DeFi
Lido presents “Restaking Vaults” in collaboration with Symbiotic and Mellow Finance
Ethereum staking mainstay Lido has recently been grappling with the frenzy around the “resumption”, a new trend that threatens to erode the staking platform’s hold on decentralized finance (DeFi).
Lido is controlled by the Lido DAO, a consortium of LDO token holders who vote on protocol strategy and key upgrades.
A new initiative from the DAO will see the Lido partner with Mellow Finance, a platform that allows users to generate yield by depositing into reinvestment ‘vaults’, and Symbiotic, an authorization-free recovery protocol. Under the new initiative, traders will have access to restructuring tools that could help bring Lido stETH back into the spotlight.
“Lido’s strategy is to demonstrate to the market that using stETH as a reinvestment asset of choice is in fact the best way to reinvest,” said adcv, pseudonymous co-founder of Steakhouse Financial and the financial department of Lido DAO, in an interview. with CoinDesk.
Lido sits at the center of Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem, allowing users to bet cryptocurrency– park it with the chain to help protect it – in exchange for rewards. The big innovation of Lido when it launched a few years ago was that it offered depositors a “liquid staking token” called Lido staked ETH (stETH) that users could trade even if their underlying deposits were technically locked up on Ethereum.
Lido currently ranks as the largest decentralized finance protocol on Ethereum, with 33 billion dollars value of deposits, according to DefiLlama. StETH, meanwhile, has become one of the most popular assets in DeFi.
But lately, The domination of the Lido has fallen as users have moved their assets to EigenLayer, a newer service that allows users to “reinvest” assets like ether (ETH) and stETH to help secure other networks in exchange for additional rewards.
Lido recently introduced The Lido Alliance—a group of partners and protocols committed to protecting the role of stETH in Ethereum DeFi. Hasu, head of Lido strategy, also highlighted reGOOSEa multi-pronged strategy to help Lido address the risks posed by reinvestment.
This new initiative – the launch of four stETH-centric restructuring products on Mellow Finance – is the first example of reGOOSE and The Lido Alliance in action. It’s also the first hint of how Symbiotic, a startup backed by the co-founders and Lido’s largest investor, could play a key role in Lido’s future plans.
Lido DAO provides formal support for Mellow Finance, a DeFi protocol that offers cash repossession “vaults”. Users can deposit assets such as stETH into the vaults, and “custodians” – who are like crypto underwriters – will deploy these assets across different actively validated services, or AVS (protocols secured by reinvested assets), to help users earn additional interest on their funds.
Mellow’s new platform is a response to fluid reconditioning protocols like Renzo and Ether.Fiwhich replenishes user deposits in EigenLayer (and, soon, other replenishment protocols) to help investors earn additional interest.
Like everything else DeFi, liquid restocking exists as a way for people to extract as much “economic efficiency” (read: yield) as possible from their digital assets. Users of the protocol earn receipts on their deposits called “liquid takeover tokens” or LRT, which can be traded, lent, and borrowed on other protocols in exchange for additional rewards.
When it comes to liquid foodservice, “you have players like Renzo and EtherFi who are doing it top to bottom, but Mellow brings a permissionless quality to it, which we found quite attractive,” adcv said.
While traditional liquidity restocking protocols take a unique approach to selecting where they deploy user capital, Mellow allows anyone to create a vault and distribute deposits based on their own risk parameters and business theses. ‘investment.
“Vaults are an important step in realizing the reGOOSE strategy, providing investors with the power to navigate the varied terrain of the risk/reward landscape,” Lido DAO said in a statement shared with CoinDesk.
Curators Mellow Steakhouse, P2P Validator, Re7 Labs, and MEV Capital are each introducing vaults that accept stETH in tandem with Tuesday’s announcement.
For now, the rewards users will receive for depositing into Mellow’s vaults will come in the form of vaguely defined “points” this could possibly be linked to future token airdrops. (There is currently no AVS paying interest on Symbiotic or any other recovery protocol.)
For now, vaults are best viewed as a proof of concept for why stETH is a useful asset for reinvestment. “StETH is the best possible asset to use as re-staking collateral,” insists adcv. “It has all the network effects. It has all the liquidity and it has the ability to abstract native staking. […] It generates the native staking yield at all times. »
“Personally, I expect and hope that other LRTs – Renzo, EtherFi, whatever – will also recognize this and in turn adopt it as their main guarantee,” the acdv said.
It’s no coincidence that Mellow Finance builds its restaurant vaults using Symbiotic, an up-and-coming competitor to EigenLayer.
Last month, a CoinDesk Report first revealed that Symbiotic was quietly funded by Paradigm, Lido’s largest backer, and cyber•fund, a venture capital firm run by Lido’s co-founders. The report also shows internal company documents detailing how the yet-to-be-launched Symbiotic protocol might work for the first time.
From a purely technical perspective, it makes sense that Mellow would choose Symbiotic to build its permissionless vaults: EigenLayer only accepts certain crypto assets (namely ETH, EIGEN, and some ETH derivatives), while Symbiotic accepts any type of crypto asset based on Ethereum. ERC-20 token standard.
But there is another reason, beyond investors or Symbiotic’s technicalities, why Lido DAO might choose to partner with a restructuring platform other than EigenLayer. Although EigenLayer accepts stETH deposits from Lido (meaning it is possible to use Lido and EigenLayer at the same time), it has capped the amount of stETH one can deposit.
The growth of EigenLayer therefore came at the expense of that of Lido, since some users withdrew their stake from Lido to channel more assets to the new reconstitution platform.
“EigenLayer was effectively limiting, on a discretionary basis, the amount of steETH that could be integrated into its middleware – rather arbitrarily, in my opinion,” adcv said. “I expect this type of restriction to become increasingly rare in the future, because from a restructuring provider’s perspective, you don’t want to put a damper on your ability to raise capital. “
EigenLayer “has had it very easy so far, but with more competition it will become more difficult to be so selective,” he said.
CORRECTION (June 11, 2024 2:12 p.m. UTC): Lido’s deposits are $33 billion, not $27 billion. Not all curators of Mellow’s stETH vault are members of the “Lido Alliance”.