Re:Staking Weekly #2
Crypto Renaissance, Restaked RPC, EigenLayer Governance, Restaking's Modular Thesis
GM friends 👋!
Welcome to this week’s Re:Staking Weekly!
The crypto market is absolutely on fire 🔥 following the U.S. election results and building upon the momentum of a very successful Devcon event in Bangkok.
Bitcoin has surged past its all-time high, surpassing silver to become the world's seventh-largest asset, now standing at $90,000 per coin. For the first time in recent memory, Web3 seems well-positioned for what matters in the upcoming years: growth, product-market fit, and use cases that extend beyond speculation.
In this shifting landscape, restaking vertical is certainly not lacking. Join us this week as we explore Infura's restaked RPC network, EigenLayer’s ambitious governance framework, and the utility of restaking in the modular Web3 thesis.
Infura Launches Restaked Decentralized RPC Network
Infura, one of the leading blockchain infrastructure providers, has announced its integration with EigenLayer restaking with their decentralized blockchain RPC product, the Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN). This is a significant step toward progressively decentralizing their RPC (Remote Procedure Call) service.
The DIN AVS is something I never thought would be on the horizon for restaking integration, but here we are in the final months of 2024, blessed with a DIN AVS that is going to be both decentralized and revenue-generating1.
RPC services have been notoriously centralized, with only a few exceptions like the POKT network and dRPC, which have not been widely adopted. The problem with decentralized RPC is that it demands extreme performance, security, and network effects to be successful.
Infura, being one of the veterans in our industry and a cousin to MetaMask under the same parent company, ConsenSys, has both the technical capabilities and distribution to pull this off.
What's more interesting, however, is the bootstrapping model that others could follow. In what Infura dubbed "progressive decentralization," the AVS will function as a watcher network to monitor the actual RPC network's health and reliability, consisting of blockchain nodes.
Without a token generation event on the near horizon, this approach allows the network to bootstrap and operate under tangible security guarantees while gradually tweaking the network's architecture, topology, and incentive settings.
To learn more about Infura’s DIN AVS:
Hot off the Block - EigenLayer’s Governance Design
You can taunt EigenLayer’s universal intersubjective work token for being too boomer or scholarly, but you should really take notes of how the team is approaching protocol governance.
Specifically, there are two areas I find particularly interesting, unpacked in this 30-minute presentation:
Expert Councils: Small, trusted councils focused on domain expertise.
Endorsement and Reputation System: A system for domain skill matching and endorsement to improve voter-proposal alignment.
The current mode of governance in Web3 protocols often relies simply on the amount of stake as the voting weight, without regard for voters’ domain expertise, past alignment history, and proposal execution.
This governance framework, if successfully implemented, might be adopted by the wider Web3 community to build a more robust decentralized governance system that balances efficiency (D.O.G.E., anyone?) rather than simple democracy.
News Bites
Cartesi Co-Processor AVS: Not launched, but cool design with network that can execute more than 8 programming languages using Cartesi VM.
Zeru Finance (testnet): On-chain credit score AVS has launched its testnet.
Brevis’s new funding round: ZK co-processor AVS — Brevis — announced its new 7.5m funding round led by Polychain Capital and Binance Labs.
Hersh (Opacity) and Sreeram (EigenLayer) wants to buy a bank and convert it with crypto-native rails: Probably nothing.
AVS Day Event in Bangkok: A collection of good looking people building in restaking.
Proof of Event - Re:Staking Brunch
During Devcon in Bangkok, the team behind Re:Staking Weekly hosted a brunch to meet researchers and AVS builders in person!
Over 100 people attended, sparking great conversations around things like AVS rewards, FHE, chip design and more. One of our favorite highlights from brunch was hearing from people like Yash at Othentic on what they're building and how they're reducing the overhead for launching AVSs.
It's events like these that really push forward the research space and make the discussions being had by the leading minds in this space more tangible. Getting to bring people together and generate deeper discussions is exactly what we want to drive forward.
Stay tuned for more events in the future both locally in NYC and at your favorite conference!
Food for Thought
If you've been following recent Web3 news, you've likely noticed many on-chain protocols launching their own blockchains or L2s, with Uniswap's Unichain being the most surprising recent announcement.
With the emergence of more L2s appearing to be a constant theme for the near to mid-term future, it's reasonable to speculate that many (if not most) will bootstrap using restaking and restaked-operators, before potentially transitioning to native token/operator-based staking models.
For me, this signals that restaking is perfectly positioned to gain significant adoption in the next 12-24 months, and I'm excited to watch it unfold.
That’s it for this week’s Re:Staking newsletter. See you next week!
If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don't hesitate to send us a DM.
Thanks for reading,
Thanks to Alex and Ethan for the edits.
See page 12 of DIN's white paper for details. DIN AVS watcher nodes will be rewarded through network testing fees and a portion of slashing revenue.