening infra and compliance layers

• Staking Rewards' 2025 Institutional Report spotlights Ethereum restaking’s growing importance

• … and more.

Let’s dive in! 🚀

Protocol News

Latest updates on restaking protocol developments across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems

1. Since February, EigenLayer, UMA, and Polymarket have been collaborating on a decentralized oracle initiative. This week, Polymarket announced its integration with X, signaling broader ambitions and expanding use cases for the project.

2. EigenLayer’s redistribution feature is now live on testnet, marking a key step toward enabling broader economic security applications.

3. EigenLayer has upgraded its app with a smoother withdrawal experience, support for multi-asset withdrawals, and easier tracking.

4. EigenLayer has introduced EigenLayer Studio, an AI chat interface aimed at helping developers quickly bootstrap new AVS applications.

5. Symbiotic Relay allows users to restake on multiple Layer 1 blockchains simultaneously. Explore how it's being designed and what it means for cross-chain economic security.

6. SatLayer just dropped its litepaper, offering an expanded first look at what they’re building.

AVS & Restaking Ecosystem

News on the latest AVS partnerships, feature releases, and innovations in the restaking ecosystem

1. Big news this week: Skate has officially launched its token. Stake it to the Skate EigenLayer AVS to receive a 30% bonus in airdrop rewards.

2. Skate’s AMM has generated over $18K in fees and surpassed $500M in aggregated trading volume. This is promising news, as Skate may begin distributing fees to its EigenLayer restakers and operators.

3. Lagrange has officially launched its token, which is now listed on major exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, and Coinbase.

4. Plume’s RWA network launch is backed by Predicate, serving as its compliance infrastructure partner.

5. eOracle has joined Plume as its official oracle partner, supporting both Native and NEST assets within the network.

6. Check out Staking Rewards’ 2025 Ethereum Staking Institutional Report, which features significant coverage of the Ethereum restaking sector.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #29 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we're revisiting the theme of value redistribution, exploring how insurance has suddenly emerged as a promising vertical in the restaking ecosystem. What once felt abstract now hints at a wave of consumer-facing DeFi applications built directly on top of restaking infrastructure. For capital allocators, this opens the door to more compelling APRs and diversified exposure. We're excited by this unexpected new avenue that restaking has stumbled upon.

Also in this issue:

• Podcast with Fermah’s Vanishree on the ZK proof super-aggregator

• Karak launches its public testnet

• Aethir’s EigenLayer-backed ATH staking with up to 30% APY

• Fuel Network integrates EigenDA as its default DA layer

• … and more

Let’s dive in! 🚀

Restaking as Insurance

During the 2021 bull market, decentralized insurance protocols emerged across DeFi, aiming to bring traditional insurance models on-chain and protect against the rising threat of protocol exploits. But nearly all of them failed.

Now, a new signal is taking shape in the restaking space. Restaking, originally designed to secure off-chain verifiable services through economic guarantees on decentralized operators, is unexpectedly expanding into a broader role. Restaked capital is now being used to underwrite the financial risks of protocols directly, effectively functioning as insurance. It is a use case that even EigenLayer founder Sreeram has acknowledged he did not originally foresee.

Simultaneously, other restaking protocols and industry thought leaders are beginning to highlight this emerging opportunity:

• SatLayer’s founder called insurance one of the most promising use cases for restaked BTC.

  

• Sreeram, founder of EigenLayer, emphasized how restaking’s redistribution mechanisms expand its scope, allowing restaked capital to underwrite generalized financial risks.

  

• Praneeth (Ethereal VC) and Jim Parillo (Figment Capital) both highlighted this as a broad and actively sought-after use case, noting that projects are already raising capital around it.

  

  

Why Restaking as Insurance Could Work

Restaking addresses several fundamental issues that led to the failure of earlier DeFi insurance protocols:

1. Objective Slashing and Redistribution Terms

Unlike traditional DeFi insurance, where coverage terms were often vague and reliant on subjective governance votes, restaking enables protocols to define clear, enforceable slashing and redistribution conditions. The insured project sets the rules up front, making risk outcomes deterministic and programmable.

2. Abundant Idle Capital Seeking Yield

Restaking already concentrated billions in idle staked assets. Insurance is a natural extension of this capital, offering yield without needing to actively market it.

3. Neutral Infrastructure, Not a Middleman

Restaking protocols serve as neutral coordination layers. They allow capital providers and insured protocols to engage directly, setting their own terms and pricing risk transparently. This removes the need for insurance-specific intermediaries, and instead creates a dynamic marketplace for trust and coverage.

Conclusion

The most interesting takeaway from this emerging signal is not just the insurance use case itself, which still needs time to play out. What stands out more is what it reveals about restaking as a platform.

First, the modularity of restaking, combined with the abundance of idle capital, creates a large, open design space. This allows market participants to invent new and unexpected applications beyond the original intent.

Second, many of these emerging use cases are no longer infrastructure or middleware, but user-facing applications. These types of projects typically ramp up faster and have more direct control over reward flows to capital providers, compared to slower-moving middleware layers.

As Cap Protocol launches its product and leveraging restaking as insurance, we should see more similar experiments popping up soon.

The ZK Super Aggregator

In this episode, we had the chance to speak with Vanishree Rao, founder of Ferma, and dive deep into why, despite the rapid acceleration of ZK adoption, the infrastructure for proof generation remains fragmented, expensive, and difficult to scale. Ferma addresses this gap by serving as a neutral coordination layer between proof seekers, such as zkRollups, and provers operating GPU infrastructure. The platform offers a modular system that handles everything from pricing and matchmaking to workflow orchestration and performance optimization, making proof generation seamless and scalable for developers.

Learn More

• Fermah's X

• Fermah's Website

• Vanishree's X

Protocol News

Latest updates on restaking protocol developments across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems

EigenLayer’s Hoodi Testnet is now live, enabling broader and more stable protocol testing across the ecosystem.

SatLayer just kicked off a new restaking points campaign.

OKX Wallet now supports direct BTC restaking to Babylon.

Karak, the Ethereum-based alternative to EigenLayer and Symbiotic, is preparing to launch its inaugural public testnet.

AVS & Restaking Ecosystem

News on the latest AVS partnerships, feature releases, and innovations in the restaking ecosystem

Aethir’s EigenLayer-backed ATH staking campaign is now live. Restakers can earn up to 30% APY in fees from cloud hosts.

Hyperland and Eclipse have teamed up to launch tUSD, a crosschain-native stablecoin with built-in yield.

Fuel Network is transitioning from Ethereum DA to EigenDA as its default data availability provider.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #28 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we're taking a closer look at EigenLayer’s evolving app strategy — what it means, why it matters in the broader push to become an AWS-like platform with real network effects, and whether the timing is right.

Also in this issue:

• EigenLayer-powered Apps Dashboard

• Lagrange unveils its native token, $LA

• zkTLS deep dive with insights from Jordan

• Why MegaETH’s throughput breakthrough depends on EigenDA

• … and more

Let’s dive in! 🚀

EigenLayer is Becoming a Platform

Over the course of its development, EigenLayer has undergone several narrative shifts — each reflecting a broader ambition.

It began with Actively Validated Services (AVSs), a new class of off-chain applications secured by Ethereum restakers. Then came the framing of EigenLayer as the verifiable infrastructure layer for AI, positioning restaking as a trust foundation for machine intelligence. Later, AVSs were rebranded to Autonomously Verifiable Services, aligning with a broader push to define EigenLayer as the verifiable cloud.

Now, a new chapter is taking shape: EigenLayer-powered applications.

In a recent talk in Dubai, EigenLayer’s founder Sreeram compared the protocol directly to AWS. While AWS comparisons have surfaced before, this time, it felt more like a deliberate declaration: EigenLayer wants to become a platform.

It’s a great ambition. But the question now is: can EigenLayer pull it off and is the timing right?

From Infrastructure to Platform

Every crypto infrastructure wants to be a platform — it’s why nearly every protocol website has an "ecosystem" section. But most confuse surface-level integrations with true platform dynamics. They count the number of apps, but don’t ask whether those apps bring net new usage.

This is the core divide between infrastructure and platforms:

A platform creates network effects — where more usage attracts more developers, which attracts more usage, and so on. It becomes the default environment to build in.

Most crypto infra never gets there. Instead, they fall into a loop of stacking more infrastructure on top of infrastructure. These secondary layers rarely onboard new users. They serve developers, not demand. As a result, the ecosystem grows sideways, not upward.

EigenLayer is at risk of falling into the same trap. It has successfully grown the number of AVSs — but most of them are themselves infrastructure, and early-stage at that. The stack is dense, but not yet activated.

The recent push toward EigenLayer-powered applications is an attempt to break that cycle. It’s a deliberate shift from simply enabling infra to orchestrating usage — to building a flywheel where apps drive activity, which drives AVS demand, which reinforces EigenLayer as the core coordination layer.

It’s a smart move and necessary move — if it works.

What’s EigenLayer’s Edge?

In Acquired’s episode on AWS, hosts Ben and David broke down what made AWS dominant. Their key points:

• First-mover advantage: AWS was the first to productize infrastructure at scale.

• Dogfooding: Amazon itself ran on AWS, validating it as production-grade.

• Favorable macro trend: Post–dot-com startups needed backend infra but couldn’t afford to build it themselves.

• Developer-first design: Modular, API-first services like S3 made AWS easy to adopt.

• Customer obsession: Long-term focus on utility and scale, even at the cost of short-term revenue.

Interestingly, EigenLayer mirrors much of this.

It was the first to coin and define restaking, setting the narrative for a new layer of crypto-economic security. It built EigenDA as its native AVS, demonstrating the protocol’s capabilities — a kind of “dogfooding” in crypto terms. And it benefits from a macroeconomic shift: the diminishing centrality of L1 blockchains and the rise of modular, utility-focused, cross-chain applications.

EigenLayer is also early in its developer-centric approach, offering open architecture and modular design that lowers the barrier to integration. The emergence of AVS-as-a-Service companies like Othentic and Layer further accelerates this effort, providing developer-friendly tooling for building on EigenLayer. Compared to many crypto infrastructure projects, EigenLayer is notably more customer-focused, actively supporting AVS onboarding, providing ecosystem guidance, and taking a long-term view on utility rather than short-term metrics.

But there’s a key difference: AWS was built on physical infrastructure — servers, networking, data centers — a capital-intensive foundation that created defensibility and technical depth. EigenLayer’s foundation is soft economic power: restaked ETH and LST capital that secures AVSs.

That difference matters. The economic base of EigenLayer is mobile. Restaked capital can migrate. AVSs can adopt multiple restaking protocols. The switching costs are low. And unlike physical servers, TVL isn’t sticky — it’s reflexive, often chasing yield rather than long-term alignment.

That’s the core challenge. EigenLayer’s edge lies in the soft power such as first-mover status, developer trust, and ecosystem coordination — not deep technical lock-in. And as other restaking protocols become bigger and more competitive (e.g., Symbiotic, Babylon), EigenLayer must win on building network effects and flywheel.

