Restaking

Reusing cryptocurrency already staked on Ethereum as collateral to secure additional services, in return for extra rewards.

• New services, such as price oracles, bridges or data layers, can rent Ethereum's existing staked capital instead of building their own validator set.
• Restakers opt in to each service's rules, and breaking any of them can trigger slashing of the same underlying stake.
• EigenLayer pioneered the idea; slashing went live on its main network in April 2025.
• The risk is correlated: one bug or badly written slashing rule could hit stake securing many services at once, a chain of leverage-like exposure.