A new name is quietly making a big wave in the restaking world: Symbiotic – a protocol that has only emerged since 2024 but has quickly raised 29 million USD from a series of major names like Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and over 100 angel investors from top projects like Aave, Polygon, and StarkWare.
What makes Symbiotic regarded as a formidable 'counterbalance' to EigenLayer – the restaking protocol that is dominating the market? Let's explore further.
🔹 Symbiotic – Not just a copy of EigenLayer.
While #Eigenlayer remains committed to supporting only ETH for restaking, Symbiotic chooses a more flexible approach: supporting all types of ERC-20 tokens. This opens up possibilities for security and coordination among diverse crypto protocols and greatly expands the scope, helping Symbiotic quickly rise to the 3rd position in TVL in the restaking field, reaching about 863 million USD, according to data from DeFiLlama.
This differentiation is not only technical – it is the strategy to expand the 'coverage' for the entire Web3 ecosystem.
🔹 Universal Staking Framework – the 'heart' of Symbiotic.
With the 29 million USD just raised, #Symbiotic is developing a core infrastructure named Universal Staking Framework. This is a new economic security coordination layer that allows:
Restake with any type of asset – not limited like $ETH .
Support from monolithic, modular, Layer-1, Layer-2 blockchains to new fields like AI, zero-knowledge, decentralized finance, or even on-chain insurance.
Establish separate staking structures for each protocol: choose validator sets, adjust reward/penalty mechanisms without needing to rewrite the core infrastructure.
In other words, Symbiotic does not only provide staking infrastructure – but also empowers protocols to design security systems tailored to their specific needs.
🔹 29 million USD is not just a number.
This is not the first time Symbiotic has raised funds – previously, they raised 5.8 million USD in a Seed round. However, this Series A round is taking place just 3 months after the mainnet was launched and 6 months after the devnet, indicating a high level of trust from investors and the extremely rapid development of the project.
The new funding will be used for:
Expanding the development team.
Accelerating the integration roadmap with new blockchains and applications.
Completing the Universal Staking Framework, aiming to become the economic coordination layer for the entire on-chain infrastructure.
Currently, there are 14 networks like Hyperlane, Spark, and Avail integrating Symbiotic, with an additional 20 networks on the roadmap.
🔹 Competing with EigenLayer – But not copying.
Symbiotic does not hide its ambition to become a competitor to EigenLayer, but they choose to differentiate themselves, not directly confront but provide tailored solutions for protocols that do not want to use shared models like EigenLayer.
According to co-founder Misha Putiatin, many blockchain projects today need customized and independent security models, not reliant on shared infrastructure. And that is the 'niche market' full of potential that Symbiotic is pursuing.
"We are not just building infrastructure — we are significantly improving it to serve new models that will emerge in the future." – Putiatin shares.
🔹 Crypto is not just Layer-1 – Staking is entering a new era.
Symbiotic is one of the clear examples showing that crypto infrastructure is developing beyond traditional Layer-1, entering the era of expanded staking, flexible coordination, and multi-industry applications.
For users in the crypto ecosystem, especially Binance users or other staking platforms, these changes open up more diverse and flexible staking opportunities, not limited to popular coins.
📌 In summary:
Symbiotic is not merely a new staking project – but a significant advancement in designing customized security infrastructure, opening a flexible restaking era for the entire Web3 ecosystem, from finance to AI, from Layer-1 to Zero-Knowledge.
🔔 Risk warning: Crypto projects, especially in the field of restaking and new infrastructure, often carry technical, security, and high volatility risks. Please carefully research and consider before participating in staking or investing in protocols still in development.