Source: ARK Invest

In 1997, Robert Greer proposed three asset classes in The Journal of Portfolio Management:

  1. Capital assets: assets that can generate value/cash flow, such as stocks, bonds, etc.;

  2. Consumable or convertible assets: Capable of being consumed, burned or converted once, such as oil and coffee;

  3. Store-of-value assets: Value persists in time/space and is scarce, such as gold and Bitcoin.

In 2019, David Hoffman pointed out here that Ethereum can serve as the above three assets at the same time: pledged Ether as a capital asset, Gas as a consumable asset, and Ethereum locked in DeFi as a store of value asset.

In the past five years, with the vigorous development of the Ethereum ecosystem, the utility of Ethereum has continued to expand - intuitively reflected in Ethereum as the pricing unit of NFT, as the Gas Token of Ethereum Layer 2, the pricing unit of MEV activities, and LST and DeFi derivative financial products based on LST, etc.

Recently, EigenLayer has used re-pledge to extend the economic security function of Ethereum to intermediary software and even other ecosystems such as Cosmos, further strengthening the network effect of Ethereum.

Let’s briefly summarize it:

  1. Staking or re-staking Ethereum, including liquid staking and re-staking tokens such as $stETH and $eETH, represent assets capable of generating value/cash flow as capital assets;

  2. The Gas spent by Ethereum as Layer1 and Layer2, including the data availability overhead of Rollup in Layer1, the overhead of verifying zero-knowledge proofs, etc., can be consumed and burned at one time, so it is regarded as a consumable asset;

  3. Ethereum serves as the reserve asset of the DAO treasury of each protocol, the collateral of CeFi and DeFi, as well as NFT transactions, MEV supply chain pricing, token trading pairs, etc. as the accounting unit and exchange medium respectively, and the value continues to exist in time/space. , a store of value asset.

Among them, staking is the core pillar of the Ethereum network. By allowing participants to lock up ether and participate in the verification process, staking provides a powerful economic incentive to the network, transforming Ethereum into a safer, more efficient, and sustainable blockchain platform, setting the stage for its long-term development Solid foundation.

This article will provide a systematic report on the staking and re-pledge industry and its ecology, as well as the investment logic and opinions accumulated from our investment layout in this track.

1. Staking

1. Overview

The concept of “staking” was born before Ethereum. In 2012, in order to solve the problem of high energy consumption in Bitcoin mining, Peercoin took the lead in proposing Proof-of-Stake (PoS), of which pledge is one of the key attributes.

In the context of Ethereum, generally speaking, staking refers to running the validator software by locking 32 Ether coins on the Ethereum blockchain, thereby helping the Ethereum network verify transactions and maintain security, and obtain a certain amount of The process of Ethereum reward.

Currently, the annualized income from Ethereum staking is approximately 3.24%, which is provided by the issuance of Ethereum. Other income may come from Tips and MEV income from the Ethereum network.

2 Four forms of pledge

2.1 Solo Staking (Single Staking)

Image source: ConsenSys

Single staking is the basic form of all staking approaches. Stakeholders need to deposit 32 Ethereum coins and run and maintain a complete Ethereum client to ensure the normal operation of the validator. Separate staking helps to increase the decentralization of the network.

Ideally, since individual staking is autonomously managed and does not require service fees to be paid to any third party, the benefits obtained are also the highest. However, compared with professional staking services, individual staking may also result in missed rewards or forfeiture due to disconnection or malicious behavior. In addition, coupled with operation and maintenance costs, income may fluctuate.

The proportion of individual pledges is an important indicator of the degree of decentralization of Ethereum. According to a study conducted by rated, solo stakers accounted for approximately 6.5% of all validators on Ethereum as of the end of 2022.

Although individual staking is a key pillar for Ethereum to achieve decentralization, it is difficult to become mainstream due to the capital requirement and operational threshold of 32 Ether coins. With the development of Ethereum's pledge, the following pledge methods have emerged in the market.

2.2 Staking Service Provider (Staking Service Provider)

In order to meet the large-scale development of the pledge track, pledge service providers usually provide large-scale and professional pledge services for institutional customers or high-net-worth individuals, and charge a certain percentage of fees based on the pledge income (based on the scale of funds participating in the pledge, ranging from 5%-10%). Companies such as Kiln and Figment represent staking service providers, with more than $8.6 billion in staked assets powered by Kiln’s technology.

In addition to providing pledge services for Ethereum, pledge service providers also basically cover the pledge business of other PoS chains, and also participate in re-pledge business.

