Restaking Explained: EigenLayer, Babylon and the Exit Problem

Restaking turned staked ETH into reusable collateral, letting one deposit secure several other networks at once in exchange for extra yield. For more than a year, almost every explainer on the subject has focused on how capital gets in: which protocol pays the best yield, which liquid restaking token to hold, which network is growing fastest. Far less has been written about how capital gets out, and in July 2026 that gap became the subject of a live governance proposal at EigenLayer itself. The proposal, together with the maze of withdrawal queues, vault lockups and unbonding periods across the wider sector, is a useful way to understand what restaking actually is in 2026, not just what it promises to be.

What Is Restaking, and Why Does Exiting Suddenly Matter?

Restaking is the practice of re-pledging already-staked capital, usually ETH, to secure additional services beyond the base blockchain in exchange for additional yield. The concept was popularized by EigenLayer, which built the first mechanism letting Ethereum validators opt in to extra slashing conditions in return for rewards from what it calls Actively Validated Services, or AVSs: oracles, bridges, data availability layers and rollup sequencers that would otherwise need to bootstrap their own security from zero. Instead of every new network paying its own validators to secure it from scratch, restaking lets it rent security that Ethereum, and increasingly Bitcoin, has already paid for.

The pitch has always centered on the entry side of the trade: stake once, earn twice, sometimes three times over. What gets far less attention is what happens when a restaker wants to leave. Exiting a restaked position is not like closing a spot trade. Depending on the venue, it can mean waiting through a native Ethereum withdrawal queue, redeeming a liquid restaking token that may be trading below its underlying value, unwinding delegation across several AVSs at once, or waiting out a Bitcoin timelock script. On 11 July 2026, an EigenLayer contributor posted a draft proposal, ELIP-018, that treats this as a genuine infrastructure gap rather than an edge case, and it is the clearest signal yet that the restaking sector is shifting from a growth story to a maintenance one.

That framing cuts two ways over the rest of this piece. It applies literally, to the mechanical process of getting capital out of a restaking position, whether that means an EigenPod, a liquid restaking token or a Bitcoin timelock. It also applies to two of the sector’s most closely watched challengers, which spent 2026 exiting the restaking category altogether rather than continuing to compete inside it.

From Liquid Staking to Restaking: How the Trust Layer Evolved

Restaking did not appear out of nowhere. It is the second layer built on top of Ethereum’s move to proof of stake, which required validators to lock up 32 ETH and run software that could be penalized, or slashed, for misbehavior. Liquid staking protocols solved the resulting capital lockup problem by issuing a tradeable receipt token, such as stETH, in exchange for a deposit, a shift that turned liquid staking tokens into DeFi’s default form of reserve collateral. That innovation made staked ETH productive twice over: it earned staking rewards while also being usable as collateral on lending markets or paired into liquidity pools. By mid-2026, liquid staking tokens collectively account for a large share of all staked ETH, with Lido’s stETH alone representing a substantial plurality of that total, a concentration that has long drawn scrutiny from parts of the Ethereum community worried about validator centralization.

Restaking asks a further question: if a validator’s stake can already be slashed for misbehaving on Ethereum, why not let it also be slashed for misbehaving on other networks, provided the validator is paid for the extra risk? EigenLayer’s answer was a set of smart contracts letting ETH holders, whether staking natively through an EigenPod or depositing a liquid staking token, opt in to securing additional AVSs. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was skeptical from the start. In a widely cited 2023 post, he warned that “any expansion of the duties of Ethereum’s consensus increases the costs, complexities and risks of running a validator,” arguing that piling too many financial obligations onto the same validator set risked turning isolated failures into systemic ones, since the community might feel pressure to bail out a failing restaked protocol rather than let it collapse cleanly.

EigenLayer and EigenCloud: Still the Restaking Standard

EigenLayer remains the dominant restaking platform by most measures, though the sector’s own data trackers disagree meaningfully on the exact numbers. The protocol rebranded its public identity to EigenCloud in 2025 to emphasize a broader roadmap of verifiable compute services, including EigenDA for data availability and EigenCompute for off-chain verification, built on the same restaked security base. Slashing went live on mainnet on 17 April 2025, meaning restaked ETH can now actually be penalized for AVS misbehavior rather than just theoretically exposed to it. The network counts roughly 190 AVSs in development, around 40 live on mainnet, more than 2,000 registered operators and tens of thousands of depositor addresses, though total value locked has fallen sharply from its early 2025 peak; different trackers currently put it anywhere from roughly $5 billion to the low teens of billions of dollars, a spread that says as much about inconsistent methodology across the sector as it does about the protocol itself.

