Restaking
In simple terms
Restaking puts capital that is already staked to work securing other systems as well. The extra rewards come with extra ways to lose the stake, because each additional service adds its own rules for penalties.
Definition
Reusing already-staked capital to secure additional services, earning more rewards and taking on more slashing risk.
In depth
Restaking allows staked assets, or liquid staking receipts, to be committed as security for services beyond the base protocol — oracles, bridges, data-availability layers, and other actively validated services. Each service defines its own slashing conditions, so a single pool of collateral becomes subject to several independent penalty regimes simultaneously. The systemic concern is correlated failure: capital counted as security by many services at once means one incident can cascade, and the true risk is harder to price than the advertised additional yield suggests.
How does Restaking work?
A staker delegates their stake, or a liquid staking receipt, to a restaking protocol and opts into one or more services. Operators run the extra software those services require. Rewards come from each service on top of base staking rewards. If an operator violates a service's rules, that service can slash the delegated stake, which means the same collateral can be penalised through a path unrelated to the base network.
An example
Restaking an illustrative position across three services might advertise an extra few percent of yield. It also creates three additional, independent ways for the stake to be slashed, and those risks are not independent of one another when the same operators serve all three.
Figures are illustrative only.
What beginners get wrong
- Treating the additional yield as free. It is compensation for additional slashing exposure.
- Assuming diversification across services reduces risk when the same operators and the same collateral sit behind all of them.
- Overlooking that this is a young design whose failure modes have not been widely tested in adverse conditions.
Related terms
Part of
What is DeFi, and how does decentralized finance work? — the subject page for defi, with all 18 of its definitions in one place.
Educational only — not financial advice.