EigenLayer and Ether.fi both transform, is the re-staking business no longer viable?

2025-07-14 10:47:18

Collection

Do the strategic adjustments of the two major leaders indicate that this track is heading towards failure?

Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher

Editor: TB, ChainCatcher

In the first half of 2024, the concept of secondary yield stirred the market, and "re-staking" became a core topic sweeping the crypto ecosystem. EigenLayer rose to prominence, with projects like Ether.fi and Renzo emerging one after another, and re-staking tokens (LRT) blossoming everywhere.

However, both leading projects in the current track have chosen to pivot:

Ether.fi announced its transformation into a new type of crypto bank (neobank), planning to launch cash cards and staking services aimed at U.S. 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 leaders indicate that this track is heading towards obsolescence?

Emergence, Frenzy, and Cleanup

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

According to RootData, there are currently over 70 projects in the re-staking track. EigenLayer, the first project to bring the ReStaking model to market, has spurred a collective explosion of liquidity re-staking protocols like Ether.fi, Renzo, and Kelp DAO. Subsequently, new architecture projects like Symbiotic and Karak have also emerged.

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.

At the same time, 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, 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 re-staking protocols is approximately $22.4 billion, down 22.7% from the historical peak of about $29 billion in December 2024. Although the overall locked volume remains high, signs of slowing growth momentum for re-staking have emerged.

Source: Defillama

The decline in user activity is even more pronounced. According to The Block, the number of daily active deposit users for Ethereum liquidity re-staking has plummeted from a peak of over a thousand in July 2024 to just over thirty currently, while the number of daily unique deposit addresses for EigenLayer has even dropped to single digits.

Source: The Block

From the validator's perspective, the appeal of re-staking is also diminishing. Currently, the number of daily active re-staking validators on Ethereum is less than 3% compared to regular staking validators.

Additionally, the token prices of projects like Ether.fi, EigenLayer, and Puffer have all retraced more than 70% from their highs. Overall, while the re-staking track still retains a certain scale, user activity and participation enthusiasm have significantly declined, and the ecosystem is entering a state of "weightlessness." The narrative-driven effect is weakening, and the track's growth has entered a bottleneck period.

Leading Projects Pivot: Is the Re-staking Business No Longer Viable?

As the "airdrop period bonus" fades and the track's heat dissipates, the expected yield curve tends to flatten, and re-staking projects begin to face the pressing 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 back to $2.4 million. In the reality of slowing growth momentum, a single re-staking 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 crypto bank" by building a closed loop of financial operations through real-world scenarios like "bill payments, salary disbursement, savings, and consumption." The dual-track combination of "cash card + re-staking" became its new engine to activate user stickiness and retention.

In contrast to Ether.fi's "application layer breakthrough," EigenLayer chose a more infrastructure-oriented strategic reconstruction.

On July 9, Eigen Labs announced a layoff of about 25% and concentrated resources on the new product developer platform EigenCloud, which subsequently 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 transformations of Ether.fi and EigenLayer, though differing in paths, essentially point to two solutions based on the same logic: to make "re-staking" shift from an endpoint narrative to a "starting module," transforming from an end goal into a means of building more complex application systems.

Re-staking is not dead, but its "single-thread growth model" may be hard to continue. Only when it is embedded in a more scalable application narrative can it possess the ability to continuously attract users and capital.

The mechanism design that ignited market enthusiasm for the "secondary yield" in the re-staking track is now seeking new footholds and vitality within a more complex application landscape.