Restaking

Restaking is the practice of putting assets that are already staked on one blockchain to work securing additional protocols at the same time. Rather than locking fresh capital for every new network, restaking extends the economic security of an established chain to other services, allowing the same stake to earn multiple reward streams.

The model was pioneered by EigenLayer on Ethereum. Holders of staked ETH or liquid staking tokens opt in to secure so-called actively validated services (AVSs), such as oracles, bridges and data availability layers. Validators who participate accept extra slashing conditions on top of Ethereum's own rules: if they misbehave while serving an AVS, a portion of their stake can be destroyed. In exchange, they collect additional rewards beyond the base Proof of Stake yield.

A related development is the liquid restaking token (LRT). Just as liquid staking tokens represent staked positions, LRTs are tradable receipts for restaked positions, letting holders keep their capital usable in DeFi while it secures multiple systems.

For new projects, restaking solves a hard bootstrapping problem. An oracle network or bridge can rent security from Ethereum's validator set instead of launching its own token and recruiting validators from scratch, which lowers the barrier to running trust-critical infrastructure.

The trade-off is layered risk. Stacked slashing conditions mean one operator failure can trigger penalties across several services, each AVS and restaking contract adds smart-contract risk, and analysts warn of systemic leverage when LRTs are widely reused as DeFi collateral. Restaking builds directly on liquid staking and ordinary staking, so understanding those concepts first makes its mechanics much clearer.