What is restaking? EigenLayer, AVSs and LRT yield

Restaking lets staked ETH secure other networks for extra rewards and extra slashing risk, and on today's numbers almost all of a liquid restaking token's yield is still ordinary Ethereum staking.

Restaking is the practice of pledging ETH that's already staked on Ethereum as security for other networks and services, in exchange for additional rewards and an additional set of rules under which that ETH can be slashed. EigenLayer created the category in 2023 and still holds most of it, with $7.06 billion restaked on 27 September 2026 according to DefiLlama. Most people restake through a liquid restaking token such as ether.fi's weETH, which tracks a pool of restaked ETH and can be traded or used in DeFi while the ETH underneath stays staked.

The pitch is capital efficiency: the same ETH earns the Ethereum staking rate and a second income stream from whichever services it secures. Measured against plain staking, that second stream has been small. On 27 September 2026, weETH's base rate was 2.29% and stETH's, which carries no restaking at all, was 2.19%, so the restaking layer added about a tenth of a percentage point on top of ordinary staking, plus whatever token rewards were paid separately.

Common restaking terms

How restaking works

An Ethereum validator locks 32 ETH and earns rewards for proposing and attesting to blocks, with the risk of being slashed by Ethereum itself for signing conflicting messages. Restaking adds a second contract on top. The staker points the validator's withdrawal address at EigenLayer (native restaking), or deposits an LST such as stETH, and then delegates that stake to an operator. The operator registers with one or more AVSs, runs their software, and earns fees paid by those services, which it shares with the stakers who delegated to it.

A close comparison is a tenant's security deposit that already guarantees one lease and is then pledged a second time as a guarantee for other tenants' leases. The deposit earns a fee for the extra guarantee, and a breach under any lease can draw it down. Here the deposit is staked ETH, the first lease is Ethereum's rules, and the other leases are the AVSs an operator joins.

The mechanism is described plainly on ethereum.org's restaking page: restakers "use their already-staked ETH to secure other decentralized services" and can "get additional rewards from those other services on top of their regular ETH staking rewards." The ETH itself never moves to the AVS. What the AVS gets is a credible threat: if the operator misbehaves, part of the stake behind it can be taken away, so cheating costs more than it pays.

1. Stake: ETH is staked on Ethereum, directly or through an LST.
2. Restake: the stake, or the LST, is deposited into a restaking protocol.
3. Delegate: the restaker picks an operator, or an LRT protocol picks one for them.
4. Secure: the operator opts into AVSs and runs their software.
5. Earn or lose: the AVS pays rewards when the work is done, and can slash when it isn't, within the conditions the operator accepted.

A liquid restaking token protocol runs the stake, restake and delegate steps for the holder and issues a tradable token such as weETH, rsETH or ezETH, while the ETH underneath earns and risks both layers.

What is EigenLayer?

EigenLayer is the restaking protocol built by Eigen Labs on Ethereum, and it accepts native ETH, LSTs, its own EIGEN token and other ERC-20 tokens as restaked collateral, according to the EigenLayer documentation. In June 2025 Eigen Labs launched EigenCloud, a developer platform built on EigenLayer, alongside a $70 million purchase of EIGEN tokens by a16z crypto, as CoinDesk reported. The docs and DefiLlama now list the protocol under the EigenCloud name, and EigenLayer remains the restaking layer inside it.

Its best-known AVS is EigenDA, a data availability service for rollups built by Eigen Labs. When slashing went live, Eigen Labs counted 40 AVSs on mainnet, 190 in development and more than 2,000 registered operators, and named LayerZero's verifier networks and Infura's Decentralized Infrastructure Network as launch partners for slashing. EigenLayer's deposits peaked at $22.06 billion on 14 August 2025 and stood at $7.06 billion on 27 September 2026, per DefiLlama, a fall measured in dollars that reflects ETH's price as well as withdrawals.

Is slashing live on EigenLayer?

