The EigenLayer of SOL Version: A Resurgence in Solana Ecosystem with Increased Staking Momentum

Influenced by the success of EigenLayer and the market attention brought by its token issuance, the Solana ecosystem seems to be ready for action. According to a Coindesk investigation, there are currently several teams developing restaking protocols.

Contents:
Toggle
Solana Ecosystem Aims to Emulate EigenLayer
Introduction to Potential Solana Restaking Projects
Jito
Cambrian
Solayer Labs
Picasso
Pros and Cons of Restaking in Solana
Perhaps inspired by EigenLayer, although the Solana Foundation has stated that it currently has no plans, it seems that at least six teams in the community are building restaking protocols in the Solana ecosystem, hoping to share in the rewards of the restaking industry.

Recommended reading:
How will the restaking project EigenLayer change the Web3 infrastructure ecosystem?
Reason for recommendation: This article comprehensively explains EigenLayer’s design philosophy, the problems it solves, and its current development status, allowing for a quick understanding of its innovative product positioning and design architecture, as well as gaining a better understanding of the content of this article.

Advertisement – Continue scrolling for more content

It is expected that similar restaking projects will be released in the coming weeks and appear in the Solana ecosystem within a few months, allowing the Solana network’s security to be shared with other decentralized projects.

These teams include the client team Jito, startups Solayer Labs and Cambrian, infrastructure development team Picasso, and new teams DePHY and Repl, born out of hackathons.

Although Jito closed its innovative MEV trading market due to community pressure, it still has influence in the Solana community and is therefore seeking new breakthrough opportunities. Restaking may be one example, but the team has not yet publicly announced any plans.

(Solana’s largest third-party client Jito will issue governance token JTO)

Cambrian’s founder Gennady Evstratov stated that they are developing a middleware service similar to EigenLayer, using zero-knowledge proof technology to optimize interaction technology, while also providing other external project security layers and compute layers, different from EigenLayer.

According to the team, Cambrian is currently raising $2.5 million. The testnet will be open in a few weeks, and they plan to launch the mainnet in the early third quarter of this year, along with the token issuance.

Similar to Cambrian, Solayer Labs plans to establish an economic security layer and execution layer for the Solana ecosystem to protect external applications in decentralized networks. These projects will be able to customize the environment they need, such as high performance or specific modules.

The team members come from projects such as Sushiswap and MPCvault, and they seem to have already raised $10 million. However, Solayer Labs is progressing slowly and currently has no plans for launch, but they have already started an early token distribution program.

Picasso started building the restaking project half a year ago and opened its service earlier this month, becoming the first available restaking product on Solana. However, Picasso did not build a general platform that can protect all decentralized projects, but instead, as a compromise, they first protect their cross-chain bridge connecting Solana and Cosmos blockchains through this restaking framework.

Picasso team members stated that they started building their own restaking system because EigenLayer’s system is limited to the Ethereum ecosystem. Currently, the protocol has deposited $8 million worth of SOL and a small amount of liquidity staking tokens.

Picasso also plans to open up to other projects and users in the Solana ecosystem.

While EigenLayer’s most important purpose for Ethereum is to benefit Ethereum Layer2 as the main scaling solution, Ethereum’s roadmap will develop into a modular blockchain, making the timing for restaking ripe, as shared assets may be the only way to protect such a large infrastructure project.

However, Solana, on the other hand, does not necessarily need it, so many community members believe that the restaking ecosystem may not necessarily bring benefits to Solana, but instead may bring uncertainty and increase system risks. For example, if the operator is reduced by AVS, the impact may affect the entire staking ecosystem.

Although restaking may bring more new vitality and opportunities to the ecosystem, compared to the risks involved, whether the benefits outweigh the risks may require more discussion.

Market speculation is that customers of such Solana restaking protocols are more likely to be other application facilities, such as oracles, MEV infrastructure, storage, DePIN, etc.

In any case, the development of the Solana restaking ecosystem seems unstoppable.

Cambrian
Jito
Restaking
Solana
Solayer Labs
Restaking