EIGEN, the network’s governance and incentive token, trades around $0.20, down roughly 96 percent from its December 2024 all-time high of $5.65, with a circulating supply of about 741 million tokens and a market capitalization near $148 million, according to CoinGecko. Eigen Labs co-founder Sreeram Kannan has consistently argued the risk is overstated relative to liquid staking, telling CoinDesk in 2023 that “anything that restaking can do, already liquid staking can do,” and that he views “restaking as a lesser risk than liquid staking” precisely because its slashing conditions are opt-in and explicit rather than implicit. The token’s price has not reflected that confidence: EigenLayer’s governance council has spent much of 2026 retuning emissions, most notably through a December 2025 proposal known as ELIP-012, which redirected weekly EIGEN issuance toward AVSs that generate real fee revenue rather than idle deposits, specifically because measured protocol revenue has lagged the growth in deposits. A related mechanism, discussed on EigenLayer’s own governance forum, roughly doubled total annual EIGEN emissions starting in October 2025 as part of a broader incentives overhaul, a reminder that even as governance tries to redirect rewards toward productive stake, overall token dilution has if anything increased rather than eased.

Liquid Restaking Tokens: ether.fi, Renzo, Puffer and Kelp DAO

Most retail exposure to EigenLayer does not come from running an EigenPod directly. It comes through liquid restaking tokens, or LRTs, issued by protocols that pool user deposits, restake them across a curated set of AVSs, and hand back a tradeable receipt. ether.fi’s eETH is the largest by a wide margin, with several billion dollars deposited and roughly three-quarters of the LRT segment by some estimates. Renzo’s ezETH and Puffer’s pufETH each hold somewhere between one and three billion dollars depending on the week, and Kelp DAO’s rsETH rounds out the group. Advertised yields across the category have typically run from the high single digits to the low double digits annually, blending native ETH staking rewards, EIGEN incentive emissions and points programs of uncertain long-term value. Renzo’s ezETH suffered a brief de-pegging scare in April 2024 that the protocol traced to a reward-token distribution error rather than any loss of underlying backing, an early warning that LRT prices can wobble for reasons that have nothing to do with the restaked ETH itself.

Liquidity for an LRT holder who wants out normally comes from one of two places: selling on a decentralized exchange at whatever price the market is clearing, or queuing a direct redemption with the issuing protocol, which unwinds the underlying restaked position and can take anywhere from hours to days depending on how many AVSs the deposit is spread across. Under calm conditions those two prices track closely. Under stress, they can diverge sharply, which is exactly what happened to Kelp DAO’s rsETH in April 2026, covered in more detail later in this piece.

ELIP-018 and RETIRE: EigenLayer’s New Exit Hatch

The proposal at the center of this piece is narrow, technical, and exactly the kind of housekeeping a two-year-old protocol eventually has to do. Posted to EigenLayer’s governance forum on 11 July 2026 under the handle mcurtis, ELIP-018 introduces a framework called RETIRE, short for Retirement Enabling Terminal, Irreversible Restaking Exit. It targets a specific problem that had gone largely unaddressed: native ETH stakers who restake through an EigenPod, rather than through a liquid token, currently have no clean way to permanently exit and free their capital from EigenLayer’s accounting rules, short of unwinding delegation, waiting for withdrawals to clear, and hoping nothing about their pod’s state changes in the meantime.

The proposal is explicit about the mechanism: “RETIRE is an EigenPod upgrade that lets a Pod Owner permanently and irreversibly disable restaking on their pod via a new disablePod method on the EigenPodManager.” Three new functions do the work. disablePod, on the EigenPodManager contract, starts the irreversible exit. disableRestaking and withdrawDisabledPodETH, on the EigenPod contract itself, handle the transition of funds. clearQueuedWithdrawalsForDisabledPod, on the DelegationManager contract, clears out any withdrawals still sitting in the queue so they are not stranded by the state change. Once a pod owner calls disablePod, the pod stops minting new restaking shares, all of its ETH becomes ordinary, fully withdrawable ETH, and a separate restriction on consolidating validators outside the restaking system is lifted.

