Re:Staking Weekly #8
Restaking's New Year Resolution and Restaking x AI Agents
Welcome to 2025 and our first Re:Staking Weekly of the year!
It's a pretty chill week as I'm sure everyone is enjoying their holiday season, so let's keep it short and sweet.
This week, we outline some hopes and wishes for the restaking ecosystem in 2025. In the past year, we grew from nothing into something formidable. This year, in 2025, what can we do to scale the achievements?
Let's dive in!
Restaking’s New Year Resolution
2024 marked restaking's 0 to 1 moment. As we enter 2025, with the foundation set, the real scaling story begins.
How high can we go? Let's explore together our wishlist for restaking's next chapter.
Increased Adoption for Rewards and Slashing
With rewards and slashing features now released, the next big challenge lies in driving feature adoption across AVS.
It won't be easy – adopting rewards and slashing means establishing formalized service level agreements (SLAs) with operators and compensating them fairly, which requires a certain level of maturity from the projects.
Still, seeing tangible rewards in 2025 would be a massive confidence booster, helping the ecosystem break free from the gravitational pull of points and airdrop campaigns — a silent, slippery slope that could quietly dismiss restaking's initial ambitions.
Smaller Operators, Bigger Opportunities
One of restaking's original promises was to democratize the operator landscape.
While institutional node operators are cherished for their white-glove service, smaller operators are poised to gain significant traction with permissionless operator delegation.
The opportunity lies in creative ways to distribute rewards and airdrops back to restakers while showcasing the security and reliability of operational services.
We've already seen EigenYields become the largest restaked operator in 2024 due to its generous 25% distribution of $EIGEN airdrop. In 2025, we're hopeful more smaller operators will claim significant market share through innovative approaches to democratize yields, opportunities, and operational standards.
Restaking Fi Ecosystem
Restaking creates many opportunities for securitization on top of yield-bearing networks. While we've only seen actively managed, hedge-fund style Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs) so far, the diverse AVS ecosystem spans different architectures, business verticals, and revenue-generating capabilities.
In 2025, we hope to see a plethora of financial products and strategies emerge, giving people more choices based on various restaking mechanisms. This could mean a continuous, self-sufficient ecosystem for restaked services – an exciting prospect for the industry.
Smaller Networks, Frequent Experiments
So far, all networks have been massive platforms designed to create more networks. While we need these foundational layers, we are hoping to see the emergence of focused, single-use-case networks.
Think individual Uni-v4 hooks or specific AI agents with constrained use case boundaries and clear revenue projections – all running on a restaked setup to be decentralized from day one while expanding their use cases.
News Bites
Zeru’s operator client is now open for permissionless operation.
Sreeram foreshadowing Reclaim Protocol’s restaking intergration — making LLM output verifiable.
Food for Thought
EigenLayer's major objective for 2025 is pushing forward the AI/Agents agenda. If you've been following crypto Twitter, you've likely noticed agents dominating the mindshare lately – from memes and AI influencers to autonomous trading systems.
How can AI agents leverage restaking?
One idea I’m particularly interested to see is AI agents launching directly through operators and restakers, achieving decentralization from day one. These agents could then distribute tokens to operators and restakers as a bootstrapping mechanism, creating an alignment of incentives.
If you have want to discuss more about AI x Restaking, send us a DM!
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,
Thanks to Ethan for the edits.