Apps on EigenLayer: A Premature Push or a Strategic Moat?

The app thesis makes a lot of sense on paper:

• AVSs need real usage to become sticky and profitable.

• Restakers need real slashing risk to justify their economic trust.

• EigenLayer needs real value flows to justify its existence.

More applications → more valuable AVSs → more aligned rewards for restakers — all reinforcing EigenLayer’s central role in the stack.

But there’s a tension. Most AVSs are still in their infancy. Tooling is immature, documentation is sparse, and many haven’t launched publicly. Yet, EigenLayer is already leaning hard into applications — encouraging developers to treat AVSs as foundational components.

It’s a bold move, but is it premature? At worst, it risks becoming a money pit: high BD overhead, low return, more confusion in the community, and EigenLayer acting as the unofficial marketing arm for early-stage infra.

Still, the push may be necessary and uniquely timed. EigenLayer is likely the only player positioned to do this effectively today — with capital, visibility, and a growing bench of AVSs that are just mature enough to support meaningful integrations. In many ways, it mirrors AWS’s early “dogfooding” strategy: seeding internal usage with long-term capital investment to catalyze external adoption.

If EigenLayer can generate enough credibility and momentum around this emerging app layer — and help AVSs land real application use cases — it could trigger a compounding loop of ecosystem gravity: where AVSs and apps choose EigenLayer not because they must, but because they know it’s where the support, trust, and traction live.

Protocol News

Latest updates on restaking protocol developments across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems

1. Explore Symbiotic and Tokensight’s research into how much economic security is optimal for a restaked network.

2. EigenLayer’s new piece on AVS archetypes breaks down common design patterns for verifiable services, a worthwhile read for any developer building in the ecosystem.

3. Tuning in to Kairos Research and SatLayer’s discussion on Bitcoin restaking opportunities within the SatLayer ecosystem.

4. Resolvers are a core component of Symbiotic’s slashing design, echoing the earlier slashing committee model from EigenLayer. Read more about their architecture and design implications.

5. Watch Robert Drost, Executive Director of the Eigen Foundation, discuss the ethos behind verifiable compute and its role in the future of decentralized infrastructure.

6. EigenLayer has shipped its Apps Dashboard, marking a bold step toward platform status by showcasing applications built atop its AVS ecosystem.

7. Learn more about Symbiotic’s new narrative: universal staking.

AVS & Restaking Ecosystem

News on the latest AVS partnerships, feature releases, and innovations in the restaking ecosystem

1. Jordan dives deep into zkTLS and explains why it could become critical infrastructure for crypto adoption and emerging use cases.

2. ReTix launches as a secondary ticket marketplace built on Reclaim’s zkTLS, secured by EigenLayer and settled on Base.

3. Lagrange is introducing its native token, $LA, as part of its next phase of network growth.

4. Read the industry-wide conversation sparked by EigenLayer founder Sreeram on the forkability of crypto protocols and what it means for governance, credibility, and value capture.

5. Built on Opacity, Daisy has crossed $1M in revenue in just 7 months — a strong signal for the future of the creator economy on verifiable infrastructure.

6. Aethir launches pre-deposit vaults to enable ATH restaking on EigenLayer.

7. Plume is joining Skate’s shared liquidity AMM as part of its expanding ecosystem of supported chains.

8. Read why MegaETH’s breakthrough in throughput relies on EigenDA for scalable, verifiable data availability.

9. Explore how Ava Protocol is building a verifiable agent platform on top of EigenLayer’s AVS framework, leveraging shared security to power trustless agent coordination.

10. Sooho, a core infra partner in the Bank of Korea’s CBDC pilot, is launching an AVS with Othentic to track contributions and transparently distribute incentives.

11. Hyperlane unveils $HYPER, a natively multichain token built for seamless interoperability.

12. How far can you loop LRT strategies before the risks outweigh the rewards? Dive into this research report featuring a Monte Carlo simulation that explores exactly that.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #27 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, I'm on the road, so we're keeping things concise with a news-only edition.

As the restaking ecosystem continues to expand, the updates can sometimes feel a bit scattered. To make it easier to keep track, we'll be breaking the news into more structured sections, like Protocol Updates and AVS & Restaking Ecosystem Highlights, in future issues.

Still, there's plenty to be excited about this week:

EigenDA V2 – The EigenDA team has rolled out significant V2 upgrades, pushing throughput to an impressive 50mb/s. We’ve included a deep dive from the team on why this matters for the restaking landscape.

Skate’s First Rewards – The Skate team has issued its first-ever rewards and outlined plans for integrating slashing features – a big step forward for their ecosystem.

Also in this issue:

• SatLayer’s BTC-backed verifiable service ecosystem overview

• EigenLayer x SOON SVM accelerator program

• New restaking DeFi product with direct AVS access

• Brevis’ Pancake partnership and explorer

• … and more

Let’s dive in! 🚀

Protocol News

Latest updates on restaking protocol developments across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems

1. Take a closer look at the 7 BTC-backed verifiable services from SatLayer, featured in the official partnership thread.

2. EigenLayer has partnered with Soon SVM for the Soon Acceleration Incentive Program, offering incentives for bridging supported assets to SOON, reduced data availability costs through the EigenDA Rebate Program, and enhanced support for LST/LRT asset adoption.

3. Jito’s restaking product has surpassed $373 million in total value locked (TVL).

4. Learn more about the forkable design of the Eigen token, explained by EigenLayer founder Sreeram. This design enables verifiable services to fork and penalize dishonest operators without additional infrastructure, significantly enhancing their flexibility and reducing the cost of deployment.

AVS & Restaking Ecosystem

News on the latest AVS partnerships, feature releases, and innovations in the restaking ecosystem

1. Tanssi, the verifiable service framework for Symbiotic, has launched its testnet.

2. Explore the implications and significance of EigenDA v2's 50 mb/s throughput milestone in this article.

3. EigenExplorer has launched its first DeFi product, Area, enabling restakers to directly allocate their stake to AVSs without relying on third-party intermediaries like operators or LRTs.

4. Check out this video to learn why EigenLayer is driving the verifiable service movement and how it’s transforming the ecosystem.

5. Skate AVS has announced its first rewards issuance for restaking participants, along with a roadmap for adopting slashing features.

6. PancakeSwap has integrated Brevis' zk product to introduce a dynamic trading fee feature, enabling the DEX to access real-time user trading history and token holdings to calculate personalized trading fees for each user.

7. Discover how Openledger's AI data platform is designed to enable transparent data origin, model history, and payment insights.

8. Labyrinth is leveraging Fermah's newly launched Confidential Proving Delegation product to enable use cases like private-by-default accounts and compliant transactions.

9. Aligned has recently launched its zk proof aggregation service, utilizing proof recursion to combine multiple proofs into a single, verifiable proof on Ethereum. This approach significantly reduces verification costs by distributing them across all aggregated proofs.

10. Take a look at Brevis' Proof Explorer for real-time proof generation statistics and a comprehensive list of apps powered by Brevis' zk products.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #26 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, EigenLayer officially adds slashed asset redistribution to its roadmap as the next major feature following the main slashing release. We break down the implications of this feature and share our updated understanding of why it might be a significant positive for the EigenLayer ecosystem, unlocking a range of new design spaces for AVS.

Also in this issue:

• Interview with Layer’s CEO, Jake Hartnell

• Fermah’s Confidential Proving Delegation product

• EigenLayer’s Berlin Hacker Village

• … and more

Let’s go! 🚀

EigenLayer Announces Slashing Redistribution Feature to Its Roadmap

EigenLayer has announced slashing redistribution as part of its roadmap this week, a feature that has been a topic of active discussion in the EigenLayer forum over the past few months. We’ve previously covered the pros and cons of this design, which aims to reduce systemic risk while enhancing restaker incentives.

Slashing redistribution allows assets lost to slashing events to be redistributed according to a predetermined strategy, such as sending funds to a custodian address or directly back to honest operators or restakers. Unlike conventional burn mechanisms, this approach avoids permanent capital loss, reducing the systemic risks to Ethereum and other blue chip assets/ecosystems while potentially boosting restaker participation.

However, slashing redistribution introduces a significant trade-off: operators, who are the only party directly exposed to slashing, may face new forms of downside risk.

A Step Forward or a Step Back?

Initially, I was skeptical about the value of this feature.

While slashing redistribution can reduce systemic risk, it also reintroduces some of the complexities and incentive distortions that the community has sought to avoid:

1. Incentive Skew – Rewarding honest operators with redistributed assets can create predatory dynamics. Larger operators might attempt to game the system, targeting smaller competitors to capture their staked assets, undermining network fairness.

2. Economic Security Complexity – Redistribution adds layers of complexity to economic security pricing, potentially leading to less efficient markets where risks are harder to quantify and price correctly.

3. Lower Returns – Widespread adoption of redistribution could reduce overall returns. As stakes become commoditized and risk profiles blur, yields may shrink, reducing the appeal for restakers.

Opportunity for New Use Cases

However, my perspective has evolved as I’ve come to appreciate the design space that redistribution opens up.

Cap Protocol provides a compelling example. In Cap’s model, protocol users deposit assets to operators, who execute custom strategies to generate yield. Restakers, in turn, provide insurance for these operators, covering potential losses through redistributed stakes if an operator fails. This setup turns the redistribution mechanism into a critical piece of economic security, redefining the role of operators within the EigenLayer ecosystem.

This kind of composability aligns well with EigenLayer’s philosophy of empowering AVSs to define their own risk and reward dynamics. By leaving the asset redistribution strategy to individual AVSs, EigenLayer takes a more flexible, bottom-up approach, potentially unlocking a wide range of novel use cases.

Final Thoughts

While the redistribution model introduces risks around complexity and collusion, it certainly unlocks a broader design space that extends well beyond traditional staking.

Optionality has value. This seems to be a core principle for EigenLayer as it continues to push the boundaries of what restaking can achieve. While adoption may be gradual, the protocol shows no hesitation in rolling out avant-garde features that empower developers to redefine the roles and responsibilities of operators. It’s wild to think operators can move beyond pure infrastructure management and into asset management, fundamentally reshaping the economic dynamics of the ecosystem, and I’m excited to see what’s next.

Breaking the Boundaries of Decentralized Apps with Jake Hartnell, Layer

In this episode, Jake Hartnell, CEO and co-founder of Layer (WAVS), dives deep into the challenges of building full-stack decentralized applications, the role of verifiable off-chain services (AVSs), and why slashing might be the most underappreciated DeFi primitive. Here are the key takeaways:

• Full-Stack Decentralization: Layer aims to bridge the gap between smart contracts and full-stack decentralized, verifiable applications, using WebAssembly (WASM) to enable complex off-chain logic.

• Slashing as a DeFi Primitive: Slashing is the foundation for decentralized SLAs, insurance pools, and new forms of performance-based tokenomics.

• Oracles Beyond Price Feeds: Layer is betting on the long tail of oracles, including niche data sources like satellite feeds and real-world asset verification.