Yes. Slashing went live on EigenLayer mainnet on 17 April 2025, which Eigen Labs described as the protocol's "feature-complete" milestone in its launch post. For the first two years restakers earned points and rewards without their stake being slashable by any AVS, so the extra risk was theoretical. The upgrade made it enforceable, with two limits on how far it reaches.

First, slashing is opt-in. It only applies when an operator joins a slashable operator set created by an AVS, and the stake it allocates to that set (called unique stake) can be slashed by that AVS alone, so one service's penalty doesn't cascade into another's. Second, the conditions are set by each AVS, which means a restaker's real exposure depends on which services their operator has signed up for. On 22 July 2025 Eigen Labs switched on redistribution, which lets an AVS send slashed funds to a chosen recipient, such as users it harmed, in place of burning them. Redistribution covers ERC-20 assets such as LSTs, while slashed native ETH is burned.

Withdrawals got slower with the upgrade. EigenLayer's withdrawal documentation sets a 14-day escrow period after a withdrawal is queued, doubled from 7 days so that an AVS has time to slash an operator for faults committed before its stakers leave. Native restakers also wait for Ethereum's own validator exit queue, which can overlap with the escrow if the withdrawal is queued early.

Liquid restaking tokens

Running a validator and choosing operators takes work, so most restaked ETH sits behind liquid restaking protocols. A holder deposits ETH or an LST, the protocol stakes and restakes it across operators it selects, and the holder gets a token whose exchange rate against ETH rises as staking rewards accrue. The token can be sold on a DEX or posted as collateral in a lending market, which gets around the 14-day escrow for anyone willing to accept the market price. It's the same model as liquid staking with one more layer of delegation and risk.

Rates are DefiLlama's base APY for each token on Ethereum, which measures growth in the token's value against ETH and excludes rewards paid in other tokens. Deposits are DefiLlama protocol TVL. The guide to APY in crypto explains how these rates are annualised.

Where restaking yield comes from

A liquid restaking token earns from three sources, stacked in order of reliability. The base is Ethereum staking: issuance, priority tips and MEV paid by the network, which ran at about 2.5% a year across all validators in September 2026, as our breakdown of Ethereum staking yield shows. The LRT protocol deducts its fee from that. The second layer is AVS rewards, paid by the services the stake secures, often in the AVS's own token or in EIGEN. The third is incentives: points programmes and airdrops, which drove much of the 2024 inflow and have no fixed value.

The first layer dominates. Against stETH's 2.19%, weETH's 2.29% was 0.10 percentage points higher on 27 September 2026, and rsETH and ezETH were slightly lower. On that comparison, ordinary staking accounted for roughly 95% or more of the measured LRT rate, and any restaking premium arrived mostly as separate token rewards whose dollar value depends on the price of the token paid. AVSs pay restakers out of their own revenue or token budgets, and most are young services with small fee income, so the second layer has stayed thin relative to the first.

Higher advertised ETH rates usually come from what's done with the LRT afterwards: lending it, looping it against borrowed ETH, or providing liquidity. Those strategies add return and add the risks of each protocol they touch. Our guide to tiering vault strategies by risk sorts them from conservative to aggressive.

Symbiotic, Karak and restaking beyond ETH

Two other restaking protocols launched on Ethereum in 2024. Symbiotic is permissionless: anyone can create a vault that accepts any ERC-20 collateral, and networks choose which vaults and operators secure them. It went live with slashing on mainnet on 28 January 2025, according to Symbiotic's launch post, and held $480 million on 27 September 2026, down from a peak of $2.7 billion in December 2024 (DefiLlama). Karak took a multi-asset, multi-chain approach and reached about $1.05 billion in June 2024, and had $8.1 million on 27 September 2026.

The same idea has spread to other assets. Babylon lets bitcoin holders stake BTC to secure proof-of-stake chains without bridging it, and held $3.43 billion on 27 September 2026, while Jito runs a restaking programme on Solana with about $21 million, both per DefiLlama. Each copies EigenLayer's structure of stakers, operators and slashable commitments, adapted to a chain that doesn't have Ethereum's staking contracts.

