Further expansion of collateralization is underway beyond Ethereum.

Re-staking, derived from liquidity staking, has provided more security for Ethereum and more opportunities for investors. Nowadays, this trend has evolved from liquidity staking tokens (LST) to a nested version called liquidity re-staking tokens (LRT).

From a theoretical perspective, LRT is actually similar to a type of re-collateralization certificate. By pledging ETH for liquidity, LST is obtained, which is a certificate that proves "I have indeed pledged ETH". By re-pledging LST, a new re-collateralization certificate is obtained to prove "I have indeed re-pledged LST". However, throughout the process, the original asset is only ETH itself.

In simple terms, it means pledging ETH to obtain LST, pledging LST again to obtain LRT, and repeating this process, known as re-staking. You can use LRT to perform more financial operations, such as re-staking and borrowing. Each additional pledge adds another opportunity to earn profits through liquidity.

Recently, some tokens related to the LRT concept have seen good gains, in addition to the continuously doubling Restake Finance ($RSTK), there are also low market value projects such as KelpDAO, which is based on EigenLayer and built with rsETH as the LRT solution.

Unreleased projects include Swell, ether.fi, Renzo, Puffer Finance with a funding of $5.5 million, exocore which focuses on multi-chain restaking, and even lending platforms Ion Protocol and Astrid that serve staked and restaked assets.

Related reading: "RSTK doubles in one day, overview of Restaking ecological projects".

Although the most common way of re-staking currently is to re-stake the LST obtained by staking Ethereum into EigenLayer to obtain LRT, other ecosystems are also attacking the re-staking track, such as the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, the Solana ecosystem Picasso, etc. This article will sort out the re-staking projects outside of Ethereum.

Babylon

On December 7th, the Bitcoin collateral protocol Babylon completed a $18 million financing round, led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC, with participation from Framework Ventures, ABCDE Capital, IOSG Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and OKX Ventures.

Babylon uses Bitcoin as an economic security token for staking on a blockchain that utilizes proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Typically, proof-of-stake chains use their native tokens for security, such as the Ethereum network using ETH for security, which may compromise security on chains where the native token is not popular. Babylon's proof-of-stake service uses Bitcoin for purposes other than just being a store of value.

Babylon entered the testnet in January of this year. Currently, 39 chains have been integrated into its testnet, and scalable restaking is about to be launched.

Babylon is a leading project in the Bitcoin ecosystem and the largest staking infrastructure for Bitcoin. Babylon originated from a research paper on Bitcoin security, which was co-authored by co-founders David Tse and Fisher Yu, as well as Sreeram Kannan, the founder of EigenLayer, and other collaborators.

Babylon's Bitcoin collateral protocol adopts remote collateral method, which overcomes the lack of smart contracts through cryptography, consensus protocol innovation and optimization using Bitcoin script language. Babylon's collateral protocol allows Bitcoin holders to trustingly collateralize Bitcoin without the need to bridge to the PoS chain, and provide complete reducible security guarantees for the chain, eliminating the need to bridge, package, and custody already collateralized Bitcoin.

One key aspect of Babylon is its BTC timestamp protocol. It timestamps events from other blockchains onto Bitcoin, allowing these events to enjoy the same timestamp as Bitcoin transactions. This effectively borrows the security of Bitcoin as a timestamp server. The BTC timestamp protocol enables fast unbonding, composable trust, and reduced security costs, maximizing the liquidity of Bitcoin holders. The protocol is designed as a modular plugin that can be used on various PoS consensus algorithms and provides the foundation for building reset protocols.

Related reading: "ABCDE: Why we invest in Babylon?"

As a Bitcoin ecological project, Babylon will expand a Bitcoin-centered ecological world, unlocking the value of 21 million Bitcoins and extending the security of Bitcoin to protect more POS decentralized worlds. Due to re-staking, Bitcoin will not only be a hard currency, but also become a productive asset.

Currently, the first phase of staking has ended. Interested users can continue to follow the updates of the second phase. Babylon hopes to launch its mainnet before the "halving" of Bitcoin, and the deployment of the mainnet largely depends on the security audit results of the Babylon testnet.