• Developer-Centric Platform: Layer drastically reduces the overhead for building AVSs, offering out-of-the-box support for multi-chain event ingestion, cryptographic signing, and cross-chain messaging.

• The Potential of WASM: Jake sees WASM as the future of decentralized infrastructure, offering unmatched performance and flexibility that could reshape the entire Web3 stack.

Read More

Jake’s X

Layer’s Website

News Bites

While the concept is similar to its EigenLayer counterpart, Symbiotic features a more expressive and DeFi-friendly vault architecture, enabling parties to design more sophisticated restaking strategies. Learn more about Symbiotic's vault architecture here.

Fermah is introducing the Confidential Proving Delegation product, allowing users to offload ZKP generation to external machines while ensuring the underlying data remains private.

EigenLayer has emerged as the leader in the verifiable service space, with its scope expanding and its potential becoming increasingly tangible.

EigenLayer is hosting its Berlin Hacker Village this June, offering mentorship, grants, and direct support from the EigenLayer team.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #25 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we sat down with Zeru Finance CEO Ashutosh to explore a fresh approach to onchain reputation—one that stands in contrast to Predicate, the AVS known for its programmable and objective transaction policies. Zeru takes a different path, leveraging AI models trained on both onchain and offchain data to derive user behavior scores. Their broader vision? A decentralized network of community-trained AI reputation agents. It’ll be fascinating to watch how these two models evolve and diverge.

Also in this issue:

• Two new restaking dashboards

• EigenDA achieves sub-30s latency

• Soubhik’s take on EigenLayer’s role in verifiability

• Kelp DAO’s smart contract bug

• … and more

Let’s go! 🚀

AI Powered Reputation AVS — Zeru Finance

We’ve covered Predicate before — the AVS building programmable, expressive transaction policies with institutional-grade data feeds. It empowers protocols to define their own rules and interpret data however they see fit.

Zeru, by contrast, takes a more opinionated route to solving a similar problem: how can we make trust programmable?

Rather than offer modular tools for interpreting data, Zeru aggregates a broad set of signals — onchain and off — and feeds them into a behavior-centric AI model that outputs a Zcore, a standardized reputation score. The end goal is to make this score useful for everything from undercollateralized lending to employment verification.

The approach is ambitious and certainly comes with its challenges. Here’s a breakdown of our discussion with Ashutosh, Zeru’s CEO, about the project’s architecture, tradeoffs, and open questions.

1. Beyond On-Chain Data

At the foundation of Zeru’s model is a structured view of what constitutes reputation. Instead of focusing solely on wallet activity or DeFi interactions, it defines five distinct paradigms:

• Financial: credit scores, bank account details, asset ownership

• Societal: user ratings (Uber, Airbnb), social media engagement

• Identity: KYC/KYB status, biometric or decentralized identity

• Professional: employment history, academic credentials

• Onchain behavior: DAO voting, lending history, restaking activity

This model aims to capture a broader and more holistic view of a user’s track record. It borrows heavily from how risk is measured in traditional industries, bringing that logic into the crypto-native world.

Rather than trying to compress everything into one number, Zeru is building a modular scoring framework — one that protocols can query for different dimensions of trust depending on their needs. While ambitious, the model remains grounded in pragmatic composability.

2. A Neural Network That Scores You

Whereas Predicate leaves policy logic entirely in the hands of the client, Zeru chooses to standardize its approach. It uses a neural network trained on behavioral data to derive a probabilistic score — one that reflects not just what users have done, but how they’ve behaved over time across multiple vectors. The model can identify traits like risk-seeking or conservatism, and surface signals that might not be obvious from raw onchain data.

Zeru positions this not as a fixed “credit score” but as a flexible reputation profile. The Zcore is just one dimension — protocols can also query specific attributes that may be more relevant for their context. This setup allows for standardization without sacrificing adaptability.

3. Turning Scoring into a Game: Competing Agents for Reputation Models

Zeru’s V2 introduces a layer of decentralization in how reputation models are constructed and evaluated. The system will feature scoring agents — independently developed models, either by the Zeru team or community contributors, each trained on different behavioral assumptions.

These agents will compete in a live environment, with rewards going to those whose models most accurately predict real-world outcomes like defaults or protocol retention. End users or applications can choose which agents to trust, effectively creating a market for reputation logic.

This framework reduces the risk of a single, biased definition of what "good behavior" looks like. It turns scoring itself into a competitive process, allowing new approaches to be tested and validated over time.

4. Breaking the Adoption Barrier: Focused Use Cases and Revenue Model

While Zeru’s architecture is thoughtful, the bigger challenge lies in adoption. The onchain reputation space is littered with projects that had technically sound designs but failed to gain meaningful integration.

Zeru is aware of this, and is focusing its go-to-market strategy around concrete, high-friction use cases: employment verification, undercollateralized lending, and vendor reputation. These are categories where trust matters, and where reputation-based decision-making is already part of the workflow — even if it’s currently slow, opaque, or expensive.

The monetization model is SaaS-based: API calls for reputation queries, and per-verification fees for enterprise use cases. The goal is to offer both cost and speed advantages over traditional verification systems while maintaining trust through decentralized validation.

Zeru is already in conversations with early clients, and building out the infrastructure required to support real integrations. Their success will hinge not just on how accurate the Zcore is, but whether it can reduce risk or unlock access in ways that protocols or employers find meaningful.

Zeru presents a compelling alternative to the current simple, centralized identity and reputation services in crypto. Rather than relying on one-off heuristics or simplistic scoring models, it offers a layered framework for quantifying behavior and surfacing trust — while still allowing for subjectivity and evolution through scoring agents. The ultimate goal, of course, is to package trust into programmable, composable, and context-aware product — without sacrificing fairness or neutrality. Whether that vision takes root will depend less on the strength of the model itself, and more on whether protocols and institutions decide they need what Zeru is offering.

Read more

• Zeru Finance’s website

• Ashutosh’s X

News Bites

a41, an institutional staking provider, launches the restaking.risk Dashboard — offering expanded categorization and in-depth analysis of individual AVS architectures and their security features.

EigenDA V2 reduces blob commitment latency from 10 minutes to 30 seconds, with plans to bring it down to 10 seconds soon.

EigenExplorer launches V2 of the EigenLayer AVS dashboard, featuring new tools like rewards analytics and portfolio tracking.

Read Soubhik’s take on how EigenLayer represents the crucial second half of the verifiability landscape — securing programmable verifiability through economic guarantees, in contrast to the mathematical verifiability offered by ZK.

Transaction speed and verifiability are the mid-term endgame for the Ethereum ecosystem — and everything seems to be converging toward that over the next year. The dots are connecting…

If you're restaked in Kelp, note that a bug in the minter contract has been identified. As a result, deposits and withdrawals are currently paused. Stay tuned for updates and review your positions accordingly.

You can now explore and ask about EigenLayer’s documentation, smart contracts, and Hello World reference architecture through the DeepWiki interface.

Quote to ponder: "Verifiability of both data and execution is the foundation of a trustworthy and efficient financial system."

EigenFoundation introduces the Grants Oversight Council to formally guide capital allocation and support ecosystem growth.

We’ve covered it before, but Soneium (Sony’s blockchain) has just released more details on its Fast Finality Layer — leveraging AltLayer and EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #24 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we caught up with Luke from EigenLayer and got confirmation on some exciting news: five AVSs are set to enable slashing and rewards by the end of Q2. Things are really starting to heat up.

We’re also dropping a new episode of the Re:Staking Podcast, featuring Boris from Aligned, where we dive into how they’re leveraging EigenLayer’s verifiable service architecture to build the zk verification layer for Ethereum — cutting proof verification costs by 90%. This tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks for zk adoption to date.

Also in this issue:

• Symbiotic’s $29M Series A

• EtherFi’s move into cash services and neobank expansion

• Nader’s latest thoughts on the future of verifiable services

• EigenLayer’s new ecosystem map

• … and more.

Let’s go! 🚀

5 AVS to Adopt Slashing in Q2

Immediately after the slashing feature’s mainnet release — and once the initial excitement fades — the real question becomes: which AVSs will actually adopt slashing, and when?

According to Luke, Head of AVS Business Development at EigenLabs, we should expect at least five AVSs to implement slashing and begin issuing rewards before the end of Q2 — within the next two months. This marks an important transition from slashing as a theoretical mechanism to slashing as a live, enforceable system that secures real services.

Among the first wave, Infura’s Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN) and LayerZero are confirmed to be part of the lineup. Both are well-known names with significant infrastructure footprints, and their participation could set the tone for broader AVS adoption.

As slashing moves from roadmap to reality, the coming months will make clear which AVSs are truly serious about economic security — and which are not. More importantly, this also marks a turning point for restaking yields. With slashing in place, rewards will be better aligned with real work and real risk — and I’m sure the market will appreciate seeing some hard-earned returns on their restaked assets.

The Proof Verification Layer for Ethereum with Aligned

Aligned is addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap: proof verification cost.

While zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have unlocked powerful new possibilities for scaling, privacy, and trust minimization, verifying those proofs directly on Ethereum remains prohibitively expensive. Aligned tackles this challenge head-on as an Autonomous Verifiable Service (AVS) within EigenLayer — making proof verification cheaper, faster, and massively scalable.

The mission is simple but critical: accelerate the adoption of ZK and Ethereum by making proof verification economically viable.

1. Moving Proof Verification to a Verifiable Service

The point of a verifiable service is to make trust-minimized computation either cheaper, faster — or both.

That’s exactly the core of Aligned’s model. It provides the missing middleware for the ZK stack: a decentralized network of operators that verifies proofs off-chain, signs the results with BLS signatures, and posts aggregated attestations back to Ethereum.

This design reduces verification gas costs by up to 90% while preserving the on-chain guarantees developers depend on.

2. Economic Security Borrowed from Ethereum via EigenLayer

Aligned wouldn’t exist without EigenLayer. As an AVS, it leverages EigenLayer’s restaked ETH to secure its network of proof verification operators.

With over 2.7 million ETH restaked and 56 active operators, Aligned ranks among the largest AVSs by total value secured. EigenLayer’s economic security ensures that operators are properly incentivized to verify proofs honestly and at scale.

3. Enabling New ZK Use Cases Once Considered Impossible

The high cost of on-chain verification has long been the gating factor for many ZK-based applications — including trustless bridges, identity systems, and ZK machine learning.

By dramatically reducing these costs, Aligned unlocks use cases that were previously out of reach. A real-world example: Aligned powers the first-ever trustless Mina-to-Ethereum bridge, verifying Mina’s “Kimchi” proofs that would otherwise be too expensive to validate directly on Ethereum.

4. PMF & Revenue Model

One of the strongest signals that Aligned is on the right track? They’re their own first customer.

Aligned was born out of necessity. Its parent company — Lambda Class, a venture studio and deep tech engineering firm based in Argentina — wanted to build products that relied on zero-knowledge proofs. But the cost of on-chain proof verification made many of those ideas economically impossible. The solution? Build the missing piece of infrastructure themselves.

