According to a report from CoinDesk, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, co-founders of the liquidity staking protocol Lido, are secretly funding the competitor Symbiotic of the re-staking protocol EigenLayer, which is entering the rapidly growing re-staking sector.
Multiple sources revealed that Symbiotic not only received support from Lomashuk and Shapovalov through their venture capital firm Cyber Fund, but also from the venture capital firm Paradigm, which is one of the main investors in Lido.
Sources also disclosed that when Paradigm sought to invest in EigenLayer’s co-founder Sreeram Kannan’s project, Kannan rejected their funding and instead chose another venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Paradigm also indicated to Kannan that they would invest in a competitor to his project.
According to internal documents obtained by CoinDesk, Symbiotic will be “a permissionless re-staking protocol providing flexible mechanisms for decentralized networks to coordinate node operators and economic security providers,” developed by a team that previously built a staking service called “Stakemind.” The documents also show that Symbiotic allows users to re-stake using Lido’s stETH token and other popular assets that are not natively compatible with EigenLayer.
The main difference between Symbiotic and EigenLayer is that users can directly deposit any asset based on the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard into Symbiotic, while EigenLayer only accepts Ether (ETH) deposits.
These documents are labeled as “preliminary” and “not for distribution,” but several teams working in the nascent re-staking ecosystem (including active verification services (AVS) and liquidity re-staking services built on EigenLayer) have indicated that they are already discussing integration with Symbiotic. Four sources consulted by CoinDesk revealed that the platform is expected to be released in some form by the end of this year.