• disablePod (EigenPodManager): starts the permanent, irreversible exit for a given pod
• disableRestaking and withdrawDisabledPodETH (EigenPod): move the pod’s ETH out of restaked status and make it withdrawable
• clearQueuedWithdrawalsForDisabledPod (DelegationManager): resolves any withdrawals still pending so they are not orphaned by the change

Why write new contract logic for something withdrawal queues already handle, at least in theory? Because in practice, EigenPods keep enforcing restaking-specific accounting even after a user has queued a full withdrawal, and operators who want to rotate validator keys, consolidate multiple validators, or simply leave the ecosystem cleanly are stuck dealing with that accounting until every last step clears. As of late July 2026, ELIP-018 remains a draft under community discussion; it has not been approved by EigenLayer’s Protocol Council or scheduled for a mainnet upgrade. Still, the fact that “how do I leave, permanently and simply” is now a formal governance proposal, rather than a support-forum complaint, says something about how the sector’s priorities are shifting after two years of near-total focus on attracting deposits.

The Queue Problem: Why Getting In, and Out, Takes Weeks

ELIP-018’s own justification points at a specific, quantifiable bottleneck: the Ethereum beacon chain’s activation and exit queues. Ethereum limits how many validators can enter or leave the active set per epoch, a safeguard against sudden shifts in the validator set that could threaten consensus. When demand to stake is high, the entry queue backs up; when demand to unstake is high, the exit queue backs up instead. In late July 2026, trackers including validatorqueue.com showed the exit queue had emptied out entirely, while the entry queue had swung the other way, with roughly 2.48 million ETH waiting to activate and an estimated wait of around six weeks.

That asymmetry is precisely the friction RETIRE is designed around. A restaker who wants to rotate keys or consolidate several validators into a more efficient setup has to exit the old configuration and re-enter under the new one. With the exit side briefly clear but the entry side backed up by roughly six weeks, anyone attempting that maneuver during summer 2026 stood to miss more than a month of staking rewards, on top of navigating EigenPod accounting that, prior to RETIRE, offered no clean “done” state. Queue lengths swing constantly with market conditions, from record backlogs to zero and back within the same year, but the underlying design problem, that restaking has treated exit as an unusual event rather than a first-class operation, does not go away just because the queue happens to be empty on a given week.

The same asymmetry shows up, in a different form, for anyone running a solo validator rather than restaking through a pooled product. Ethereum’s push toward simpler client operations has made solo staking with distributed validator technology more accessible, but the same entry and exit queues apply regardless of whether the validator is restaked, and coordinating an exit across a distributed key setup adds its own layer of operational complexity on top of the network-level bottleneck. Withdrawal friction is not unique to restaking either; even centralized venues vary widely in how quickly they let users move funds out, as HOGE Wire’s own comparison of withdrawal speed across Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and OKX found.

Babylon: Restaking Bitcoin Without Wrapping It

While EigenLayer built restaking for ETH, Babylon built the Bitcoin equivalent, and its approach to the exit question is structurally different because Bitcoin’s scripting language cannot run arbitrary smart contracts. Babylon lets BTC holders lock coins directly using Bitcoin’s own native timelock scripts, without wrapping the asset or routing it through a bridge, and that locked BTC then provides economic security to proof-of-stake chains that opt in as what Babylon calls Bitcoin Supercharged Networks. Its Genesis mainnet and BABY token both launched on 10 April 2025. In late July 2026, Babylon’s own dashboard showed 56,853 BTC staked, worth approximately $5.6 billion, making it the largest Bitcoin staking system by that measure, though the figure stayed essentially flat for weeks at a stretch, suggesting it updates more slowly than a live counter.

BABY, the network’s token, trades around $0.012, down roughly 93 percent from its April 2025 all-time high of $0.1661, with a market capitalization near $47 million against that multi-billion-dollar TVL figure, a valuation gap that reflects both the token’s relatively small share of total supply in circulation and the broader market’s skepticism toward restaking tokens generally, according to CoinGecko. Exiting a Babylon position does not involve a liquid restaking token or a beacon chain queue; it means submitting an on-chain unbonding transaction and waiting out a timelock defined by the specific staking script used, a mechanically simple process that is nonetheless a real, mandatory delay rather than an instant redemption.

