Inside the Restaking Ecosystem: A Snapshot of Leading Protocols and Projects

This is the first in a series of posts exploring the restaking ecosystem. Over the next two weeks, we’ll publish several blogs that explore a specific area of restaking with a focus on risk management. 

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Since EigenLayer launched in June 2023, with its promise to leverage Ethereum’s robust economic security to power a new wave of decentralized applications and infrastructure, the concept of restaking has quickly evolved from a novel primitive to a fully-fledged competitive sector within crypto.

The Ethereum community has restaked nearly $20 billion worth of ETH and various liquid staking tokens (LSTs), the lion’s share via EigenLayer (more than $17 billion). But well-funded competitors like Symbiotic and Karak, which collectively boast more than $1 billion in total value locked (TVL), have emerged to challenge EigenLayer’s first-mover advantage.

The Landscape

Meanwhile, liquid restaking platforms, which offer Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs) to users who choose to restake their ETH or LSTs with them rather than directly on EigenLayer, have locked up nearly $15 billion. 

Projects building on EigenLayer, known as Actively Validated Services (AVSs), have raised tens of millions of dollars to capitalize on this new paradigm, and major staking providers like P2P, Figment, Kiln, and Coinbase have gotten into the restaking game by launching Operators to run AVS nodes in return for rewards. New protocols have also started to introduce restaking to other chains, including Bitcoin, Solana, and NEAR.

Visualizing the Ecosystem

To help you keep track of this rapidly evolving area of crypto, we’ve created the accompanying Restaking Ecosystem Map to capture the breadth and depth of the restaking landscape. We identify and segment the growing number of players actively building in the space and highlight emerging areas, such as projects building infrastructure and other DeFi-related products and services for LRTs and AVSs. 

This space moves fast, so treat this as a snapshot in time (i.e., look at the publish/edit date) rather than an evergreen resource. 

Stay tuned for much more restaking content in the coming days. 

Gauntlet Team

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