In addition to B2B business models, B2B2C business models are also an important part of these companies' revenue. For example, Kiln partners with major wallets such as Ledger, Coinbase Wallet, and Metamask to provide users of these wallets with a one-stop staking solution. The wallet provides a distribution channel for staking service providers, while the latter provides infrastructure and services to the former, with revenue split between the two.

2.3 Centralized Exchange Staking

Centralized exchange staking is a staking service provided by each centralized exchange to its users. This type of pledge is managed and requires almost no capital threshold. However, the disadvantage is that the fees are usually high and opaque, and there are risks such as fund misappropriation. . Companies such as Coinbase and Binance are representatives of centralized exchange staking.

The proportion of staking on centralized exchanges has dropped from around 40% in 2021 to 2022 to 24.4% now. The reasons may be: first, after the collapse of FTX, users’ trust in centralized and custody solutions declined; second, in February 2023, due to regulatory pressure from the US SEC, Kraken announced that it would terminate staking services to US customers , raising concerns among users about staking service providers in specific jurisdictions. Despite this, centralized exchange staking remains the second largest staking option after liquidity staking.

2.4 Liquid Staking (Liquidity Staking/LST)

LST is an application of staking at the protocol and smart contract levels. Protocols such as Lido collect ether from users and outsource running validators to a third-party staking service provider, while collecting fees from them.

The main feature of LST is that these protocols usually return an equivalent tokenized claim to the user as a certificate (such as Lido’s stETH), thereby liberating the liquidity of funds. These certificates can be considered approximately equivalent to Ethereum and can be used in multiple DeFi protocols to gain additional benefits. There is a risk of de-anchoring in the tokenized claims of LST, but this risk has been reduced after the "Shanghai Upgrade" Ethereum started withdrawals.

Lido currently occupies the highest market share among LST, and its TVL is 12.9 times that of the second-place Rocket Pool. In addition to Lido, some differentiated products have also been derived.

  1. For example, Rocket Pool allows anyone to run validators for Rocket Pool's stakers, with a total of 3,716 node operators, with better decentralization and capital efficiency compared to the professional staking service provider operated by Lido.

  2. Institutions mainly consider three points when participating in staking: security, liquidity and compliance. Traditional institutions need to conduct due diligence on counterparty risks and complete a series of compliance processes such as KYC/AML. At this stage, unlicensed LSTs such as Lido are currently unable to meet such needs. Alluvial has joined forces with leading staking service providers such as Coinbase to launch the industry standard for LST: Liquid Collective, which mainly provides a "dedicated pool" that is fully compliant and meets KYC/AML requirements, which can better help traditional Funds enter the Ethereum pledge market.

Source: GSR, IOSG

The table above summarizes the foregoing.

3. Summary

  • a. Looking back at the development of the staking track, the emergence of LST not only solves the two major pain points of capital and operations mentioned above, but also further releases liquidity. These three things are the primary reasons for Lido’s success. The quality of liquidity is directly related to the user's psychological expectations and the degree of trust in the protocol. Lido had the best exit liquidity in the market before the "Shanghai Upgrade" started withdrawals. This is also the main reason why Lido can attract new funds to participate in staking. At a time when the competitive landscape of LST has been determined and fierce competition among LRTs has begun, Ether.fi has established a market leading position with a good liquidity pool, which has also verified this.

  • b. Looking at the pledge market, Lido has long held a leading position with a market share of about 30%, and its head effect is quite obvious. Nonetheless, there are still some opportunities for differentiated product performance in the market. For example, the compliant staking solution launched by Liquid Collective for more traditional institutional users; and the market opened up by the new narrative of re-staking - in fact, Ether.fi rode on the trend of re-staking and quickly attracted a Funding, it has attracted 1.21 million Ethereum deposits in the past 6 months, with a growth rate of 288.1%. It has become the third largest pledger of Ethereum, second only to Lido and Coinbase.

  • c. In addition to LST, we believe that pledge service providers are also good investment categories. LSTs like Lido are essentially intermediaries connecting node operators to end users, playing a distribution role and relying on node operators for actual operations and operations. Compared with running nodes themselves, these node operators have large-scale cost advantages and high-level service guarantees. Whether they are cooperating with LST, re-staking protocols, etc. to run nodes, or helping wallet users participate in staking, node operators have a good ecological niche and a solid business model. In addition, as validators, these node operators are key interfaces in the transaction life cycle on the chain and have an important position. Pre-confirmation (pre-confirmation) that has recently appeared on the market is one of the services that verifiers can provide.