The Aave V4 Bet: Why Native BTC Collateral Is Still Stuck in Testnet

The clearest test of whether Bitcoin restaking can plug into the rest of DeFi is a proposed integration between Babylon and Aave, and it is a good illustration of how slowly even a well-funded, well-audited plan moves once it hits governance. Babylon Labs and Aave Labs announced the partnership on 3 December 2025, proposing two new Aave V4 Spokes: a Babylon Core Lending Spoke that would let users borrow against native BTC collateral, and a BTC Vault Swap Spoke that would convert liquidated collateral into WBTC for liquidators to settle against. The mechanism relies on what Babylon calls Trustless Bitcoin Vaults, BTC locked in a Taproot output on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, represented on the Ethereum side by vaultBTC, a transfer-restricted accounting token rather than a freely tradeable wrapped asset.

Aave Labs founder and CEO Stani Kulechov backed the plan publicly, arguing in Babylon’s own announcement that “the Bitcoin-backed market on Aave V4 demonstrates how easily new markets can be launched using Aave V4’s Hub and Spoke model,” while Babylon co-founder David Tse framed the pitch around preserving Bitcoin’s own security guarantees rather than trusting a bridge operator. A formal Temperature Check went up on Aave’s governance forum on 25 May 2026, and the integration reached public testnet in early June 2026. That security work has reportedly included firms such as Coinspect, Sherlock, Zellic and ABDK, together with formal verification from Runtime Verification, a heavier review than many DeFi integrations receive before launch, reflecting how much is riding on getting native Bitcoin collateral right the first time. Yet as of late July 2026, the integration is still not on mainnet, months past its original informal target of around April 2026; Aave governance still needs to move the proposal through a full Aave Request for Comment stage covering risk parameters, deposit caps, oracle design and liquidation mechanics before any on-chain vote, a reminder that a project’s testnet milestone and its actual mainnet ship date can sit a long way apart. Anyone weighing whether to wait for native BTC yield on Aave versus routing through an existing bridge should track the Aave governance thread directly rather than any single news summary, given how much the timeline has already moved.

SSV Network and Distributed Validator Technology

A third strand of the restaking story runs through distributed validator technology, or DVT, which splits a single validator’s signing key across multiple independent operators using threshold cryptography, so no single machine or operator ever holds the whole key. SSV Network describes itself as the largest Ethereum DVT provider, citing several million ETH staked, tens of billions of dollars in total value locked, and well over 100,000 validators secured across thousands of operators, figures that run meaningfully higher than some third-party explorer estimates, underscoring the same tracker-disagreement problem seen throughout this sector.

SSV Labs unveiled a second-generation design in January 2025 called Based Applications, or bApps, which lets validators opt in to securing external applications using delegated capital rather than their core 32 ETH principal, so the underlying validator stake itself is never at risk of slashing by a bApp, only whatever additional collateral an operator chooses to delegate. SSV’s own token economics shifted again in April 2026 with a staking product called cSSV, which converts staked SSV into a liquid, non-rebasing token and redirects protocol fees toward ETH-denominated rewards rather than paying everything out in SSV. For validators, exiting an SSV-secured position means the same beacon chain exit process as any other validator, plus the added step of coordinating that exit across the operator set holding the distributed key shares, since no single operator can unilaterally sign an exit message alone. SSV has also been rolling out a second client implementation, called Anchor and built by the security firm Sigma Prime, specifically to reduce the risk that a bug in one dominant piece of software could affect a large share of validators at once, a client-diversity effort mirroring similar work underway across Ethereum’s core node software.

When a Protocol Exits the Category: Symbiotic and Karak’s OpenGDP Pivot

Individual restakers are not the only ones rethinking their exit. Two of EigenLayer’s most prominent challengers spent 2026 backing away from the restaking label entirely, which is its own kind of exit story. Symbiotic launched in 2024 with a design that let vaults accept any ERC-20 token as restakable collateral, not just ETH, and chose its own slashing resolvers, such as UMA or Kleros, rather than EigenLayer’s more centralized model. Despite roughly two years live and about $34.8 million raised across a seed round and a Pantera-led Series A, Symbiotic still had no public token as of July 2026, running on a points program instead. On 1 July 2026 it launched Core V2, explicitly repositioning away from restaking-for-AVS-security and toward what it calls shared collateral markets: routing idle vault capital into insurance backstops, tokenized credit and real-world-asset liquidity. Its first Core V2 product, called Liquid Lane, launched on 2 June 2026 and targets near-instant redemptions for otherwise illiquid tokenized assets such as private credit funds, a market its backers size at well over $300 billion but where most existing products still impose redemption windows of two to six months. Symbiotic co-founder Misha Putiatin has argued the pivot addresses a bigger structural problem, telling The Block that shared collateral works because “committed capital now functions as a liquidity sleeve, settling redemptions without sitting idle,” rather than sitting parked and waiting for an AVS to eventually need it. Estimates of Symbiotic’s total value locked vary widely by tracker and methodology, from roughly $300 million to over $1 billion, one more instance of the sector’s data problem.

