Restaking & LRTs

Re-staking, as the name suggests, offers an additional layer of staking. Users can choose to ‘restake’ their LSTs to earn an additional yield on their staked deposits. This restaking paradigm has been made possible largely by EigenLayer which accepts a user’s ETH (in the case of native restaking) or LSTs and restakes them in Web3 projects that require Ethereum’s security. There also exist restaking platforms such as Ether.fi, Renzo, Puffer Finance etc. that are based on Eigenlayer. These protocols accept LSTs and deposit them on EigenLayer to earn the additional restaking yield. To avoid the same staking liquidity problem, these protocols issue, in return, a corresponding number of Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs) that have the same advantages LSTs enjoy.

However, such reliance on only EigenLayer for additional yield is problematic for the following reasons: i) Once deposits into EigenLayer exhaust their internal caps, new deposits into the platform can be suspended, preventing additional users from enjoying restaking yields and, ii) EigenLayer relies on a set of Web3 projects that require Ethereum’s security to provide restaking yield and during bear market periods, when developer activity plummets, users can no longer enjoy stable returns on their holdings.

To mitigate these problems, there must exist a blockchain network that incorporates yield as a fundamental feature of its operations and provides stable returns to its participants, irrespective of prevailing market conditions. And this is what the Arithmic Network sets out to achieve.