2. Restaking

1. Overview

圖源:ETHRestaking Dashboard by @blocklytics

On the basis of Ethereum pledge, projects represented by EigenLayer proposed re-pledge - that is, the pledger made a second pledge based on the original Ethereum pledge exposure to promise to honestly provide economic security for the intermediary software, and Gains will be obtained accordingly; at the same time, re-pledgers need to bear the risk of slashing the pledge exposure due to factors such as improper operation.

In terms of market size, EigenLayer surpassed Uniswap and AAVE shortly after the mainnet was launched, quickly becoming the second largest DeFi protocol after Lido. As of now, EigenLayer's TVL has reached 15.5 billion US dollars, which is three times that of Uniswap. There are 19 AVS and 339 node operators running on the main network.

In addition to EigenLayer, Symbiotic, a restaking protocol backed by Lido and Paradigm, has also been launched. Symbiotic is a restaking solution powered by Lido and Paradigm. On the asset side, Symbiotic accepts any ERC-20 token or LP position as a re-pledge asset. As of now, Symbiotic’s TVL has reached US$1.2 billion, mainly composed of Ethereum-based LST and stable coins.

This chapter will mainly discuss based on EigenLayer.

2 EigenLayer

Before EigenLayer, the intermediary software in the Ethereum ecosystem had obvious pain points:

  • To become a validator (node ​​operator) of intermediary software, you first need to invest money. For the sake of token value capture, validators are often required to pledge the native tokens of the intermediary software, which requires a certain marginal cost, and due to fluctuations in token prices, there is uncertainty in their risk exposure, and even tokens may fall. The losses incurred may be far greater than the gains gained.

  • And the project side needs to maintain a certain token value, otherwise rational funds will move to other platforms or protocols with higher returns. Second, the security of the intermediary software depends on the overall value of the staked tokens; if the tokens plummet, the cost of attacking the network also decreases. This problem is particularly acute in the early stages of a project when the token value is low.

  • For some dApps that rely on intermediary software (such as derivative financial products that require price feeds from oracles), their security actually relies on the trust assumptions of both Ethereum and the intermediary software. This creates a barrel effect - the security of the system depends on its shortcomings.

These are the basic problems that EigenLayer wants to solve.

Image source: EigenLayer, IOSG

EigenLayer solves the above problem by introducing re-pledge: existing pledgers of Ethereum carry out re-pledge, which means that there is no need to invest additional funds, but to expand the existing Ethereum pledge market share to new ones. protocol (of course, this introduces new risk exposures and assumptions), and the price of Ethereum is relatively stable, making the economic security based on Ethereum more reliable.

The project side can adopt a dual pledge model, in which the verifier pledges the native token and Ethereum at the same time. This can avoid the death spiral caused by the price drop of a single token without sacrificing the utility of the token. At the same time, Ethereum’s validators are also more decentralized.

Image source: IOSG

Structurally, EigenLayer is a three-party market:

  • AVS (Actively Validated Service). That is, infrastructure such as cross-chain bridges and oracles. AVS acts as a consumer of economic security, is protected by economic security, and pays rehypothecaters.

  • Re-pledger. Re-stakeholders with Ethereum exposure can participate by transferring their staking withdrawal credentials to the EigenLayer smart contract, or simply depositing LST (e.g. stETH). If a re-stakeholder is unable to run an AVS node, they can delegate this task to an operator.

  • operator. AVS nodes are run by operators entrusted by re-stakeholders or provide verification services. Operators can choose which AVSs to serve. Once you provide services to AVS, you must comply with the slashing rules set by AVS.

The figure below outlines the methods and workflow for participating in re-staking on EigenLayer.

Image source: IOSG

EigenLayer provides the following three programmable trusts:

Image source: EigenLayer

  • Economic trust: Economic trust relies on people’s confidence in pledged assets. If the profits from corruption are lower than the costs of corruption, economically rational actors will not attack. For example, if the cost of an attack on a cross-chain bridge is $1 billion, but the profit is only $500 million, it is clearly irrational from an economic perspective to conduct the attack. As a widely adopted cryptoeconomics primitive, slashing can greatly increase the cost of corruption, thus strengthening economic security.

  • Decentralized Trust: The essence of decentralized trust is to have a large and widely distributed set of validators, both virtually and geographically. To prevent collusion and Liveness Attacks between nodes in AVS, it is best not to have a single service provider run all nodes. On EigenLayer, different AVS can customize their degree of decentralization. For example, they can set geographical location requirements for node operators, or only allow individual operators to provide node services, and accordingly provide more incentives to attract such operators.

