People familiar with the matter: Lido founders and Paradigm are secretly investing in re-pledge protocol Symbiotic to compete with EigenLayer

According to CoinDesk, citing people familiar with the matter, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, co-founders of the liquidity staking protocol Lido, are secretly funding Symbiotic, a competitor of the re-staking protocol EigenLayer. This new company will compete in the rapidly growing restaking sector. Start competing.

Symbiotic is backed not only by Lomashuk and Shapovalov through their venture capital firm Cyber ​​Fund, but also by venture capital firm Paradigm, which is also one of Lido's major investors, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

People familiar with the matter also revealed that when Paradigm approached EigenLayer co-founder Sreeram Kannan to invest in his project, Kannan turned down their funding and instead chose another venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Paradigm also told Kannan that it would invest in a competitor of its project.

Symbiotic

According to internal documents obtained by CoinDesk, Symbiotic will be "a permissionless re-staking protocol that provides decentralized networks with a flexible mechanism to coordinate node operators and economic security providers." Developed by the team of Stakemind's staking service. The filing also shows that Symbiotic enables users to “re-stake” using Lido’s stETH token and other popular assets that are not natively compatible with EigenLayer.

The main difference between Symbiotic and EigenLayer is that users can deposit any asset based on the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard directly into Symbiotic, which means that the protocol will work with stETH tokens and thousands of other assets that use the ERC-20 standard Direct compatibility, while EigenLayer only accepts Ethereum (ETH) deposits.

The documents are marked "preliminary" and "not for distribution," but several teams working on the nascent restaking ecosystem (including Active Verification Service (AVS) and Liquidity Restaking Services built on EigenLayer Four sources consulted by CoinDesk said they are already discussing integration with Symbiotic, and they expect the platform to be released in some form before the end of the year.

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