Original | Odaily

Author | Nan Zhi

Last week, EigenLayer, a cryptocurrency re-staking service provider, announced the completion of a $100 million financing round with participation from a16z. Binance Labs also announced its investment in two re-staking protocols, Puffer Finance and Renzo. On the other hand, according to on-chain analysts, in early February, three of Sun Yuchen's addresses invested 271,328 stETH tokens for re-staking, with a current value of $880 million.

The popularity of re-staking is increasing.

In this article, Odaily will summarize various mainstream re-staking protocols, comparing their differences and highlights from multiple perspectives. The following chart shows a list of protocols in descending order of TVL (Total Value Locked).

Protocol Comparison

Financing

Regarding financing, there are currently only a few protocols that have publicly announced their financing situation, mainly concentrated at the end of 23 and the beginning of 24 (Swell's financing was mainly for the LSD business at that time), with amounts in the millions of dollars.

On the other hand, the overlapping degree of participating institutions in each agreement is not high. The lead institutions for TVL's first ether.fi are North Island Ventures and Chapter One. The lead institutions for Puffer Finance are Lemniscap and Faction. The most influential financing event was Binance Labs announcing its participation in Puffer Finance and Renzo. The market believes that this news signifies the possibility of the token being listed on Binance Exchange. With the disclosure of the participation news, TVL has rapidly increased.

Pendle Fixed Rate

Pendle encapsulates interest-bearing tokens into SY (Standard Yield) tokens, which are further split into principal and yield components, namely PT (Principal Token) and YT (Yield Token) respectively. Users holding PT tokens can redeem the equivalent principal after maturity, while all the interest during the period belongs to YT. The difference between the current price and the maturity price of PT represents the fixed yield.

Pendle has launched a proprietary navigation interface for LRT as shown in the figure below. The fixed yields of various agreements are approximately in the range of 30% to 40%, with maturity dates of 120 days and 57 days respectively. It is worth noting that holding only PT means obtaining fixed yield only, while giving up points and pledge yield.

And buying YT is equivalent to using leverage to obtain EigenLayer points and project points. The following are some screenshots of YT products taken by Odaily. The YT of several protocols is equivalent to obtaining EigenLayer points with a leverage of ten times, and it comes with leverage points with different multipliers.

EigenLayer points

Currently, only four protocols have announced EigenLayer points, with the highest being 308 million points for ether.fi and the lowest being 13.3 million points for Bedrock.

In addition, according to the data from the points trading market Whales Market, the current floor price of EigenLayer points is about 0.15 USDT per point. For pledgers of ether.fi, this is equivalent to holding a total of $46.2 million worth of point assets, accounting for approximately 3% of the TVL. Readers can calculate the value of the EigenLayer points of other disclosed protocols or convert the TVL to the point assets of other protocols.

In addition, Whales Market has also launched project points for ether.fi. The current market depth is poor. If calculated based on the floor price of 0.00074/Point, the Loyalty Points of the current protocol are 22.1 billion, which is approximately $16.42 million. There is currently no publicly available price for the points of other protocols.

Asset withdrawal

Currently, most of the restaking protocols have not implemented withdrawal logic and can only be withdrawn in the form of asset exchange through various DEX, causing certain loss. Ether.fi is the only protocol that can be directly withdrawn, and Ether.fi has also prepared liquidity reserve funds to meet users' immediate withdrawal needs.

But at the same time, ether.fi also encountered allegations of "cheating points", with community users pointing out that the actual points obtained by ether.fi based on the TVL and EigenLayer scores of other protocols are significantly smaller than the calculated scores. Ether.fi responded by stating that the reason for the relatively small number of points is due to the time difference of deposits and the funds set aside for users to withdraw immediately, in order to transfer all EigenLayer scores to users.

Conclusion

Each Restaking protocol has different characteristics, and users can choose based on their own needs:

For users with high liquidity requirements, they can choose to stake on ether.fi to have the opportunity to withdraw and participate in other protocols at any time;

For users seeking stable returns, they can choose to purchase PT from Renzo.

For users with medium risk preferences, they can choose Puffer, as it has a higher expected listing on Binance and a larger number of major stakeholders, such as Sun Yuchen being the top staker of Puffer.

In addition, there are other protocols such as Zircuit and Eigenpie, which offer rich reward types and are suitable for users who want to improve the efficiency of fund utilization and balance expected returns.