  • Ethereum "Inclusion" trust: In addition to making commitments to Ethereum through staking, Ethereum validators can also make credible commitments to AVS if they further pledge on EigenLayer. This allows proposers to provide some services on Ethereum (e.g. partial block auctions via MEV-Boost++) without requiring changes to Ethereum’s protocol level. For example, forward block space auctions allow buyers to secure future block space in advance. Validators participating in the re-staking can make a credible commitment to the block space, and if they later do not include the buyer's transaction, they will be slashed.

3. Babylon

(Conceptually, Babylon does not belong to "re-pledge", but to Bitcoin "pledge", but because its application is similar to EigenLayer, it provides economic security for blockchain, intermediary software, etc., so it is included in this chapter discuss)

The launch of Babylon is based on the background that Bitcoin cannot generate "native" income due to the limitations of the programmability of the Bitcoin blockchain. Generally speaking, there are two main ways for Bitcoin to generate income:

  • Wrapping Bitcoin. Solutions like WBTC issue WBTC on Ethereum through 1:1 acceptance, allowing Bitcoin to participate in various DeFi activities on Ethereum in a mapping manner. The current volume of WBTC is around US$10 billion. However, such solutions are usually based on multi-signature and custodian mechanisms, with a high degree of centralization.

  • Deposit into a centralized exchange. Financial products on centralized exchanges offer Bitcoin returns. However, returns are often opaque and there are greater financial risks.

Babylon uses the Bitcoin time lock opcode and signature algorithm Extratable One-time Signature (EOTS) to introduce native Bitcoin pledges on the Bitcoin blockchain without relying on any third-party custody, packaging and cross-chain bridge. This technical mechanism is Babylon's technological innovation, which releases the utilization value of idle Bitcoin and provides extremely important infrastructure for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The diagram below outlines the methods and workflow for participating in Bitcoin staking on Babylon.

Image source: IOSG

3. Re-pledge and its ecology

1. Liquid Restaking (Liquidity Re-pledge/LRT)

LRT is a new asset class derived from the three-party market surrounding EigenLayer. Currently, the total TVL of the LRT protocol is approximately US$6.4 billion, accounting for approximately 41.29% of EigenLayer TVL. The starting point of LRT is similar to LST, mainly to liberate liquidity (locked in re-pledged Ethereum). Due to the different composition of LRT's underlying assets, LRT is more complex than LST and has a dynamically changing nature.

Image source: IOSG

Compare the two below:

3.1 Portfolio

LST's investment portfolio only has one type of Ethereum pledge, but LRT's investment portfolio is diverse and can invest funds in different AVS to provide them with economic security and naturally have different risk levels. Different LRT protocols have different fund management methods and risk preferences. At the level of fund management, LST is passive management and LRT is active management. LRT may provide different management strategies corresponding to different levels of AVS (such as mature AVS versus newly launched AVS) to suit the user's return/risk preference.

3.2 Yield, figure source and composition of yield

  • The rate of return of LST is currently around 2.6%~3%. The figure is derived from the joint income of the consensus layer and execution layer of Ethereum, which is composed of Ethereum.

  • The rate of return of LRT is temporarily uncertain, but basically the figure is derived from the fees paid by each AVS, and may be composed of AVS tokens, ETH, USDC, or a mixture of the three. According to the information we received from communicating with some AVS, most AVS will set aside a few percentage points of the total token supply as incentive and security budgets. If AVS is already online before the currency is issued, it may also be paid in Ether or USDC, depending on the specific situation.

  • Since it is AVS token-based, the risk of token fluctuation will be greater than that of Ethereum, and the APR will also fluctuate accordingly. AVS may also have entry and exit rotations. Such factors will bring uncertainty to LRT's yield.

3.3 Punishment risk

There are two penalties for Ethereum staking: Inactivity Leaking and Slashing, such as missed block proposals and double voting. The rules are very certain. If operated by a professional node service provider, the accuracy can reach about 98.5%.

The LRT protocol needs to believe that the AVS software coding is correct and has no objection to the penalty rules to avoid triggering unexpected penalties. There is inherent uncertainty due to the diverse nature of AVS and the fact that most are early-stage projects. Moreover, AVS may have rule changes as its business develops, such as iterating more functions and so on. In addition, at the risk management level, it is also necessary to consider the upgradeability of the AVS Slasher contract, whether the slashing conditions are objective and verifiable, etc. Since LRT acts as an agent for managing user assets, LRT needs to comprehensively consider these aspects and choose partners carefully.

