Original author: Haotian (X: @tmel0211 )
Recently, a series of factors including: @eigenlayers expected airdrop, @RenzoProtocols performance after launch was below expectations, and the decline in Fomo sentiment of other Restaking have undoubtedly cooled down the Restaking re-staking track. How do you view the current situation of the Restaking industry and the possible changes in the future? Next, I will briefly share a few points of view:
1) The restaking track has indeed experienced a long period of irrational prosperity, from the points war to ETHFI, Renzo, Puffer, Swell and other projects that are expected to have high market expectations. The restaking track has fallen into a locking liquidity data show mode of grabbing native ETH and LST certificates, as if whoever can attract more assets to be locked in can create greater expected value in the future, and therefore get a higher valuation when entering the market?
In my opinion, this value estimation standard is far from the truth, and it ignores an essence. Locking assets such as LST vouchers cannot create incremental value for points. The AVS network market behind it can be opened up, and the real creation of income is the beginning of value. Obviously, under irrational emotions, everyones expectations and focus are not on the implementation of AVS. Instead, high expectations in exchange for attracting traffic and assets are not effectively supported;
2) Eigenlayer hastily issued tokens and proposed an innovative paradigm of intersubjective. To be honest, I think this token issuance is specifically for extinguishing the fire and cooling down the heat. Because if the Restaking Points Lego War is further demonized, the pressure on Eigenlayer will be exponentially magnified. Once Eigenlayer has any disturbance in the future development process, it will trigger a chain resonance crisis in the re-staking industry.
The expected implementation of Eigenlayer’s token issuance will significantly cool down the Fomo trend such as the points war, allowing the market to focus on the growth essence of the AVS network effect, which is the support point of re-staking.
3) AVS (Active Verification Service), in simple terms, is to select some nodes from the tens of thousands of node operators of Ethereum, and do some corresponding hardware and software and technical service capacity enhancement, so that these validators can maintain their original Ethereum consensus and expand some service capabilities to maintain the security of other Rollup networks, thereby obtaining the possibility of additional income. (It is equivalent to abstracting some mining pools from a large number of miners and then doing some business expansion)
The AVS network can be understood as strengthening some middleware services in the basic Infra layer of Ethereum, allowing some nodes to unite and encapsulate and commercialize service capabilities such as decentralized sequencers and decentralized Oracles. In theory, as long as the capability boundaries of the nodes under the control of AVS are large enough and within the large consensus framework of Ethereum, the application scenarios that can be expanded will be very impressive.
To put it simply, these middleware networks originally required external consensus building to access, but now the underlying infrastructure of Ethereum can directly provide such service capabilities, and it can also represent a certain Ethereum security consensus. The AVS node enhancement application paradigm can be regarded as a potential direction for Ethereum to increase its business expansion capabilities, but its focus is on enhancing node service capabilities and the actual implementation of AVS network service capabilities and generating benefits. It is not the expected attributes of subsidiary pledge re-staking and points War brought by AVS.
4) In fact, the AVS node enhancement application paradigm is also reflected outside the Ethereum network: for example: @MarlinProtocol can provide rental computing power support for some AI model training demanders through distributed node enhancement; another example: @FlareNetworks can directly integrate the EVM network and the on-chain ecosystem by enhancing its off-chain distributed Oracle node capabilities, opening up the narrative direction of Oracle As A Service. (I will follow up with detailed analysis and interpretation when I have time)
After the capabilities of these node operators who originally worked behind the scenes at the bottom layer are enhanced, they can bring broader business growth capabilities to the original chain.
Looking back, Eigenlayer originally did restaking just to provide basic security capabilities for its EigenDA (the first AVS), but it never expected to open the Pandoras Box of restaking: on the negative side, if not guided and controlled, the false prosperity of restaking will further amplify the potential liquidity crisis of the Ethereum network; on the positive side, from the perspective of AVS node capability enhancement, Restaking will indeed inject a new narrative direction and imagination space into the blockchain ecosystem.
This is the future of the re-pledge track, nothing else.
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