Aligned’s core customer is the developer — the builders of ZK-powered apps, rollups, and protocols. Its subscription-based revenue model allows these projects to stake Align tokens for access to verification services, with operators paid in Align or ETH. A dual staking mechanism and slashing protections via EigenLayer are on the roadmap to reinforce security and long-term alignment.

“We like to say we’re like a microservice for Ethereum — optimized for a specific task, but secured by Ethereum’s economic guarantees.”

Many verifiable services aren’t like the shiny new L1s that chase attention and headlines — and that’s what I like about them. They’re focused on building honest, functional businesses with real utility and staying power.

For Aligned, the bet is clear: a future where zero-knowledge-based verification quietly powers nearly every application we use. And that future feels closer than most people expect.

Learn More

Boris’ X

Aligned Website

News Bites

Symbiotic’s $29 million Series A financing, led by Pantera Capital, marks a significant milestone for the restaking sector and highlights the direction in which the industry is moving.

With its EigenLayer integration, Kite AI unlocks decentralized validation for AI assets and inference results — secured by its distributed operator network.

Check out Pratik’s article on zkTLS and why it is becoming a key vertical for our space.

Nader expands on the evolving Web3 infrastructure stack and discusses how the verifiable compute paradigm could drive greater developer adoption.

EigenLayer is giving out $2.5k for great ideas — submit yours to the Verifiable App Awards!

EtherFi, a leading LRT protocol, just unveiled its card business, marking its first step toward a neobank model — and potentially driving more assets into restaking yield opportunities.

Bondless (by zkSync), the partner responsible for verifying EigenLayer’s slashing transactions, has published its first whitepaper.

Curious where to restake? This ecosystem map breaks down the AVS landscape.

Verifiable services are showing up everywhere — EigenLayer AVS now powers anti-cheat engines for matches between chess grandmasters.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #23 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week’s headline is, of course, the mainnet launch of EigenLayer’s slashing feature. But that’s not all — we also sat down with Predicate’s Founder and CEO, Nikhil Raghuveera, to dive into why compliance needs programmable trust, and how EigenLayer helps Predicate stay credibly neutral in a multi-polar world.

Also in this issue: Human Network expands into Uganda, Layer partners with Gaia on verifiable research agents, Sui integrates with Babylon’s BTC restaking, Othentic rolls out multichain support, and more.

Let’s go! 🚀

Off-Chain Rulebook for the On-Chain World

Compliance, the boring ol’ subject that became trendy around 2021 and vanished in the feat of gaining relevance. Companies like Stripe treated it as one of the most important bottlenecks, while others saw it as fundamentally incompatible with the crypto ethos. Predicate was born between the tension of these movements and spearheaded a way forward. What’s different about their view of compliance, and why should it matter more than the many who came before?

I had the opportunity to chat with Nikhil Raghuveera, founder and CEO of Predicate, and we unpacked Predicate’s founding journey — what they’re building, why it’s resonating, and where it’s heading.

1. Tackling Compliance via Expressiveness

Predicate doesn’t see the new era of compliance as a box-checking exercise or a KYC collection ritual. Instead, they think in terms of policies — customizable logic that can be defined and enforced programmatically. Rather than forcing users through rigid KYC pipelines, developers can now define nuanced pre-transaction rules based on things like jurisdiction, transaction type, address reputation, or even time of day.

The goal is simple: give builders full expressivity to implement exactly the rules their use case demands. That flexibility unlocks a virtually infinite design space and enables Predicate to plug into partners like TRM, layering compliance logic over diverse data sources. Suddenly, this isn’t just about compliance anymore — it’s about programmable control. Predicate can enforce minting rules for stablecoins, create custom filters for privacy-preserving bridges, or apply institutional-grade risk controls, all before a single transaction hits the chain.

2. Why Censorship Resistance Is Non-Negotiable

If Predicate were just another centralized middleware startup offering compliance APIs, none of this would matter. But they’re not. The team has a hardline stance: if you want policy infrastructure to matter — to actually scale globally — it must be censorship-resistant. No one, not even Predicate, should be the arbiter of which policies can or can’t exist.

So they flipped the model. Predicate isn’t policy-as-a-service. It’s an open, on-chain system where any project, developer, or DAO can define and enforce their own policies, no gatekeeping required. That neutrality is crucial for global adoption — a stablecoin issuer in Nigeria shouldn’t be beholden to rules set by a Delaware C-corp. Policy logic must reflect the intent of the builder, not the limitations of the provider.

3. From Aleo to Uniswap: Early Traction and Use Cases

Predicate is already live, with its first production implementation on Aleo. Transactions bridging from Ethereum to Aleo are now pre-checked by Predicate — a crucial upgrade for privacy-focused chains where compliance isn’t just sensitive, it’s existential.

Next up: Uniswap and Plume. Uniswap is integrating Predicate for selective enforcement within its v4 hooks architecture. Plume, an RWA-focused rollup, is taking a more centralized approach. What’s notable is how Predicate handles both extremes: DAO-led governance or top-down project teams. That flexibility is proving to be a key differentiator.

As more applications evolve from simple interfaces to structured economic zones, Predicate’s ability to enforce business logic before execution — without compromising decentralization — becomes increasingly attractive.

4. No Token, No Slashing — Yet

Predicate is built on EigenLayer, but you won’t find a token, slashing, or fee switch — at least not yet. Like Opacity, they’re following a playbook that’s quietly becoming the new standard among the AVSs: prove utility first, evolve the economics later.

Today, their operator network is small, permissioned, and intentionally lightweight. This phase is about building a credible, product-driven AVS — not papering over a weak product with token incentives. Down the line, Predicate may activate slashing, introduce rewards, or experiment with token mechanics — but only if the demand is there and the model makes sense.

The long-term goal is clear: economic and governance control must move from the company to the network. If the policy layer is going to be real infrastructure, it has to be credibly neutral. And neutrality starts with giving the ecosystem — not a single company — the keys to the machine.

In a world where every crypto product is scrambling for yield, Predicate quietly positions itself as something more fundamental: programmable rules for the internet of value. The boring compliance layer? Maybe. But also, maybe, the most important thing we haven’t gotten right — until now.

Learn More:

• Nikhil’s X

• Predicate’s Website

• Predicate’s X

News Bites

You’ve probably already seen the big news this week: EigenLayer’s slashing feature is now live on Ethereum mainnet, making the protocol feature-complete. The next milestone is adoption—with Infura’s DIN and LayerZero integrations leading the way.

Infura’s DIN AVS is now live on testnet. It’s one of the few AVSs set to support slashing from day 1.

Explore a different perspective on slashing from EigenLayer’s competitor, Symbiotic.

Human Network, a decentralized identity and payment protocol secured by EigenLayer, has completed its first transaction in Uganda.

Layer, an AVS framework, has announced a collaboration with Gaia Network to build a verifiable research agent network.

Curious about how Babylon’s BTC restaking network works under the hood? Check out this deep dive from Zellic.

Sui is joining Babylon’s BTC restaking protocol, expanding its reach into Bitcoin-backed security.

Othentic rolls out multichain support to power the next wave of AVS projects.

Check out Cap’s founder Benjamin on DeFi Dad’s podcast. Cap is a stablecoin protocol built on EigenLayer’s shared security. Unlike traditional setups, Cap’s operators generate their own yield strategies and compete against one another.

EigenLayer’s Sepolia testnet is now live, offering a more stable experience than the previous Holesky testnet.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #22 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

We're diving deep this week into the world of verifiable service frameworks with Othentic, arguably the most knowledgeable team launching AVSs in EigenLayer, with a 40+ deployment track record and accelerating growth. While most teams merely participate in restaking, Othentic lives in it. If you want to hear a battle-tested perspective on current and future restaking trends, watch the interview featured in this issue!

Also in this issue: Brevis' Usual Money integration, Mellow's EigenLayer vaults, how to build a DEX on EigenLayer, launching an AVS in under 15 minutes, and more.

Let’s get into it! 🚀

The Verifiable Service Framework with Othentic

Othentic is rapidly becoming the most indispensable name in EigenLayer's ecosystem, crafting a toolkit that's quietly revolutionizing how verifiable services (AVSs) are built and deployed.

In my deep dive with Raz Peleg and Yash Saraswat, we uncovered four compelling themes shaping the future of AVSs — each balancing on the fine line between innovation and operational reality.

1. First Steps into the Verifiable Framework Jungle

Launching an AVS often means grappling with the formidable task of crafting a reliable consensus or verification layer. Teams face the daunting puzzle of ensuring that decentralized execution by operators is accurate and verifiable — a notoriously complex task that can stall projects indefinitely.

Othentic didn’t merely observe this hurdle; they stumbled through it firsthand. What began as Yarden’s personal side project — a humble Oracle AVS — quickly revealed the painful reality of developing from scratch, even with EigenLayer’s starter templates. Amidst a daunting sea of choices and endless configurations, Yarden experienced firsthand how overwhelming the process could be.

This pivotal moment sparked Othentic’s singular pivot, driving the team toward developing a standardized yet flexible framework akin to popular web development tools like React or Next.js.

2.Balance, a.k.a. How to Not Kill Creativity

Here's the tension: AVSs could theoretically be anything — from DeFi bots juggling yields to face-recognition attestation systems. How do you abstract enough to simplify, but not so much that creativity is stifled?

Othentic resolves this by establishing clear definitions for two crucial roles: 'task performers' (operators who execute tasks or transactions) and 'attesters' (operators who verify execution results).

By structuring AVSs into distinct execution and validation services, Othentic creates a powerful division of labor: developers define "what" should happen, while Othentic handles "how" it happens. Under this architecture, developers gain the freedom to innovate across wildly diverse use cases, transforming potentially overwhelming complexity into something manageable, exciting, and ready to scale.

3. Escaping the Airdrop Trap

Crypto loves an airdrop — but Raz and Yash argue that for AVSs to survive beyond fleeting hype, they must pivot from speculative token incentives to genuine revenue streams.

This means finding real-world product-market fit, a goal echoed consistently in our discussions. Raz and Yash openly acknowledged the tension between speculative tokenomics and sustainable business practices, spotlighting the Redstone Oracle as a prime example of rapidly securing meaningful market traction.

The big gamble is clear: AVSs delivering tangible value and revenue will dramatically outperform those reliant on short-lived token incentives. It's the essential existential question facing crypto’s business model in miniature.

4. Slashing and Operator Economics — The Next Frontier

Raz and Yash emphasize that for AVSs to scale meaningfully, they must confront the formidable challenge of slashing head-on.

However, effective slashing isn’t solely within the project's control. Teams require rich operational data and existing slashing patterns to correctly design their slashing mechanisms.

Othentic is fully immersed in this challenge, pushing beyond basic penalty frameworks. They envision customizable slashing logic, nuanced reputation scoring, and dynamic rewards, all available from day one, accelerating AVS teams' ability to test and refine their slashing strategies.