Of course, EigenLayer encourages AVS to conduct a complete audit, including AVS's code, slashing conditions, and logic for interacting with EigenLayer. EigenLayer also has a multi-signature veto committee to conduct final review and control of forfeiture events.

Overall, LRT is an asset management protocol. Based on this market positioning, LRT can further explore related businesses, such as extending functions to protocols such as Symbiotic and Babylon, or a DeFi strategy vault similar to Yearn, to meet the scenarios and needs of different ecosystems. The needs of users with different risk appetites.

2. AVS (Actively Validated Service)

AVS is the object of economic security provided by EigenLayer. According to EigenLayer’s official documentation, AVS covers the following infrastructure: side chains, data availability layer, new virtual machines, guardian network, oracle network, cross-chain bridge, threshold encryption scheme, trusted execution environment, etc. The following table lists more types that may be built on top of AVS.

Image source: EigenLayer, IOSG

EigenLayer has built a good AVS pipeline around the core primitive of restaking. Currently, 19 AVS are online on the mainnet.

For example, EigenDA is a data availability solution developed by EigenLabs and marketed simultaneously as the flagship AVS. EigenDA’s solution is derived from Danksharding, the Ethereum scaling solution. The concept of data availability sampling (DAS) is also widely used in DA projects such as Celestia and Avail.

For AVS, EigenLayer provides the following benefits:

  • Economic security and node operation services during the project start-up phase. During the maturity phase of a project, EigenLayer can also provide leased elastic security if there is a sharp increase in economic security needs in the short term;

  • AVS's node verification service is run by Ethereum validators. Compared with independent operation by the project party or centralized node service provider, it can achieve better decentralization;

  • Possibility to reduce verification and operational costs (depending on the circumstances) and reduce marginal costs;

  • The Dual Staking model proposed by EigenLayer can provide certain token utility for AVS;

  • Build certain services and products based on trusted commitments from Ethereum validators, such as pre-confirmation;

  • As an EigenLayer ecological project, it has received certain endorsements, marketing support, market exposure, etc.

As a kind of technical solution, AVS is often more natural and concise than L1 and intermediary software that start their own node network. In addition, it should be recognized that AVS is essentially an intermediary software and infrastructure project. The logic of investing in AVS should be evaluated based on the logic of evaluating such projects (products, technology, competitive landscape, etc.). AVS itself does not provide Special differentiation.

As mentioned above, AVS is the consumer and leasing party of re-hypothecation, and is also the core of the three-party market. The market relies on AVS for payment, which is generally paid in AVS's native token (maybe in the form of points if the token is not online), which is usually 3%-5% of the total supply of AVS tokens. In the near future, EigenDA will begin paying re-stakeholders and node operators at 10 Ether per month. EigenLayer itself will also use 4% of its total token supply to support all early-stage AVS to help them survive the cold start period.

From a mid- to long-term perspective, the driving force for the sustainable development of the EigenLayer ecosystem lies on the demand side. There needs to be enough AVS to pay for economic security, and it must be sustainable. This is related to AVS's own business conditions and operating capabilities, and will eventually be reflected in the token price.

The income from Ethereum staking will exist and remain in a stable range for a long time, but the income from AVS may not. Each AVS token provides different returns, durability, and volatility. Each re-pledger’s risk preference and pursuit of returns are also different. In this process, there will be spontaneous dynamic regulation by the market (more Ethereum Staking to a certain AVS will reduce the yield, prompting pledgers to switch to other AVS or other protocols).

3. Summary

After the airdrop craze subsided and the market cooled, EigenLayer’s TVL dropped by about 20%, entering the mean reversion period we had previously predicted. In the long term, we believe that EigenLayer's re-staking will not be a short-term emotional narrative, but will become a permanent attribute of the Ethereum ecosystem, used to externalize the economic security of Ethereum and help projects get started.

  • According to the above, TVL is not the core indicator for evaluating EigenLayer, but the quality of AVS is. If there are more high-quality AVS built on EigenLayer, then they will definitely bring high revenue and TVL will follow. Therefore, the competition between re-hypothecation protocols is actually a competition to identify and “invest” in AVS early on. The re-hypothecation agreement will obviously be a winner-takes-all market.

