From Staking to Restaking
Summary
Cosmos pioneered this idea as shared security, and EigenLayers restaking recognized that an ETH-centric approach could successfully bootstrap this validator ecosystem. Zooming out, the long-term goal of the protocol is to provide primitives that help networks navigate the roadmap to decentralization while prioritizing safety and capital efficiency.Protocols built on Symbiotic can control their collateral assets, rewards, and slashing criteria. Over time, it will be possible to maximize the number of participants, their geographic distribution, and their overlap with other protocols, reputation, and other selection criteria.The core Symbiotic contracts are immutable, which removes external governance risks. Services built on Symbiotic will be able to support many different slashing resolution mechanisms, which we believe is critical for innovation.Building infrastructure operator networks is challenging, as we have learned in working with Lido. However, we think block production use cases may take longer to blossom: they often benefit from adoption by a greater fraction of L1 proposers and may pose more direct security risks to Ethereum L1.To help achieve that vision, we also created Reth Execution Extensions (ExEx).