Karak went further. Once positioned as a direct EigenLayer competitor with a restaking-focused pitch, the protocol rebranded entirely to OpenGDP in mid-2026, describing itself as “the operating layer for real-world economic execution” and dropping restaking and AVS language from its site altogether in favor of stablecoin settlement and real-world-asset tokenization. No confirmed, liquidly traded token for the rebranded project has surfaced. It is a useful data point precisely because it complicates the exit-problem framing in a different direction: sometimes the hardest thing to exit is not a user’s position, but a protocol’s own commitment to a narrative that has stopped paying off.

Correlated Slashing: Restaking’s Core Risk

The reason exit mechanics matter so much is that restaking’s central risk is not any single AVS failing; it is the possibility that one failure cascades across every AVS a given unit of stake happens to be securing at the time. If the same ETH is restaked to secure five different services and one of them has a bug that triggers slashing, whether that loss stays contained to a fraction of the position or spreads further depends entirely on how the underlying protocol isolates exposure. EigenLayer’s answer is a design it calls Operator Sets and Unique Stake Allocation, described in its own security documentation as ensuring “a unit of ETH can only be slashed by a single Operator Set at any given time,” which lets new AVSs onboard permissionlessly without needing a shared veto committee across every other AVS on the network.

Independent academic modeling of restaking networks has generally supported the idea that adequate overcollateralization can meaningfully bound the size of a cascading slashing loss, rather than letting it compound unchecked across every connected AVS, though the exact margin needed depends heavily on how correlated the underlying AVSs actually are. The practical takeaway for anyone evaluating a restaking product is that marketing material rarely discloses how correlated a given basket of AVS exposures really is, which is precisely the kind of gap that independent security researchers and, increasingly, bug bounty programs staffed by professional whitehat researchers exist to close before it becomes a live incident rather than a theoretical one.

The Kelp DAO and Aave Incident: Exit Friction Under Stress

Restaking’s exit problem is not purely theoretical, and the clearest case study is what happened to Kelp DAO’s rsETH in April 2026. On 19 April, an attacker exploited a cross-chain messaging configuration on Kelp’s bridge to mint roughly 116,500 rsETH out of thin air, worth approximately $292 million and equivalent to a significant share of the token’s entire circulating supply at the time, then used the freshly minted tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow against, according to CoinDesk’s reporting. Because rsETH had been accepted as collateral without fully pricing in the risk of its underlying bridge, the exploit left Aave with bad debt that different reports have estimated anywhere from roughly $196 million to $230 million, while Aave’s total value locked fell by billions of dollars over the following days as users, unable to tell legitimate rsETH from freshly minted counterfeit rsETH, rushed to exit positions across the board.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov froze rsETH’s borrowing power across Aave’s markets as an emergency measure and rallied a coalition, including Lido, ether.fi and Consensys, that pledged more than $300 million to help make affected users whole, saying at the time that “Aave is my life’s work and we’re working nonstop to find the best possible outcome for users.” The recovery effort was reported substantially complete by around mid-2026. It specifically involved burning the fraudulently minted rsETH and migrating Kelp’s cross-chain bridge away from the messaging system implicated in the exploit toward a different provider with additional independent attestors and a longer confirmation window before funds can move between chains, changes aimed at the same exit-and-entry friction discussed throughout this piece, just applied to bridge security rather than validator queues. The episode is a real-world illustration of the exit-friction theme running through this piece: during the exact window when Kelp DAO depositors most needed to exit cleanly, the token’s price and its actual backing had become impossible to tell apart from the outside, a worse version of the queue-length problem described earlier, because it was not a known, published delay but an unknown one.

Insurance and Risk Mitigation

The Kelp episode accelerated a push toward on-chain insurance built specifically for restaking and liquid staking risk. Liquid Collective, the institutional liquid staking protocol built with backing from Coinbase, Kraken, Figment and Kiln, runs a coverage program with a three-layer waterfall: dedicated reinsurance capacity from Nexus Mutual capped per incident, a matching node-operator commitment capped per operator, and a treasury reserve funded by a small percentage of network rewards, according to the program’s own documentation. Several restaking-adjacent protocols have since arranged comparable slashing-cover deals with the same reinsurer, treating it as a template for how the sector can offer depositors a defined, priced backstop instead of an implicit trust-us guarantee.