LiNEAR

LiNEAR is a liquidity staking protocol on Near Protocol. The NEAR mainnet launched in August 2020 and is a sharded, proof-of-stake L1. Its core design is the concept of sharding, which divides the network infrastructure into several parts so that nodes only need to process a small portion of network transactions.

LiNEAR's key advantage is its ability to automatically monitor and adjust validator delegation, ensuring competitive and stable overall returns. Currently, the annualized rate is 8.35%, the highest among Near.

Regarding the re-staking gameplay of LiNEAR, it involves three types of tokens: $NEAR, $LiNEAR, and $bLiNEAR. In order to enable users to fully participate in the decision-making of LiNEAR and influence its development, LiNEAR is launching the governance token $LNR for the LiNEAR protocol.

Users can stake $NEAR to receive $LiNEAR, which can be further used in various DeFi protocols in the NEAR/Aurora ecosystem, significantly improving the capital efficiency of $NEAR stakers. $bLiNEAR is a derivative token of liquidity mining launched by LiNEAR. Users who deposit $NEAR into the $bLiNEAR staking pool will receive $bLiNEAR, which represents the user's re-staking of $NEAR.

$bLiNEAR can be used for additional financial activities in any DeFi protocol, such as re-staking for borrowing or providing liquidity. One notable advantage of $bLiNEAR is that it can be quickly exchanged back to $NEAR, avoiding the typical long unbonding and delayed unlocking periods.

As the governance token of the protocol, users can deposit $LNR into the insurance fund, and the pledger receives $sLNR as a representative of their fund shares. $sLNR holders have the right to set the fee rates for the $LiNEAR and $bLiNEAR staking pools, manage authorization policies, supervise the protocol treasury, and receive a portion of the protocol's revenue, which increases with the development of the ecosystem. New $LNR tokens will be regularly introduced into the insurance fund to promote liquidity related to $bLiNEAR and strengthen governance.

Currently, LiNEAR is preparing an $LNR airdrop event for existing $LiNEAR users and early adopters of $bLiNEAR. Users can lock $NEAR before a specific date and enjoy staking rewards from the LiNEAR protocol. After the lock-up period, they will automatically receive $bLiNEAR. The earlier the lock-up, the greater the amount of $LNR airdrop.

Related reading: "LiNEAR Protocol Launching Governance Token $LNR and Unveil Restaking Support".

除了 LiNEAR 外，针对 Near Protocol 的再质押项目还有 Octopus Network。

Aside from LiNEAR, there is also Octopus Network as a re-staking project for Near Protocol.

On December 17th, Octopus Network launched the first Cosmos SDK application chain, Ottochain. This means that their innovative NEAR Restaking shared security service and NEAR-IBC cross-chain service are running smoothly, and the Octopus 2.0 mainnet is officially online. It is reported that Octopus 2.0 has added the NEAR Restaking mechanism.

In Octopus 2.0, $NEAR holders can re-stake their tokens to the NEAR protocol or to Ottochain and other application chains. Therefore, in addition to receiving staking rewards for $NEAR, additional $OCT rewards allocated by Ottochain can be obtained through re-staking. However, unlike LiNEAR, re-staking NEAR in Octopus does not provide LRT, which means that the staked NEAR cannot be further used in DeFi.

Picasso

Picasso Network aims to support multiple L1s, mainly promoting cross-ecosystem blockchain communication (IBC) between ecosystems such as Polkadot, Kusama, and Cosmos, and expanding to other networks such as Ethereum and Solana. However, the project currently targets the blank space of liquidity re-staking track in the Solana ecosystem, attempting to achieve re-staking in the Solana ecosystem through IBC capabilities.

Picasso has just launched LST$DOT and $lsDOT for re-staking to ensure security. Specifically, Picasso is introducing a Restaking Vault program, similar to EigenLayer on Solana. The implementation is roughly as follows:

Layerless

According to official sources, upgrading from MATIC to POL requires sending MATIC to the upgrade smart contract, which will automatically return an equivalent amount of POL. Token holders will have ample time to upgrade, such as 4 years or longer. If the community reaches a consensus to support the proposal, migration may begin within a few months.

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