Raz and Yash painted a vivid picture — slashing isn't merely technical; it’s the economic bedrock of EigenLayer’s AVSs. Missteps here erode trust instantly, while getting it right fosters a transparent, sustainable competitive landscape for operators.

Othentic's journey is a gripping narrative about striking balances — technical robustness versus ease of use, economic viability versus innovative freedom. As they push further into slashing mechanisms and economic guardrails, they're defining the next chapter of the verifiable services revolution. Rightly so, they continue to aggregate network effects that come after 40+ AVS deployments, with data and operational patterns nobody has seen in the restaking ecosystem.

Read More:

• Othentic website

• Othentic ecosystem explorer

• Othentic docs

• Raz Peleg’s X

• Yash Saraswat’s X

News Bites

Brevis, an EigenLayer AVS focused on zk computation, is now being integrated by Usual Money to help distribute its $30 million in annual revenue (official announcement from Usual Money here).

A strong March for Othentic: shipping five major features and onboarding over 20 clients into the Othentic and EigenLayer AVS ecosystem.

Mellow has officially integrated with EigenLayer, launching curated EigenLayer AVS vaults that optimize yield based on users’ risk appetite.

With verifiable services, you can build anything — like Ishaan’s decentralized exchange architecture imagined on the EigenLayer stack.

Watch the deep dive and Q&A with Nader and Nelson on EigenLayer’s upcoming slashing release.

With more options emerging across AVS frameworks, Nader demonstrates how you can build an AVS in under 15 minutes using Layer’s WASM-based stack. The proliferation of verifiable services is quickly becoming a reality.

A major milestone for the Bitcoin restaking ecosystem: Babylon is launching its token release and genesis staking event.

Watch DeFi Dad’s interview with Symbiotic CEO Misha, where he discusses verifiable services, bootstrapping networks with Tanssi, and more.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #21 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

Slashing is going mainnet — you heard it right. This week we start off with the highly anticipated slashing mainnet release, which will happen on April 17th. We break down the importance of this major achievement and what's likely to unfold afterwards — will the adoption of slashing be swift or gradual, similar to the pattern observed during the rewards v2 rollout?

Also in this issue: Digg is using Opacity's zkTLS service, restaking risk research by P2P.org and TokenSight, Layer's WAVS framework launch, Eigen Summer Fellowship, and more.

Let’s get into it! 🚀

Slashing Goes Mainnet, What’s Next?

EigenLayer’s highly-anticipated slashing feature is set to launch on Ethereum mainnet on April 17th. This launch represents the final major milestone in the restaking protocol, placing restakers’ assets at genuine risk for the first time.

The heightened anticipation stems from the expectation that placing assets at risk will incentivize AVS projects to significantly increase reward issuance, thereby igniting the economic engine of restaking and accelerating protocol adoption. The critical question now is whether this new slashing mechanism will experience rapid adoption or if it will mirror the slower, incremental uptake observed with prior features like reward distribution.

The Optimistic View on Slashing Adoption

From EigenLayer's perspective, internal sources cautiously predict a potentially slow initial adoption, acknowledging that slashing represents a significant responsibility for many nascent AVSs. Su, EigenLayer's senior business development manager, emphasizes,

"We do not expect all AVSs to adopt slashing immediately or all at once. This process will likely unfold over time as AVSs gradually implement it into the protocol."

Nevertheless, there are strong reasons to be optimistic about adoption. A detailed review of EigenLayer’s slashing upgrade highlights that while both old and new slashing systems will coexist, the new mechanism represents a fundamental shift with substantial changes to user experience, incentive structures, system interfaces, and APIs. Consequently, AVS teams will likely find themselves compelled to adopt the new design, driven both by updated EigenLayer user interfaces and growing demand from ecosystem participants.

This is excellent news. Initially, I thought both slashing mechanisms would operate side-by-side indefinitely, with no clear guidance or incentives to transition. However, it now seems clear that once the new slashing mechanism goes live, adoption of this improved model will likely exceed expectations.

Key Changes in the Slashing Model

The most significant change is in how operators allocate restakers’ funds to AVS projects. Previously, operators could double-count the same assets as they are non-slashable, meaning a single pool of funds could be simultaneously delegated to multiple AVSs. This inflated the TVL figures, creating misleading incentives and inaccurate measures of AVS popularity and strength.

The new slashing model entirely eliminates this problematic double-counting. When operators designate a portion of restaked funds as slashable for a specific AVS, those funds will count exclusively towards that AVS alone. As a direct consequence, we should expect a substantial decline in reported TVLs for many AVSs, with figures now accurately reflecting genuine operator confidence and the true comparative advantage of each AVS.

What to Expect from Now

This shift will inevitably pressure AVSs to offer clearer, more substantial incentives. The era of easy or "free" liquidity for AVSs is likely coming to an end. Although practices like airdrop hunting and rewards farming will continue, these decisions will become far more rational and economically driven. Unless AVSs provide compelling reasons — whether through credible token airdrop potential or tangible rewards — their TVLs will likely decline significantly or stagnate at negligible levels.

For restakers and broader ecosystem participants, this development represents a highly positive turning point. With EigenLayer’s feature set now complete, market dynamics can finally shift toward healthier, more transparent incentives. Personally, I'm very optimistic that the mainnet launch of EigenLayer’s slashing feature will address past negative sentiment and align ecosystem incentives in a significantly better direction. Moving forward, we'll monitor adoption closely and provide detailed insights into the real-world impact of these changes.

News Bites

Watch Jordan’s video on why verifiability is essential in the era of agentic AI — and how EigenLayer plays a key role in enabling it.

TokenSight and P2P.org just published a study analyzing restaking risks and outlining approaches to quantify them.

Layer launched its WebAssembly-based AVS Builder, making it easier and faster for developers to stand up new AVSs.

Mellow Protocol — a restaking-based vault platform — is launching soon on EigenLayer.

ARPA, the only AVS consistently rewarding outside of EigenDA, is now Rewards v2 compliant and kicked off its Season 4 rewards on April 3.

Big news this week: Kevin Rose’s rebooted Digg is tapping into zkTLS via EigenLayer’s AVS, Opacity.

Othentic unveils its AVS MCP implementation, giving agents seamless access to verifiable services via a standardized interface.

EigenLayer has launched its Summer Fellowship — an 8-week paid builder program offering direct guidance from EigenLayer CEO Sreeram, Nader Dabit, and Gajesh.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #20 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

We start this week with an interview with Robert Drost, Ph.D., the CEO and Executive Director of the Eigen Foundation, who oversees roughly half of the EIGEN token supply. Robert is not your typical crypto degen. He comes from a multi-decade run at Sun Microsystems after earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, later founding his own networking startup, and eventually joining ConsenSys. Some might argue that Robert is too traditional, but I’d say he carries the lived experience of Silicon Valley — and, by extension, the history of computation itself. His firm belief in verifiable services is a strong dose of confidence in where we’re headed.

Also in this issue: Celo’s L2 transition, Sreeram’s take on EigenLayer’s focus, new AVS integrations, and more.

Let’s get into it! 🚀

Standing by Verifiable Services | Robert Drost, CEO of Eigen Foundation

Robert Drost isn’t your typical crypto executive. He’s not selling you coins, shouting from Twitter, or pivoting every quarter. With a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and a career spanning Sun Microsystems, ConsenSys, and founding high-performance networking startups, Drost brings a level of technical sobriety that’s rare in the space.

Today, he serves as CEO and Executive Director of the Eigen Foundation — the independent governance entity behind the EigenLayer protocol — overseeing roughly half of the EIGEN token supply. Together with Eigen Labs, the engineering arm led by visionary founder Sreeram Kannan, Drost is focused on something far more ambitious than another DeFi yield machine: building the foundational layer for a verifiable, trustless internet infrastructure.

1. The Verifiable Cloud

“The next generation of applications — not just crypto apps — will be verifiable by default.”

At the core of Robert’s thesis is the idea of a Verifiable Cloud — an architectural evolution that moves us from centralized, opaque cloud services to transparent, incentive-aligned infrastructure.

What I appreciate most is his clarity and firmness in his stance: EigenLayer isn’t a decentralized AWS alternative. Instead, It’s aiming to offer something better — something inevitable. In Robert’s view, we shouldn’t be thinking about competition with legacy infra; we should be expecting its deprecation. EigenLayer replaces centralized trust with cryptographic verification.

2. Four Flywheels of Growth

In Drost’s framing, EigenLayer’s core unlock is mapping the crypto paradigm — shared trust and consensus at the L1 — onto general-purpose software systems. The mission is to absorb $2 trillion of Web2 software revenue into Web3.

Of the four flywheels that represent EigenLayer’s growth strategy, the first two are already spinning. The latter two are now in active development — backed by a $150M+ war chest and an FDV of $1.5B worth of EIGEN tokens.

• Security Supply – EigenLayer is already over-provisioned in ETH security.

• Operator Marketplace – A decentralized marketplace where infrastructure providers compete to serve protocols.

• AVS Ecosystem – The buildout of Autonomous Verified Services across verticals (compute, AI, APIs, etc).

• Consumer Layer – A unified surface for identity, data, and assets — real usability for end users.

3. Governance Without Speculation

As head of the Eigen Foundation, governance is a major part of his job description. Drost's focus is shaping the EIGEN token around one core utility: off-chain forking.

Off-chain forking is one of EigenLayer’s most interesting innovations — and one whose importance few people truly grasp. It enables AVSs to fork independently during operator disagreements without the need to fork Ethereum itself. This model retains fundamental crypto-native guarantees while decoupling execution from L1-level coordination.

At the same time, the token is also used for growth. The Foundation has minted half the token supply to drive the aforementioned four flywheels — split roughly into thirds: airdrops for community alignment, strategic partnerships to strengthen the AVS ecosystem, and public goods initiatives to support broader Web3 infrastructure.

Learn More

• Robert’s X

• Eigen Foundation

News Bites

This week’s major news: Celo, a prominent L1, is transitioning into an Ethereum L2 and will use EigenDA as its data availability layer. Read Kydo’s analysis on why L2 migration is poised to become a major trend.

Watch this short clip of Lagrange CEO Ismael explaining why EigenLayer is the most effective way to bootstrap new decentralized infrastructure and applications.

Unmarshal, a new data indexing infrastructure focused on the AI vertical, announced its integration with EigenLayer this week.

Sreeram sets the record straight on whether EigenLayer has pivoted.

ZEX, a decentralized exchange bringing centralized exchange performance, is now live on testnet. ZEX is built on Zelluer — a fast-finality consensus and sequencer network secured by EigenLayer.

AVSs built with the Othentic stack can now be monitored and analyzed directly in the Othentic Hub.

Dextr, a decentralized and MEV-resistant order-matching network, is now live on testnet. It leverages EigenLayer’s economic security to secure its off-chain infrastructure.

In this a16z interview, EigenLayer CEO Sreeram shares his journey into crypto and the story behind founding EigenLayer.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #19 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we’re kicking things off with a podcast recorded live at ETHDenver featuring Hersh Patel from Opacity. If you’ve been following along, you already know Opacity is something special — its rapid rise grabbed my attention a few weeks back, and this conversation filled in a lot more details about the business. Hersh opens up about the company’s candid founding story, where Opacity stands today, and the ambitious future it’s charting. It’s a packed episode — you won’t want to miss it.