These products remain niche relative to the total capital at risk across the sector, and they mostly cover the base staking or liquid-staking layer rather than the full stack of AVS-specific exposures a restaker might be carrying. But they represent the same underlying maturation signal as ELIP-018: a sector moving from deposit-and-hope toward products that price risk and define an actual, contractual exit path when something goes wrong, rather than relying on ad hoc rescue coalitions after the fact.

Where Regulators Stand: The SEC’s Restaking Gray Zone

US regulators have addressed staking directly but have been notably careful to avoid extending the same comfort to restaking. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued staff statements in May and August 2025 concluding that certain protocol staking and liquid staking activities, under specific conditions, do not involve the offer or sale of securities. Both statements, however, explicitly carve out restaking and other liquid staking “variations” from that conclusion, according to the SEC’s own press release. Staff statements carry no binding legal force and can be withdrawn or superseded, but the explicit exclusion means restaking protocols and the LRTs built on top of them are operating without the same regulatory comfort that plain staking now has, a gap that has become more relevant as institutional treasuries and publicly traded companies have begun deploying real capital into these products.

That gray zone sits alongside a broader overhaul of how the SEC treats crypto products generally, including new exchange-traded product and market structure rules finalized in 2026, none of which yet address restaking or AVS-based yield directly. Until they do, anyone allocating to a restaking product, whether directly through EigenLayer, via an LRT, or through Babylon’s Bitcoin equivalent, is relying on the same patchwork of protocol-level insurance, audit coverage and now exit-mechanism upgrades like RETIRE to manage risk that regulation has not yet stepped in to define.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is restaking in crypto?

Restaking is the practice of re-pledging already-staked ETH, or a liquid staking or restaking token representing it, to secure additional blockchain services beyond the base network, such as oracles, bridges or rollup sequencers. In exchange for accepting extra slashing conditions, the staker earns additional yield on top of standard staking rewards. EigenLayer pioneered the model for Ethereum, and Babylon later built an equivalent system for Bitcoin using native timelock scripts instead of smart contracts.

Is restaking safe?

Restaking carries more risk than plain staking because it adds new slashing conditions tied to whichever services a deposit secures, and a bug or attack on any one of those services can affect the underlying stake. The main danger is correlated slashing, where the same unit of stake is exposed to multiple services at once and a single failure cascades across all of them. Protocols mitigate this with isolation mechanisms and, increasingly, dedicated insurance products, but the sector’s total value locked has fallen sharply from its 2025 peak, and most token prices tied to restaking protocols remain far below their all-time highs.

How do you withdraw or exit a restaking position?

The exit process depends on how the position was opened. Holders of a liquid restaking token like eETH or rsETH can sell it on the open market instantly, at whatever price it is trading, or queue a direct redemption with the issuing protocol, which can take hours to days. Native ETH restakers using an EigenPod must queue a withdrawal and pass through Ethereum’s beacon chain exit queue, and a 2026 proposal called ELIP-018 would add a permanent disable function to make that exit final and simpler. Babylon’s Bitcoin restaking uses an on-chain unbonding transaction with a built-in timelock delay instead.

What is Babylon and how does Bitcoin restaking work?

Babylon is a protocol that lets Bitcoin holders lock their BTC using Bitcoin’s own native timelock scripting, without wrapping the asset or routing it through a custodial bridge, and then use that locked BTC to provide economic security to proof-of-stake networks that opt in as Bitcoin Supercharged Networks. Its mainnet and BABY token launched in April 2025, and by mid-2026 its dashboard reported more than 56,000 BTC staked. A separate, still-pending integration with Aave would let that staked BTC also serve as native lending collateral, but as of late July 2026 it remains on testnet rather than mainnet.

What is the difference between liquid staking and restaking?

Liquid staking issues a tradeable token, such as stETH, in exchange for a staking deposit, solving the problem that staked capital is normally locked up and unusable elsewhere; that token can then be used as collateral or traded while still earning staking rewards. Restaking goes a step further by taking already-staked capital, whether held natively or as a liquid staking token, and pledging it again to secure additional services for additional yield and additional slashing risk. In short, liquid staking makes staked capital liquid, while restaking makes staked capital do more than one job at once.

Marcus Reid is a markets and DeFi reporter for HOGE Wire.