Written by: Fairy, ChainCatcher
Editor: TB, ChainCatcher
In the first half of 2024, the concept of secondary income ignited market enthusiasm, and 're-staking' once became the core topic sweeping the crypto ecosystem. EigenLayer rose, and projects like Ether.fi and Renzo emerged one after another, with re-staking tokens (LRT) blossoming everywhere.
However, both leading projects in the track have chosen to transform:
Ether.fi announces its transformation into a new type of crypto bank (neobank), planning to launch cash cards and staking services for US users;
Eigen Labs announced a layoff of about 25%, restructuring resources to fully focus on the new product EigenCloud.
Once a hot topic, 're-staking' now faces a turning point. Do the strategic adjustments of the two major players indicate that this track is heading towards inefficacy?
Emergence, craze, and clearing
In the past few years, the re-staking track has gone through a cycle from concept testing to capital-intensive influx.
According to RootData, there are currently over 70 projects that have emerged in the re-staking track. EigenLayer, within the Ethereum ecosystem, is the first project to bring the ReStaking model to market, spawning a collective explosion of liquidity re-staking protocols such as Ether.fi, Renzo, and Kelp DAO. Subsequently, new architecture projects like Symbiotic and Karak also made their appearances.
In 2024, financing events surged to 27, raising nearly $230 million throughout the year, making it one of the hottest tracks in the crypto market. As we enter 2025, the pace of financing has begun to slow, and the overall heat of the track is gradually cooling down.
Meanwhile, the reshuffling of the track is accelerating. Currently, 11 projects, including Moebius Finance, goTAO, and FortLayer, have successively ceased operations, gradually clearing the early bubble.
Currently, EigenLayer remains the dominant player in the track, with a TVL of approximately $14.2 billion, capturing over 63% of the market share in the entire industry. In its ecosystem, Ether.fi holds approximately 75% market share, while Kelp DAO and Renzo account for 12% and 8.5%, respectively.
Narrative weightlessness: cooling signals behind the data
As of now, the total TVL of re-staking protocols is approximately $22.4 billion, down 22.7% compared to the historical peak of about $29 billion in December 2024. Although the overall locked volume remains high, the momentum for re-staking growth has shown signs of slowing.
Image source: Defillama
The decline in user activity is even more pronounced. According to The Block data, the daily active deposit users for Ethereum's liquidity re-staking have plummeted from a peak of over a thousand in July 2024 to currently just over thirty, while the number of daily independent deposit addresses for EigenLayer has even dropped to single digits.
Image source: The Block
From the perspective of validators, the appeal of re-staking is also diminishing. Currently, the daily active re-staking validators on Ethereum account for less than 3% compared to regular staking validators.
Moreover, the token prices of projects such as Ether.fi, EigenLayer, and Puffer have all corrected by over 70% from their peak. Overall, although the re-staking track still retains a certain volume, user activity and participation enthusiasm have significantly declined, and the ecosystem is falling into a state of 'weightlessness'. The narrative-driven effect has weakened, and the growth of the track has entered a bottleneck period.
Leading projects' transformations: Is the re-staking business no longer viable?
As the 'airdrop period bonuses' fade and the track's heat dissipates, the expected revenue curve is expected to flatten, and re-staking projects are beginning to face the question: how can the platform achieve long-term growth?
Taking Ether.fi as an example, it achieved over $3.5 million in revenue for two consecutive months at the end of 2024, but by April 2025, revenue fell to $2.4 million. In the reality of slowing growth momentum, a single re-staking function may be difficult to support a complete business story.
It was also in April that Ether.fi began to expand its product boundaries, transforming into a 'new type of crypto bank', constructing a closed loop of financial operations through 'bill payments, salary distributions, savings, and consumption' in real-world scenarios. The dual-track combination of 'cash card + re-staking' has become its new engine for attempting to activate user stickiness and retention.
In contrast to Ether.fi's 'application layer breakthrough', EigenLayer chose to reconstruct more towards the strategic infrastructure level.
On July 9, Eigen Labs announced a layoff of about 25% and focused resources on the new developer platform EigenCloud, which subsequently attracted a new round of $70 million investment from a16z. EigenCloud integrates EigenDA, EigenVerify, and EigenCompute, attempting to provide a universal trust infrastructure for on-chain and off-chain applications.
The transformations of Ether.fi and EigenLayer, though differing in paths, essentially point to two solutions of the same logic: to make 're-staking' transition from an endpoint narrative to a 'starting module', from a goal in itself to a means of building more complex application systems.
Re-staking is not dead, but its 'single-threaded growth model' may be hard to sustain. Only when it is embedded within a more scalable application narrative does it possess the capability to continuously attract users and capital.
The mechanism design that ignited market enthusiasm in the re-staking track with 'secondary income' is now searching for new points and vitality in a more complex application landscape.