Also in this issue: Lagrange handling 75% of ZKsync’s proof workload, Mantle’s EigenLayer + EigenDA integration, DataHaven joining the EigenLayer ecosystem, and more.

Let’s get into it! 🚀

Let’s Flood the World with Verifiable Data | Hersh Patel, CEO of Opacity

Hersh Patel, better known online as EulerLagrange, is the CEO of Opacity — the zkTLS company we’ve previously featured in our newsletter.

At EthDenver, I sat down with Hersh to dive deeper into the questions I had around his personal founding story, Opacity’s evolving business model, and why he believes restaking is the best economic engine for the company.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Opacity. It feels like the original ethos of Web3 — challenge the incumbents, liberate data, and reduce transaction costs. Hersh’s story is especially compelling: from reverse-engineering Uber’s API in college, to thinking his idea was impossible, to finally having that “aha moment” when it all clicked. I think you’ll enjoy this one.

Here are the key ideas Hersh shared during our conversation:

1. The Poverty of Verifiability

Early in our conversation, Hersh introduced a striking phrase that sticks to me: “the poverty of verifiability.” It captures the shocking lack of verifiable data in our digital world — not just a Web3 problem, but a foundational flaw of the internet itself, and arguably a structural issue in society.

Today, the amount of verifiable data is laughingly small. The core challenge is that we can't bring off-chain data — like your Twitter handle or whether you have $5,000 in your bank account — on-chain in a trust-minimized and verifiable way.

Oracles don’t solve this. Most meaningful data is locked behind corporate APIs, walled off from third-party access. The only real path forward, according to Hersh, is zkTLS.

Opacity’s vision is bold: flood the world with verifiable data. If successful, it can not only enable new Web3 use cases but also dramatically reduce the transaction costs that pervade real-world systems.

2. Aligning Incentives for Data Sharing

Most approaches to verifiable data assume cooperation from data providers — but in reality, companies often have zero incentive (or even disincentives) to sign and share their data.

The key breakthrough for Opacity was realizing that zkTLS lets them bypass that entirely. Instead of waiting for companies to play ball, zkTLS leverages existing HTTPS APIs — allowing verifiability without requiring any changes from the data providers themselves.

This means immediate utility without having to rebuild the internet from scratch — and a much more realistic path for a real business.

3. The Surprise Use Cases

Some of the most interesting applications of Opacity’s tech weren’t even on Hersh’s radar at the start. They emerged organically:

• Daisy – TikTok influencers coordinating engagement for brand deals

• Earnify – Disrupting predatory payday lending by proving work hours via payroll data

• EarnOS – Enabling targeted advertising without intermediaries like Google Ads

All of these use cases share a common theme: valuable data is trapped behind intermediaries who extract rents. With verifiable data, direct and more efficient transactions become possible.

4. The SaaS Model + Restaking

Opacity takes a refreshingly simple approach to monetization — modeled closely after Plaid:

• Per-user-per-month pricing

• Focus on recurring revenue from high-traffic applications

• Already securing major deals using this model

It’s easy for business clients to understand and adopt, which gives Opacity a strong foundation to iterate from.

This model also aligns perfectly with EigenLayer’s restaking:

• Shared security is cheaper and more scalable than native token security

• It enables better incentive design across multiple blockchain ecosystems

• It allows for recruiting and incentivizing specific operator behavior (e.g., TEE requirements as one of the slashing conditions)

Learn More

• Hersh’s X

• Rubicon Podcast

• Opacity’s X

News Bites

Lagrange's Prover Network will start to handle 75% of ZKsync's capacity, a significant milestone in adoption and usage.

DataHaven, a project built by MoonBeam (Polkadot EVM project), announces its integration with EigenLayer. The platform provides high-volume verifiable data access for smart contracts.

Human Network's identity layer will soon go live on EigenLayer mainnet, inheriting 34.5M user credential data from the Human Passport product.

Watch Nader build an MCP server that serves AVS data. This could be interesting for anyone developing verifiable agents.

Read about how EigenLayer’s go-to-market strategy is taking shape, with major wins secured on Mantle and ZKsync.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #18 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we're mapping out a realistic timeline for restaking. The sector has spent too much time focusing on features—rewards, slashing, and more—but not enough on adoption. It's time to shift the conversation and chart a path toward a future where adoption is high and revenue is strong.

Also in this issue: RedStone’s EIGEN rewards, Predicate and Witness Chain crossover, L2beat-style scoring for AVSs, and a plethora of verifiable agent platforms.

Let’s dive in! 🚀

The Realistic Timeline for Restaking

Over the past year, I’ve consistently seen people question the purpose of restaking and the progress EigenLayer has made. Some of this is just FUD, but I also think it reflects a deeper concern — some aspects of restaking aren’t yet delivering what people expect.

A key reason for this skepticism is the disconnect between what’s being presented and what’s being experienced by users. EigenLayer has done an undeniably great job in marketing restaking, announcing feature releases, and onboarding AVSs—perhaps too good of a job. This creates a contrast: while the ecosystem sees clear momentum, what people actually care about is lagging behind — seeing their staked assets put to real work and generating meaningful rewards. More importantly, they want to see real revenue flowing from AVSs.

That’s where the big questions arise:

• Does restaking actually generate economic value?

• Is EigenLayer (and similar protocols) building the right products to drive revenue creation?

Of course, I believe restaking creates economic value—if it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. I’ve written before about its economies of scale, and I do think EigenLayer and other protocols are building the right products. But where we can improve is in communicating the timeline more effectively.

We need to move away from a timeline filled with feature releases and focus on a timeline of real adoption. That’s what we’re going to break down today.

The Timeline of Adoption

The timeline of adoption can be broken down into three stages — much like the Lean Startup framework:

1. Shipping the minimum viable product (MVP)

2. Finding the first set of customers

3. Scaling

What we’re experiencing today is a misalignment in what qualifies as the true MVP of restaking. Just like adding a camera and a powerful computer to your car doesn’t mean it can drive itself, simply launching rewards and slashing doesn’t mean restaking is fully functional.

The Minimum Viable Product of Restaking

The first real milestone is when a single AVS completes the full feature loop—real rewards and real slashing.

Real is the key word here. Some rewards exist today, but they’re minimal, and slashing remains largely theoretical. To some extent, you want the rewards to be exceptional and the pain to be painful. That’s why I don’t think mechanisms like operator ejection or redistribution — where the stake isn’t actually lost — are going to cut it.

In the early stages, slashing carries symbolic weight. It signals that staked assets carry real risk, forcing restakers to think critically about where they allocate capital and pushing AVSs to treat TVL as something more than free money.

The true MVP of restaking isn’t just about turning on features—it requires both real incentives and real penalties. Until that happens, restaking remains incomplete.

The Imitation Game

Once the first AVS successfully establishes a working economic model, others will copy. Right now, no one knows the optimal parameters for restaking. In this uncertainty, most projects are waiting for someone else to experiment first.

The moment one AVS successfully implements a full restaking loop, it sets a precedent — a baseline that others can imitate. I believe we need at least five AVSs adopting similar models before the imitation phase truly takes off.

The Scaling

Once the first few AVSs standardize their economic models, momentum kicks in. This is when restaking moves from an experimental concept to a viable, long-term mechanism in crypto, allowing scale economies to take over. The first two milestones are the hardest — until they’re reached, I wouldn’t even consider restaking a serious contender in the long-term crypto narrative.

Where Are We Now?

Right now, we’re still a long way from reaching the first milestone — meaning restaking is still pre-product-market fit.

I actually agree with most of the critics — the current projects integrating with restaking don’t yet prove real revenue generation. They’re experiments, not economic engines. And that’s fine! The skepticism isn’t misplaced. It’s just early.

The real question is whether we’re on track to cross these milestones. Due to turbulence on Holesky, the slashing feature is now projected to go live on mainnet in early April. On testnet, more than a month after the release of slashing and operator sets, only around two dozen AVSs — out of approximately 1,500 registered — have tested the idea, and meaningful data remains scarce.

Given this pace, I’d estimate the first AVS to complete the full feature loop sometime in Q2 or Q3 of this year — which is already ambitious. The second milestone, where multiple AVSs adopt the model, could realistically stretch into Q4 or even Q1 2026. That said, once the first milestone is reached, adoption will likely accelerate.

Until then, rather than just waiting and hoping, the best thing we can do is stay focused on building toward that first real test.

News Bites

You can now earn $EIGEN rewards if you have restaked into the RedStone AVS.

Listen to Eigen Foundation CEO Robert Drost’s presentation at Stanford, where he discusses new verifiable services and the evolution of computing paradigms.

Will we see more AVS crossovers? Witness Chain and Predicate have joined forces to introduce geolocation-based compliance pre-transaction checks.

Lagrange introduces its zkML libraries, designed to generate verifiable AI inference proofs.

Check out the new AVSbeat website for L2beat-style subjective AVS ratings across parameters such as slashing, interoperability, rewards, and more. Built by the team members of Opacity and Breadchain.

We have discussed the need for strategy curators given the overwhelming number of yield possibilities within the restaking ecosystem. Peteris shared an insightful thread on the necessity of curators and the different types of curator roles.

A Plethora of Verifiable Agent Platforms

Mother is integrating restaking. It is an AI agent platform that enables its agents to be secured by ETH.

Ensemble is an agent platform with a built-in AVS for agent task verification, built on the Othentic stack.

Autonome is following AltLayer’s playbook, enabling AI agents to be restaked and secured by a diverse range of assets.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #17 of the Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we're diving into scale and network effects — two powerful forces that have yet to be fully captured in Web3. These dynamics have propelled businesses like Amazon and Vercel to unprecedented heights, serving as the secret ingredients behind their compounding growth trajectories. Understanding the economics of scale is key to unlocking mass adoption in our industry.

Also in this issue: EigenLayer’s Eigen Games hackathon winner, EigenLayer’s $2.5 million security bounty competition, Predicate’s Alchemy integration, Jito TipRouter’s $284K February rewards, and more.

Let's go! 🚀

Scale Matters

Over the past week at EthDenver, I’ve been reflecting on the concept of Meta AVS (credit to Ron Turetzky for the name) — frameworks that build AVS — and their role in the evolution of decentralized frameworks.

Tracing the progression from L1 to L2 frameworks and now to verifiable services, a clear pattern emerges: scale has been the defining factor in both the struggles of L1 framework businesses and the initial success of L2 frameworks. As we turn our focus to verifiable services, scale will once again be critical — not just in determining the viability of these frameworks, but in reshaping the fundamental structure of our industry.

The Scale Problem in Framework Businesses

Historically, framework businesses in Web3 have struggled due to their poor scale economics.

