Symbiotic Launch on Ethereum Mainnet

Symbiotic is launching on the Ethereum mainnet on Tuesday, marking the first fully permissionless restaking protocol to go live in a production environment, co-founder Misha Putiatin told The Block in an interview.

Restaking allows users to “restake” their existing staked assets on one network to secure another, helping to improve capital utilization across the crypto ecosystem.

Unlike leading restaking protocol EigenLayer, Symbiotic is designed for greater flexibility by allowing users to deposit any ERC-20 token in its security model, rather than just ETH and its staked derivative variations.

“It’s really hard to launch a decentralized network because it’s like a semi-isolated process,” Putiatin said. “Every network goes through it alone. First, you need to launch a token that is going to be robust enough to provide economic security and coordinate the network. You need to have really good operators. You need to have robust software for those to use. It’s not an easy feat.”

Symbiotic is also the first restaking protocol to fully implement its slashing feature, which is essential in establishing trust over proof-of-stake systems and ensuring network integrity. Validators can lose some of their staked assets via slashing if they engage in malicious or improper behavior like double-signing blocks or experiencing excessive downtime.

At the core of Symbiotic’s design are its modular smart contracts called “vaults,” where users pool their staked assets that are used to secure other networks.

Putiatin noted Symbiotic tries to achieve “credible neutrality” and full flexibility in the types of slashing mechanisms protocols want to set up.

“Imagine one network has arbitrary slashing, right, like that’s based on prediction markets and voting. Symbiotic can implement that. It doesn’t have to adapt to any standard that we propose,” he said. “Our job is really to enforce this agreement once it’s reached. So a lot of flexibility is delivered by the modules that are outside the permissionless core.”

“A really good argument for networks to start with us is that we don’t have political influence,” Putiatin added. “We are not opinionated. They don’t have to adapt their system to accommodate us. They can just use their own architecture. It took us a while to design that.”

Over a dozen projects plan to launch immediately following Symbiotic’s mainnet deployment. Various projects can tap Symbiotic’s architecture for varying needs. Chainbound’s bolt network is using Symbiotic to support its pre-confirmations system while Router uses Symbiotic to enable Cosmos-based chains to leverage Ethereum’s security.

Symbiotic’s pre-production ready system also attracted use from dozens of projects including rollups, data availability layers, and oracle networks.

Ethena, for instance, plans to integrate Symbiotic in a number of different places, Putiatin said.

“It’s an interesting case because to fully decentralize requires a lot of moving parts. It’s important for them that different parts and different networks — like their vaulting token, DAO token, and stablecoin — within their ecosystem will be aligned using one token. They have plans for an oracle network and plans for an L2 and other networks that need decentralizing. Symbiotic will help layer all of those networks with one token.”

Last June, Symbiotic raised $5.8 million in seed funding led by Paradigm and cyber•Fund, the venture firm co-founded by Lido’s co-creator Konstantin Lomashuk.