According to a report from CoinDesk citing sources familiar with the matter, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, co-founders of the liquidity staking protocol Lido, are secretly funding Symbiotic, a competitor of EigenLayer in the rapidly growing restaking 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, 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 declined their funding and instead opted for another venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Paradigm also expressed to Kannan that they would invest in a competitor of his project.
Symbiotic, as per internal documents obtained by CoinDesk, is described as “a permissionless restaking 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 indicate that Symbiotic allows users to restake 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 deposits in Ether (ETH).
These documents are labeled as “preliminary” and “not for distribution,” but several teams working in the nascent restaking ecosystem (including Active Validation Services (AVS) built on EigenLayer and liquidity restaking services) 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.
Related articles:
– “EigenLayer Searches Dictionaries for Intersubjective as Replacement for ‘Social Consensus'”
– “Binance Research Report: Exploring the Restaking Sector”