  • For LRT protocols, TVL is certainly one of the explicit indicators for evaluating protocol performance, but the number of TVL alone cannot summarize all of a protocol. For protocols such as "saving money", the support of users, especially large investors, is a core element. Compared with retail investors, large investors have more "lazy" funds, less willingness to gain short-term and quick returns, and more stable risk preferences, so they are more likely to stay on the platform for a long time. Liquidity is a top priority for large investors, which is related to their confidence in the project. Therefore, establishing and maintaining liquidity should be one of the primary goals of the LRT protocol.

4. Investment logic and layout

We are actively planning the Staking & Restaking track before and after the two key time nodes of Ethereum "The Merge" and "Shanghai Upgrade". In summary, we are mainly based on the following predictions:

  • Ethereum "The Merge" means that PoS has become a permanent attribute of Ethereum, and staking is an indispensable part; after "Shanghai Upgrade", Ethereum staking as a means of asset management has changed from "only in but not out" to "You can enter and exit" to achieve a closed loop of capital flow. Two iconic events are the basis for our focus on this track.

  • We believe that the staking track will inevitably develop in the direction of product diversification. The market favors diverse solutions. As the pioneer and absolute leader in the staking track, Lido will be more cautious in launching new products due to its sensitive position (the community has repeatedly expressed concerns about Lido’s market share exceeding 33%), so we believe that as other companies As competitors launch differentiated strategies, Lido's market share will slowly decline in the long term.

More than a year has passed, and the market’s performance has also verified our prediction:

圖源:ETH Staking Dashboard by @hildobby

  • The Ethereum pledge rate has grown from about 12% a year ago to 27.28%, a growth rate of 227.3%. In the current Ethereum staking queue, there are 6,425 stakers entering the queue and need to wait for 3 days and 14 hours; while there is only 1 staker in the exit queue and there is almost no need to wait (data on May 31). Demand exceeds supply for a long time.

  • Driven by the Restaking narrative, many LRT protocols (such as Ether.fi, Renzo) have actually become the top stakers of Ethereum. In addition, institutional-level staking plans and independent staking plans are also in full bloom. Lido’s market share also dropped from a peak of 32.6% to 28.65%.

5. Conclusion

Image source: Justin Drake

Looking back at the development history of the Ethereum staking and re-pledge ecosystem, we can clearly see that the value of Ethereum as a multi-functional asset has been continuously strengthened and expanded. From its initial single accounting and gas functions to now playing diversified roles at the same time, Ethereum has become an indispensable cornerstone of the crypto economy.

As the Ethereum roadmap continues to expand functionality and the staking ecosystem becomes increasingly mature, the role of Ethereum is becoming increasingly important in the entire blockchain industry. Through staking and re-staking, Ethereum not only provides a solid foundation for network security and decentralization, but also demonstrates its three major attributes of capital, consumable and value storage assets by expanding functional economic security and enriching the ecosystem. unique role.

In the future, Ethereum may play a more important role in the following aspects:

  • As the value anchor of the cross-chain ecosystem: Through re-staking protocols such as EigenLayer, Ethereum has the potential to become the economic security foundation of the multi-chain world.

  • Promote composable financial innovation: DeFi products based on LST and LRT will be more abundant, providing users with more income and risk management options.

  • Deepening integration with traditional finance: The access channels provided by Ethereum ETFs and the stability of Ethereum staking returns may attract more institutional investors and promote the integration of crypto assets with traditional financial markets.

Some predictions:

  • In the future, as the Ethereum pledge rate grows, the pledge income will gradually decrease, and funds will seek a more diversified income structure. As the re-pledge solution matures, re-pledge will take over the flow of this part of the funds and provide certain additional income. (Just like MEV-Boost has become the default block construction method adopted by almost all validators to increase returns) The proportion of Ethereum coins participating in re-staking relative to the Ethereum coins participating in pledges will gradually increase.

  • In the re-pledge industry, due to the flexibility of LRT's asset management, its positioning will gradually expand from a liquidity re-pledge platform to a cross-protocol and cross-ecological "asset management center" and a connecting DeFi Hub, and even connect to the real world. . For example, Ether.fi has launched its crypto-native credit card in conjunction with its LRT and Liquid products. In this process, market leaders have higher bargaining power when negotiating with upstream and downstream companies.

We firmly believe that Ethereum will continue to serve as the cornerstone of the decentralized economy, supporting and driving the widespread adoption of decentralized applications around the world. We will continue to pay close attention to this rapidly developing industry and align our investment layout with the future development trend of Ethereum.

[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.

  • This article is reprinted with permission from: "Foresight News"

  • Original author: IOSG Ventures