Lido Co-Founders, Paradigm Secretly Back EigenLayer Competitor As DeFi Battle Lines Form
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The co-founders of dominant liquid staking protocol Lido, along with the venture capital firm Paradigm, are secretly helping to fund a new company, Symbiotic, that would compete in the fast-growing arena of "restaking," according to people briefed on the matter.
Internal company documents obtained by CoinDesk lay out diagrams of how the project would work.
The emergence of a restaking player with deep-pocketed backers could portend a face-off that might redefine the DeFi landscape.
The co-founders of Lido, the biggest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, are secretly funding a competitor to EigenLayer, the buzzy "restaking" service that has emerged rapidly this year to become a powerful force in decentralized finance.
According to several people with knowledge of the matter, the project is called Symbiotic and has drawn backing from not only the Lido co-founders, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, through their venture firm Cyber Fund, but also Paradigm, the crypto venture capital firm that is one of Lido's lead investors.
CoinDesk also obtained internal Symbiotic documents that describe the project, which allows users to "restake" using Lido's staked ether (stETH) token and other popular assets that are not natively compatible with EigenLayer.
Developed by the team that previously built a staking service called Stakemind, Symbiotic will be "a permissionless restaking protocol that provides flexible mechanisms for decentralized networks to coordinate node operators and providers of economic security," according to the internal company documents reviewed by CoinDesk.
The documents were marked as "preliminary" and "not for distribution," but several teams working in the nascent restaking ecosystem – including actively validated services (AVSs) and liquid restaking services building on EigenLayer – say they have already been in discussions to integrate with the
Representatives of Paradigm, Symbiotic and Cyber Fund declined to comment on the