Curriculum·J305 Staking, Restaking, and Yield Architecture·about 32 min
Restaking and LRTs
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Enumerate the claim stack behind a liquid restaking token and name each issuer
- →Separate the risk a restaking premium is advertised against from the risk actually borne
- →Compute how many years of premium a single wrapper dislocation consumes
- →Evaluate the protections the design does provide, and what they do not cover
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The risk that arrived after the deposits.
- What happened
- This is a structural finding rather than a named incident, and it is labeled as such. Restaking is the practice of allowing already-staked ether to secure additional services, in exchange for additional rewards and additional slashing conditions. Tens of billions of dollars of deposits, and the points programs built on them, accumulated from 2023 onward on that premise. Slashing did not go live on EigenLayer mainnet until 17 April 2025, and then as an opt-in mechanism, with slashing confined to an operator's unique stake allocated to a single operator set and a reputation-based committee able to veto unjust penalties. By that point the ecosystem reported around 190 services in development with about 40 on mainnet, more than 2,000 registered operators and over 80,000 unique staking addresses.
- The decision point
- For the period in which restaking accumulated most of its capital, the slashing risk that a restaking premium is supposed to compensate for was not yet enforceable. So whatever depositors were being paid for, it was not that. What they were actually exposed to was the claim stack: an issuer, a wrapper, a secondary market price and, for many, leverage on top. Per this course's autopsy, that is precisely where the losses occurred, and the design worked hard on the risk that was being discussed rather than the one that was being taken.
What you will be able to answer
- →What is restaking?
- →How many layers is a liquid restaking token?
- →What was the premium actually compensating for?
- →How much premium does one dislocation cost?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://blog.eigencloud.xyz/slashing-goes-live/
- https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/04/17/eigenlayer-adds-key-slashing-feature-completing-original-vision
- https://docs.eigencloud.xyz/eigenlayer/concepts/slashing/slashing-concept
- https://protos.com/depeg-of-3b-restaking-token-ezeth-causes-over-60m-in-defi-liquidations/
Confidence medium·Volatility high·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
Marked medium confidence and high volatility because this area changes faster than the curriculum revises. Slashing is live and its parameters, the set of services and the operator population all move. The structural argument about claim stacks and about which risk a premium compensates is durable; every specific figure here is dated and should be checked.
This lesson is not an argument that restaking is unsound. The slashing design deliberately limits correlated penalties through unique stake and a veto committee, which is a serious answer to a serious problem. The point is narrower: those protections address the slashing layer, and the documented losses have come from the wrapper layer.