Restaking risks

Restaking keeps every risk of ETH staking and adds several of its own. Slashing by an AVS has only been possible since 2025, so there's little history to measure it against, and the largest loss restakers have taken so far came from a bridge.

• Extra slashing conditions: an operator that opts into a slashable AVS can lose part of the delegated stake for faults that Ethereum itself wouldn't penalise, such as downtime or a bad signature on the AVS's network.
• Operator risk: the restaker, or the LRT protocol, depends on the operator's choice of AVSs and on how well it runs their software.
• Smart contract and bridge risk: each layer (EigenLayer, the LRT protocol, any cross-chain bridge) adds contracts that can fail. On 18 April 2026 an attacker forged a cross-chain message to Kelp's LayerZero bridge and released 116,500 rsETH, about $292 million and roughly 18% of supply, prompting Aave, SparkLend and Fluid to freeze rsETH markets, according to Chainalysis. Chainalysis attributed it to the offchain infrastructure that verified bridge messages.
• Depeg and liquidity risk: an LRT only trades near ETH while buyers trust its backing. With a 14-day escrow plus Ethereum's exit queue, anyone who needs ETH quickly sells at the market price.
• Looping risk: looping an LRT against borrowed ETH earns the gap between staking and borrow rates, and loses money when borrow rates rise above the staking rate or when the LRT's price drops against ETH.
• Reward risk: AVS rewards paid in tokens can fall in value, and points programmes can end without the payout holders expected.

Always make sure to do your own research and be aware of the above and any other risks before depositing.

Restaking vs staking vs liquid staking

Where vaults fit

For most holders, restaking arrives inside another product: an LRT used as collateral in a lending market, or held by a yield vault that combines it with other positions. The vault's curator decides how much restaking exposure to take, which LRTs, and what to do with them, and the vault's rules limit where the funds can go. A vault's onchain allocations show how much of its headline rate is plain staking passing through.

On Upshift, the Sentora ETH vault, curated by Sentora, held about 677 ETH (around $1.8 million) on 27 September 2026 per Upshift's backend, with weETH supplied on Morpho as collateral against a borrowed RLUSD position lent back into Morpho. Each Upshift vault's policy engine restricts which protocols, tokens and functions the curator can use, and the contracts have been through 10 smart contract audits by 6 independent firms. Our explainer on how onchain yield vaults are secured covers those controls.

Frequently asked questions

What is restaking in simple terms?

It means using ETH that's already staked on Ethereum to also secure other services, such as bridges or data layers. Those services pay extra rewards and can slash the stake if the operator running their software breaks the rules.

What is the difference between staking and restaking?

Staking secures Ethereum and earns the network's rewards. Restaking pledges the same stake to additional services for extra rewards, and adds their slashing conditions on top of Ethereum's.

Is restaking safe?

It carries more risk than plain staking: extra slashing conditions, more smart contracts, bridges for tokens used on other chains, and a 14-day withdrawal escrow on EigenLayer. The largest restaking loss so far, the April 2026 Kelp bridge exploit, came from bridge infrastructure.

What is liquid restaking?

Liquid restaking protocols such as ether.fi, Kelp and Renzo restake ETH on a holder's behalf and issue a tradable token, such as weETH, rsETH or ezETH, that keeps earning while it's used elsewhere in DeFi.

How much yield does restaking pay?

On 27 September 2026 the main liquid restaking tokens had base rates of 2.16% to 2.29%, against 2.19% for stETH, per DefiLlama. Extra AVS rewards and incentives are paid separately and vary in value.

Is EigenLayer slashing live?

Yes, since 17 April 2025. It applies only to stake that operators allocate to slashable operator sets, under conditions each AVS defines.

What is EigenCloud?

EigenCloud is the developer platform Eigen Labs launched in June 2025 on top of EigenLayer. EigenLayer is still the restaking protocol within it.

Keep reading

• Current ETH staking rates. What staked ETH earns and why rates differ by provider.
• What is liquid staking. How stETH, rETH and similar tokens work.
• DeFi lending. How lending markets that accept LRTs as collateral pay lenders.
• What is TVL. How deposit figures like EigenLayer's are measured.