The first generation of Web3 frameworks — designed to help developers build L1 networks — has achieved only marginal adoption over a decade, with frameworks like Tendermint Core, CosmWasm, and Substrate seeing just a few hundred deployments. This limited scale can be attributed to high security requirements, rigid architectures, and liquidity fragmentation. Simply put, L1 frameworks were not built for mass adoption.

L2 frameworks have achieved greater scale. In just 2–3 years, we’ve seen hundreds to thousands of L2 deployments, with deployment platforms like Conduit alone launching over 300 L2s. This rapid expansion is driven by localized and modular execution environments combined with a more flexible verification model, enabling application-specific customizations.

That said, L2 frameworks still fall short of an ideal scale economy. While they improved execution throughput and modularity, their focus has largely remained on financial transactions and smart contract scalability. They were not designed for general-purpose cryptographic verifiability beyond state transitions.

The Scale Economy of Verifiable Services

Verifiable services represent a fundamental step up in scale. Instead of hundreds or thousands of deployments, we are now looking at tens of thousands or even more. EigenLayer alone has more than a few hundred AVS on testnet after roughly one year of existence.

Unlike L1s and L2s, which have monolithic and highly rigid application structures, verifiable services are largely customized to their specific functions while benefiting from existing data availability and proof generation services. This flexibility fosters application diversity, which in turn drives scale.

This is where Meta AVS becomes particularly interesting as a business. Without scale, a framework and service business is difficult to justify. However, with scale, other than the obvious revenue potential, it also generates network effect. Once critical mass is reached, new services emerge organically as part of the framework’s evolution.

The best analogy comes from Web2: Vercel and Next.js. Next.js, as the most popular web application framework, has reached 7M monthly downloads and 800K active deployments on its sibling company Vercel. Vercel itself, originally just a deployment service, evolved into a “frontend cloud”, integrating services like observability, fluid compute, AI inference, and more. None of this would have been possible without scale, which allowed Vercel to vertically integrate into the compute stack and SDK layer that developers interact with daily.

We’re seeing this play out in real-time within restaking, the forefront of verifiable service development. Othentic, an AVS framework and deployment service, has spent the past year defining its verifiable service framework and is now shipping operator observability tooling. With roughly 40 AVS developments under its belt and scale compounding, Othentic’s vertical integrations are poised to transform both the operator and staker landscape.

I remain extremely bullish on what scale will bring to the restaking ecosystem. I believe we have underestimated the potential of verifiable service framework businesses — not because the concept itself is flawed, but because we have often overlooked the scale factor. In reality, what Othentic, Layer, EigenLayer, and other verifiable service developers are building could have a significantly larger impact than most anticipate.

Slowly, then suddenly. The log curve will emerge for any business that scales, and this time, it may be verifiable services and Web3.

News Bites

Take a look at the Eigen Games winners. They are more interesting and diverse than you think — verifiable GPU performance services, AI video editing AVS, and P2P order books. Scale is here, and scale is now.

A $2.5 million security bounty competition for EigenLayer’s smart contracts is open until March 28th.

Learn more about stacking EigenLayer AVS to build verifiable AI agents.

Predicate's Policy AVS is now available for integration on Alchemy’s Integration Marketplace.

Read the follow-up research on the risks associated with the slashed asset redistribution mechanism that we have posted 2 weeks ago.

Learn more about UngateAI, an AVS built on the Othentic framework, leveraging trusted execution environments and proof generation to ensure secure and verifiable agent execution.

Jito’s TipRouter has generated more than $284K in rewards for its restakers in roughly 40 days since its inception on January 30, 2025.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #16 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week we explore why restaking can be a powerful mechanism for established protocols, expanding beyond its initial focus on new and growth projects. This perspective brings a strong dose of optimism to the restaking narrative, but also highlights the need for restaking protocols to adapt to evolving market demands.

As EthDenver wraps up, we've included Sreeram's analysis on EigenLayer's consumer adoption plan, TADA's EigenLayer integration, Babylon's first airdrop, and more.

Let's dive in! 🚀

Restaking is Eating the World

Have you seen the architecture of Unichain, Uniswap Foundation's newest creation?

Within this Ethereum L2 that hosts the renowned decentralized exchange, there's a new architecture called UVN (Unichain Validator Network) that decentralizes the conventional centralized sequencer.

Through the lens of restaking, it's essentially a custom node network requiring economic security to guarantee its service. Unsurprisingly, UVN will use UNI tokens to secure its network instead of ETH.

But why not?

Who needs restaking? (a revisit)

Uniswap Foundation's decision to skip ETH and restaking protocols like EigenLayer makes a lot of sense. As the world's largest DEX, it has little incentive to use external tokens when $UNI could use additional utility. Building a custom staking and restaking infrastructure is a marginal expense from their treasury.

This aligns with what we've observed before. Restaking currently offers the most value to new and growth-stage projects without established tokens.

• For new projects, using ETH to bootstrap the network and validate the PMF is reasonable.

• For growth projects, they can leverage restaking to avoid building their own infrastructure and gradually transition from ETH-based restaking to native token staking.

In the previous reasoning, large, established projects seemingly don't need restaking — they have the resources to build infrastructure themselves.

But I realized that I missed something important. Established projects actually have strong incentives to adopt restaking:

1. Established projects have strong incentives to foster an ecosystem. Restaking can quickly help to bootstrap a group of economically aligned allies.

2. Restaking is great for apps. 99% of the time you don't need to build an L1. The path of building the app first then vertically integrating into the protocol stack is becoming a norm.

3. Restaking is great for the native token that has established social consensus but can use additional utility.

Now the catch: I don't believe that established projects have enough incentives to use existing restaking infrastructure except for co-marketing opportunities. Instead, they'll likely to build their own systems to drive token demand and bootstrap ecosystem projects that restake with their token.

Consider Jito, an established Solana project with its own off-chain network (the Tip Router) secured by its native token, which also secures numerous new Solana projects. Similarly, HyperLiquid — a utility-first DEX — has developed a fast-growing ecosystem. I believe HyperLiquid restaking is inevitable.

The Future of Restaking: Beyond Established L1s?

The opportunity I previously overlooked was assuming that large projects wouldn’t use external assets to secure their infrastructure. In reality, they likely won’t — but restaking’s value prop still holds.

Restaking is a powerful tool for ecosystem growth, enabling new projects to attract capital by leveraging the yield-seeking behavior of token holders from established networks. Over time, as these projects grow, they shift from using external tokens for restaking to issuing their own, gradually building self-sustaining ecosystems. This cyclical process not only accelerates project maturity but also reinforces the broader restaking landscape, making it a sustainable and scalable mechanism for long-term expansion.

But are existing restaking protocols prepared to evolve with the market demand?Currently, most restaking solutions are designed for major L1s like Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. However, the most innovative developments are emerging from alt-L1s that began as successful applications — like Unichain and HyperLiquid. This shift signals a fundamental change in how we should think about blockchain infrastructure and restaking.

For restaking to reach its full potential, the next generation of protocols must embrace:

• Chain-agnostic architecture that supports both emerging and established ecosystems.

• Robust native token support, reducing dependence on major L1 assets.

• Direct interfaces between restakers and networks/AVS, minimizing intermediaries and strengthening community alignment.

Among today’s restaking leaders, EigenLayer stands out as the only one actively testing the boundary beyond the L1. Its $EIGEN token design, featuring off-chain forking capabilities, effectively positions it as a quasi-L1 — making it more attractive to established projects.

As the industry reconsiders the role of L1s following the Ethereum and Solana debate, it’s clear that restaking will continue evolving beyond traditional L1 structures. L1s as dominant Web3 products may rise and fall with market sentiment, but restaking as a mechanism will likely survive forever.

News Bites

Sreeram at ETHDenver: Driving consumer adoption through cryptographic trust in AI. A core theme for EigenLayer in 2025.

An intuitive chart illustrating the Othentic AVS framework — a valuable resource for aspiring AVS developers.

Not widely discussed yet, but keep an eye on TADA’s integration with EigenLayer. The ride-sharing company, focused on the Southeast Asian market, reported $20M in revenue in 2024.

Jito reaches $152.6M in restaking TVL — still marginal compared to other ecosystems, but good news for restakers as TipRouter is generating impressive fees with little competition.

Babylon, the BTC restaking protocol, is launching its airdrop soon. Check out their ecosystem architecture and airdrop plans.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam and Ethan

Thanks to Alex and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #15 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week, we begin with an analysis of the potential slashed-asset redistribution feature that anyone can implement for restaking. Will it benefit everyone, or will it disrupt the restaking market equilibrium and security?

Also featured this week: EigenLayer’s big AVS renaming announcement (spoiler: it’s still called AVS but with a twist), Lido V3’s early adopter program (for those holding stETH), a strategy boasting 55% APY on Jito Restaking, UMA’s plan to integrate restaking into their oracle for stronger incentives, and much more.

Let's dive in! 🚀

Should Slashed Assets Be Redistributed?

Redistributing slashed assets could change how we think about penalties in the restaking ecosystem. Could this feature represent a new way to protect restaker interests while maintaining a sufficient level of economic security?

This week, new research was published on the EigenLayer forum outlining a mechanism that could be implemented alongside EigenLayer's core architecture. It would redistribute the slashed assets from a faulty operator to other healthy operators, thereby retaining asset security.

Tell me more about the slashed asset redistribution

The existing slashing design operates on a straightforward principle: when a slashing event occurs, staked assets are burned completely. This creates a real economic penalty for both the operator at fault and the restakers who chose that operator.

Under the proposed redistribution design, instead of burning slashed assets, they would be redistributed to other operators in the set. Under this system:

• Only operators face penalties.

• Restakers' assets transfer to other operators rather than getting burned.

• The network's total economic security remains intact.

One note is that this mechanism can be implemented by anyone. It is essentially a wrapper on top of the existing restaking strategy that has redistribution logic built into it. The wrapper token gets restaked and slashed, while the original asset remains intact. Therefore, it is highly likely this feature would be built by ecosystem participants first rather than by EigenLayer itself.

Who would benefit from redistribution?

Restakers appear to gain the most. By redistributing slashed assets rather than burning them, restakers would not face direct penalties — making restaking feel like a “free lunch.” Their only real cost is the potential opportunity cost of missing out on higher yields elsewhere, but their principal remains protected regardless of slashing events. (Note: Although a single restaker might benefit from never needing to worry about losing the asset, the restaker group’s overall interest could be harmed, as their stake is now less valuable.)

LRTs also stand to benefit. Since LRTs can spread stake across multiple operators, when one operator is slashed, part of the penalized funds would be redistributed to the remaining, healthy operators. This design also reduces liquidation risk on lending platforms because the underlying assets stay intact.

Finally, AVSs could benefit by maintaining a stable level of nominal economic security regardless of slashing incidents. If restakers see no downside to staking, AVSs may attract more participants and increase overall security.

It sounds like everyone benefits… What’s the catch?

Despite the upside, some AVSs might worry about the bad incentives redistribution creates. If operators who aren't slashed automatically receive the slashed assets, they might be tempted to team up and slash competitors just to grab those extra funds.

