Re-staking track cools down: Transformation and breakthrough of leading projects

Original Title: "EigenLayer and Ether.fi Both Transform, Is the Staking Business No Longer Viable?"

Original Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher

Original text edited by: TB, ChainCatcher

In the first half of 2024, the concept of secondary yield has stirred the market, with "re-staking" becoming a central topic sweeping the crypto ecosystem. EigenLayer has risen, and projects like Ether.fi and Renzo have emerged one after another, with re-staking tokens (LRT) blooming everywhere.

However, today the two leading projects in the field 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.

The once popular "re-staking" has now reached a turning point. Do the strategic adjustments of the two major players indicate that this track is heading towards obsolescence?

Emergence, Frenzy, and Clearing

In the past few years, the re-staking track has gone through a cycle from conceptual testing to a capital-intensive influx.

According to RootData, there are currently more than 70 projects in the re-staking sector. EigenLayer in the Ethereum ecosystem is the first project to bring the ReStaking model to market, leading to 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 cryptocurrency market. As we enter 2025, the pace of financing has begun to slow down, and the overall heat of the track is gradually cooling.

At the same time, the reshuffling of the track is accelerating. So far, 11 projects, including Moebius Finance, goTAO, and FortLayer, have successively ceased operations, and the early bubble is gradually being cleaned up.

Currently, EigenLayer is still the leader in the field, with a TVL of approximately $14.2 billion, accounting for over 63% of the market share in the entire industry. Within its ecosystem, Ether.fi holds about 75% of the 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 the restaking protocol is approximately $22.4 billion, a decrease of 22.7% compared to the historical peak of around $29 billion in December 2024. Although the overall locked amount remains high, there are signs that the growth momentum of restaking is beginning to slow down.

Image source: Defillama

User activity has declined more significantly. According to data from The Block, the number of daily active deposit users for Ethereum liquidity re-staking has plummeted from a peak in July 2024 (over a thousand) to currently just over thirty, while the number of daily unique deposit addresses for EigenLayer has even fallen 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 are less than 3% compared to regular stake validators.

In addition, the token prices of projects such as Ether.fi, EigenLayer, and Puffer have all retreated more than 70% from their highs. Overall, although the re-staking sector still retains a certain scale, user activity and participation enthusiasm have significantly declined, and the ecosystem is in a state of "weightlessness." The narrative-driven effect has weakened, and growth in the sector has entered a bottleneck period.

Top Projects Transformation: Can’t Continue the Stake Business?

As the "airdrop dividends" fade and the excitement in the sector diminishes, the expected yield curve tends to smooth out, and staking projects must begin 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 by the end of 2024, but by April 2025, the revenue dropped to $2.4 million. In the reality of slowing growth momentum, a single restaking function may struggle to support a complete business narrative.

It was also in April that Ether.fi began to expand its product boundaries, transforming into a "new type of cryptocurrency bank" by creating a closed loop of financial operations through real-world scenarios like "bill payments, payroll disbursement, savings, and consumption." The dual-track combination of "cash card + re-stake" became its new engine aimed at activating user stickiness and retention.

Unlike Ether.fi's "application layer breakout," EigenLayer opts for a restructuring that leans more towards the infrastructural strategic level.

On July 9, Eigen Labs announced a layoff of about 25% and will focus resources on the new developer platform EigenCloud, which has also attracted a new round of $70 million investment from a16z. EigenCloud integrates EigenDA, EigenVerify, and EigenCompute, aiming to provide a universal trust infrastructure for on-chain and off-chain applications.

The transformation of Ether.fi and EigenLayer, while varying in paths, essentially points to two solutions of the same logic: to make "re-staking" shift from an endpoint narrative to a "starting module," turning the purpose itself into a means of constructing more complex application systems.

Re-staking is not dead, but its "single-threaded growth model" may be hard to continue. It can only maintain the ability to continuously attract users and capital when embedded in application narratives with greater scale effects.

The mechanism design of re-staking tracks to ignite market enthusiasm with "secondary earnings" is now seeking new points and vitality within a more complex application map.

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