SOL version of EigenLayer? The staking frenzy spreads to the Solana ecosystem

Recently influenced by EigenLayer's successful model and the widespread market attention brought by its token issuance, the Solana ecosystem seems to be gearing up for action. According to Coindesk's investigation, multiple teams are currently developing restaking protocols.

Solana Ecosystem Aiming to Emulate EigenLayer

Perhaps inspired by EigenLayer, although the Solana Foundation has stated that there are currently no related plans, it seems that at least six teams within the community are building Solana ecosystem-style re-staking protocols, aiming to get a piece of the re-staking industry pie.

It is expected that similar re-staking games will be released in the Solana ecosystem in the coming weeks and months to share the security of the Solana network with other decentralized projects.

Introduction of Potential Solana Re-Staking Projects

These teams include client team Jito, startups Solayer Labs and Cambrian, infrastructure development team Picasso, hackathon-born new teams DePHY and Repl.

Jito

Although Jito previously closed its innovative MEV trading market due to community pressure, it still holds influence within the Solana community and is therefore seeking new breakthrough opportunities—re-staking may be one example, although the team has not yet disclosed any related plans.

Solana's largest third-party client Jito will issue governance token JTO

Cambrian

Cambrian's founder Gennady Evstratov stated that they are developing an intermediate service similar to EigenLayer and will use zero-knowledge proof technology to optimize interactive technology, also providing security and computation layers for external projects, unlike EigenLayer.

According to the team, Cambrian is set to complete a $2.5 million fundraising. Cambrian will open its testnet in the coming weeks and plans to launch its mainnet in early Q3 this year, open its point system, and issue tokens.

Solayer Labs

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

The team members come from projects like Sushiswap, MPCvault, and seem to have raised $10 million in funding. However, Solayer Labs is progressing slowly with no online plans at the moment, but the early point system has already started.

Picasso

Picasso started building a re-staking project six months ago and opened its service earlier this month, becoming the first available re-staking product on Solana. However, Picasso has not built a universal platform to protect all decentralized projects, but instead, it first protects its own cross-chain bridge connecting Solana and Cosmos blockchains through this re-staking framework.

Team members of Picasso stated that they started building their own re-staking 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 in the future.

Pros and Cons of Solana Incorporating Re-Staking

Although EigenLayer on Ethereum is mainly aimed at scaling solutions for Ethereum Layer2. Ethereum's roadmap will develop into a modular blockchain, making the timing right for re-staking, as sharing assets may be the only way to protect such a large infrastructure project.

However, Solana relatively does not need this, so many community members believe that the re-staking ecosystem may not necessarily benefit Solana, but may bring uncertainty and increase system risks. For example, if operators are reduced by AVS, the impact may affect the entire staking ecosystem.

Although re-staking may bring more new vitality and opportunities to the ecosystem, the balance between risks and benefits may need more discussion.

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

Regardless, the development of the Solana re-staking ecosystem seems unstoppable.