Definition
Restaking is a crypto-economic concept in which assets that are already staked to secure a base blockchain or protocol are reused as collateral to secure additional systems. Instead of locking new capital, the same staked position is effectively rehypothecated to provide security guarantees for other applications or networks. This extends the economic security of the original staking layer to new services, while keeping the underlying stake subject to additional conditions and potential penalties.
In restaking designs, the original staked tokens remain bonded to their primary protocol, but are also opt‑in committed to extra sets of rules enforced by higher-layer or side protocols. These additional commitments can introduce new slashing conditions, meaning the same stake can be partially or fully penalized for misbehavior across multiple environments. As a result, restaking tightly couples the risk profile of the base staking position with the reliability and behavior of the extra protocols it secures.
Context and Usage
Restaking is most commonly discussed in the context of shared security and modular blockchain architectures, where multiple services seek to leverage an existing trust and capital base. Protocols that adopt restaking aim to bootstrap security more efficiently by tapping into already-staked assets rather than building independent validator sets from scratch. This can influence how decentralized finance ecosystems, including platforms that interact with DEX environments or structured protocols like EigenLayer, think about security sourcing and risk allocation.
Because restaking layers introduce additional contractual obligations on top of the original staking relationship, they create complex dependencies between the base chain and the protocols that inherit its security. The same staked capital may simultaneously back core consensus, middleware services, and DeFi applications, concentrating both security and potential systemic risk. As restaking models evolve, they are increasingly treated as a distinct category of crypto-economic design, separate from traditional staking, lending, or liquidity provision mechanisms used in platforms such as GMX, Maker, or Curve.