Ecosystem-wise, the skew in incentives could undermine overall trust and prevent it from reaching a sustainable equilibrium and adoption. Specifically:

• If economic security (TVL) is primarily used as a Sybil resistance mechanism, the sheer volume of capital might drive down returns, making this added complexity less appealing.

• In certain non-dPOS systems, there may also be a strict requirement to slash the actual staked asset, rendering redistribution strategies incompatible.

• Lastly, excessive customization can confuse users and reduce overall adoption, as the costs of understanding novel security models can be significant.

How would redistribution impact the overall security of the restaking ecosystem?

In short, it’s too early to tell.

Currently, the adoption of slashing on testnet (which is a really bad metric) is precisely 0, and to even consider something like redistribution, we would need some slashing adoption on testnet or mainnet, the redistribution token wrapper accepted by slashing-enabled AVS, and then we can empirically assess the effect on the broader ecosystem.

It is similar to all other slashing-related features — such as operator ejection, freeze, or blacklist — as none have been tested, adopted, or implemented on mainnet yet.

Some worries remain. One of our community members wonders if redistribution creates a high probability of exogenous pressure to trigger slashing events, and whether this is a pathway towards operator collusion.

Finally, this debate raises a fundamental question: in a world where most capital providers aren't directly operating services, who should bear the penalty for attributable faults — the restaker or the operator or both?

Special thanks to our community members for contributing to the discussion: Beryl, Bowen, Brandon, Carson, and David.

News Bites

The ball has dropped. AVS is still AVS, but it now stands for Autonomous Verifiable Services. Read more about the AVS name change here.

Take a look at EigenLayer’s Operator Mainnet Campaign, an interesting source to learn more about institutional and homebrew operators and their competitive advantages.

Lido V3 EA program is now live. In the future, custom vaults can tap into restaking yield sources with stETH as the restaking asset.

UMA is introducing a joint research and integration initiative between Polymarket and EigenLayer (official blog post). This joint effort could potentially enable UMA’s data oracle to accept multiple assets, better aligning with the data feed and end users.

Holding LRTs? Explore Gauntlet’s LRT Market Risk dashboard to assess the health of your position.

Predicate AVS’s compliant bridge is now live on Aleo — a significant milestone in driving Predicate’s adoption.

The restaking APR game is now going multi-chain, and Jito’s TipRouter is leading the way.

Read Finality Capital’s thesis on Opacity AVS.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam and Ethan

Thanks to Alex and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #14 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

This week's content takes a different turn. For the first time, we sat down with Symbiotic's head of ecosystem, Felix Lutsch, to talk about Symbiotic's strategy and his personal take on restaking, competition, DeFi, and much more.

Also happening this week: EigenLayer's collaboration with Sentient to build domain-specific AI agents that help differentiate and judge subjective issues, including slashing. Pretty wild, right? We also have a podcast with Sreeram discussing real crypto apps, EtherFi's new rewards launch, CapLabs' restaking-backed stablecoin explainer, and more.

Let's dive in! 🚀

Symbiotic: finding balance between competition, neutrality, and innovation

After diving deep into EigenLayer for quite a while, we're switching things up this week with a fantastic conversation featuring Felix Lutsch, Symbiotic's Head of Ecosystem. Felix joined us to share his insights on where Symbiotic stands today and its vision for the future, along with his own perspectives on restaking, rewards, DeFi partnerships, and more.

Below you'll find the key insights from our conversation, but if you want to get the full breadth of the episode, watch the podcast from the link above!

You Cannot Resist the Emergence of DeFi

One thing that struck me long after the conversation was Felix's perspective on DeFi and Restaking.

• Restaking itself is innately a part of DeFi, having evolved organically from staking after Ethereum's PoS transition and Lido's emergence

• One key truth about crypto and DeFi is its unstoppable, permissionless nature. If DeFi is meant to happen, it will.

Given these two fundamental aspects, DeFi's evolution within the restaking ecosystem is inevitable.

Nonetheless, this isn't to say that Symbiotic is going all-in on DeFi. Quite the contrary. Currently, Symbiotic aligns closely with EigenLayer's strategy of staying neutral, but the project does show a slightly more welcoming stance toward DeFi activities through its Mellow partnership, which has been there since day one.

As the second-largest restaking protocol, Symbiotic still needs to balance its core focus — growing networks and helping new ones launch — but I can't imagine a restaking ecosystem with fewer DeFi integrations going forward. From where I stand, we're just at the beginning of this growth curve.

A common path for Networks

Of course, we can't skip the question about rewards, as almost all networks are still figuring out how to reward their infrastructure participants.

One particular insight from Felix that resonated with me is that we ask about rewards because there's no common roadmap for these experimental, flexible, and modular networks to reference. Being custom and unique to their niche markets and users, these networks can't simply follow the traditional L1 launch pattern: testnet, mainnet, improvement proposals, and hard forks. Some projects need to launch just a section of the network to test validity, while others require vast participation to get going.

Looking ahead, establishing a commonly understood progression path could not only help networks follow a more consistent pattern and bring transparency to network transitions - from points to tokens, from basic security to advanced features - but also help users better understand when these key milestones will unfold.

Lido v3 - The signal for diverse staking demands

Lido has traditionally been very risk-averse due to its sheer size and scale. When asked about Lido's newest updates, which boast a similar restaking infrastructure utilizing stETH, Felix believes this signals two important trends to the market:

1. It validates the demand for a more modular staking and restaking infrastructure across varied ecosystems

2. It signals a growing adoption of restaking through different risk designs and its acceptance in the mainstream

We'll have to wait and see how Lido's v3 updates unfold, but it won't be short on excitement, competition, and diverse verifiable networks.

A Real Role for AI in Crypto Governance

Crypto has been objective since day one, with its "code is truth" motto. It took us years to start realizing that our society is filled with subjectivity - perhaps the first principle of human psychology.

Restaking was intertwined with subjectivity from the start. The initial design of the veto committee aimed to fix the problem of slashing, where an operator's malfunction can often be non-intentional and the slashing criteria frequently involves subjective elements (like oracle inputs).

However, similar to many DAOs, the veto committee's success depends on participation and domain knowledge, which the commons often lack. This is where AI can be extremely useful, if properly trained and fine-tuned for specific use cases.

I'm excited about the collaboration between EigenLayer and Sentient not only because this is a perfect opportunity to let AI operate in its most suitable domain but also because the marriage of AI and restaking solves a critical problem: slashing needs nuanced determination mechanisms to achieve true fairness and equality.

News Bites

Sreeram from EigenLayer discusses crypto applications with real utility and traction.

EtherFi season 4 rewards are claimable now.

Read more about how Opacity helps agents differentiate between human and agent interactions.

Honestly a pretty novel mission - addressing the general lack of Web3 education, starting with college students. Learn more about Eigen Games here.

Don’t know what to build? Get some ideas here.

Watch and learn more about Cap Labs’ restaking-based stablecoin.

RedStone Oracles has just launched its tokenomics details. Rewards distribution soon?

ETH Denver Special

Every EigenLayer events hosted during ETH Denver.

Register here for Symbiotic’s Builder’s Cafe.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam and Ethan

Thanks to Alex and Servet for the edits.

Welcome to Issue #13 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋

Not sure if you noticed, but an increasing number of SaaS-like networks are reaching critical scale in crypto, with many leveraging restaking to bootstrap their networks.

This week, we explore why crypto's SaaS-ification trend could signal another wave of industry growth, diving into Jito's TipRouter's rewards distribution mechanisms, EigenLayer's AI playbook, and more.

Let's dive in! 🚀

SaaS-ify Crypto

In just two weeks, I've witnessed compelling evidence that a maturing, modular, SaaS-like crypto future is taking shape, with many developments emerging from the restaking ecosystem.

This is the strongest signal I've seen since the modular movement first coined its name from Celestia following DeFi summer in 2021-2022. Evidence is pouring in — from Earnifi (an Opacity ecosystem project), Predicate, Eigen's agent explainer, to Jito's Tip Router — all pointing to a common thread:

• Networks are increasingly specializing in single use cases, focusing their resources and development on specific problems.

• These networks are adopting highly specialized consensus and network structures that operate independently of traditional block production.

This evolution makes perfect sense when we look at Web2's progression. These niche networks can optimize their architecture and consensus mechanisms for specific use cases, creating network efficiency and security that monolithic networks (like Ethereum) simply cannot match. Moreover, these specialized networks can easily bootstrap services to help onboard clients — something monolithic networks, constrained by low-level implementation, struggle to achieve.

Jito's TipRouter

Last week, we covered how Jito's flagship NCN (Node Consensus Network, essentially an AVS or node network) will start earning impressive fees for its restakers and operators.

TipRouter, analogous to EigenDA for EigenLayer, is Jito's homegrown network. Its origin story perfectly illustrates how product-centric networks emerge.

Before venturing into restaking, Jito's core product was Jito-Solana, a Solana node validator client enabling users to submit transactions with priority tips for faster inclusion. These tips, totaling an impressive $2.5 billion annually to date, were distributed centrally (by the Jito Foundation) between the Jito treasury and Jito-Solana operators.

TipRouter decentralizes the process. According to JIP-8, using $2.3 billion in annual tip fees as a reference, the network aims to maintain a security ratio of approximately 45x — with $500 million in TipRouter’s economic security and roughly $14.8 million in tips processed per epoch. Out of the $2.3 billion in collected fees, 0.03% (about $7.3 million per year) is used to reward the JitoSOL and JTO restakers, which translates to a 0.68% reward rate (rewards rate goes higher with lowered TVL).

This development is significant for two reasons:

1. Following the SaaS playbook, this demonstrates how ambitious teams can decentralize their stack by involving users and community, creating a powerful force multiplier compared to centralized approaches.

2. It provides a crucial benchmark for network security fees that other projects can reference — a vital data point for the future rewards generation paradigm from verifiable, idiosyncratic networks.

Read more:

• What is Jito TipRouter

• Great technical write up about TipRouter NCN (JIP-8)

• TipRouter Homepage

News Bites

EigenLayer has published its Verifiable Agents explainer, detailing its plan and first principles for the agent ecosystem leveraging restaking and restaked AVS. Read more here.

EigenLayer’s AI AVS Categories: A modular stack where potential AVSs can be built to power AI agents.

Earnify, a project utilizing Opacity Network (an EigenLayer restaked zkTLS network), has hit the App Store and ranked #5 in the finance category. This app allows college students to borrow up to $200 instantly with private zkTLS verification of their pay stubs, etc.

Colederm explains RiscZero's Boundless ZK prover marketplace and how restaking works in the context of its prover network.

Watch Sreeram and Lucas's discussion on Solana vs. Ethereum restaking.

Transaction policy AVS Predicate has partnered with TRM Labs to enforce TRM's risk scores across smart contracts, solver networks, and routers — all before funds move.

That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.

If you want to catch up with the latest news in the restaking world, give our curated X list a follow!

See you next week and thanks for reading,

Liam

Thanks to Alex, Ethan and Servet for the edits.