The restaking gold rush is over, and top protocols are barely making a profit

By the end of this quarter, ether.fi will have cut the last structural link between its staking tokens and restaking protocol EigenLayer. Protocol documentation put under 1% of assets still restaked as of August with EigenPod withdrawal credentials due to be removed by the end of the year.

When ether.fi launched in 2024, deposits were restaked on EigenLayer automatically. In August the company stripped restaking out of weETH, the version of its token that circulates and is accepted as collateral across DeFi, leaving it as a plain liquid staking token. Anyone who still wants restaking has to opt into a separate token built on Symbiotic, a rival platform.

Mike Silagadze, ether.fi's chief executive, said the decision came down to risk. "There were no meaningful yield opportunities in restaking and there was some perceived risk from stakers, so we decided it made sense to exit," he told CoinDesk.

What restaking was meant to be

Staking means locking up $ETH to help secure Ethereum, in return for a yield. Restaking was the idea that the same locked $ETH could do a second job: EigenLayer would rent that security out to other services, such as oracles and data availability layers, which would pay for the protection. Depositors would earn twice on one pot of money. Liquid restaking tokens sat on top of that, giving depositors a tradable receipt that they could sell or use as collateral elsewhere rather than locking their $ETH away and waiting. weETH was the largest of them.

EigenLayer held $19.7 billion at its peak and liquid restaking tokens grew more than 1,000% in the first six weeks of 2024. But the services buying security never paid enough to cover both the base staking yield and a premium on top, so the second yield restaking promised never materialized.

On Sept. 8, DefiLlama's restaking category held $10.02 billion and generated $99,977 in fees over the prior week. The liquid staking category, on $51.87 billion, generated $27.35 million. Per dollar secured, ordinary staking earns roughly 53 times more.

Two developments then removed what was left of the incentive to restake. Points programs subsidizing deposits wound down through 2025, and slashing went live in April 2025. Slashing is the penalty that confiscates part of an operator's staked $ETH when it misbehaves, by going offline or signing conflicting messages, for example. So restaking suddenly carried a real, priced downside where before the risk had been theoretical. There was no extra yield to compensate.

Set ether.fi aside and the rest of the sector is small. Renzo, Kelp, Swell, Puffer Finance and Bedrock, the five largest remaining liquid restaking tokens, made $953,350 in combined gross profit in the second quarter of 2026. Three quarters earlier the same five made $2.18 million. Puffer, which raised $23 million, recorded $21,590 for the quarter. Swell recorded $22,370.

The income statements also show which part of these businesses was ever profitable, and it was not the restaking. On Kelp's books, EIGEN token rewards appear at $460,600 in gross revenue and $460,600 in cost of revenue: they arrive and pass straight to depositors, leaving nothing with the protocol. Puffer and Swell book staking rewards the same way. Whatever profit these companies made came from the orinary staking fees charged underneath the restaking layer.

Silagadze disputes one input into DefiLlama’s figures. Cashback, the rewards paid to card users, appears in DefiLlama's figures at $5.83 million in both revenue and cost of revenue, which means it adds nothing to profit "That was back when third-party partners were paying the cashback rewards," he said. "That's no longer the case, so current revenue reporting doesn't include cashback subsidy grants." DefiLlama's adapter still books it on both sides through the most recent quarter.

He also says users were told about changes as ether.fi made them. Moving the cash vaults onto Aave replaced a custom-built debt manager and reduced risk, he said: "Users were notified multiple times and opted in to this change."

The technology was never the problem

None of this is to say the technology failed. EigenDA, EigenLayer's data availability service, runs on mainnet at 100 MB/s and remains the largest service by value secured. Symbiotic, where ether.fi moved its own restaking, has integrated more than 50 networks.

The question was never whether restaking works. It was whether it generates enough revenue to justify building a business on it, and for the protocols that made restaking their entire product, the answer has been no.

EigenLayer has also stopped selling restaking as the product. Rebranded as EigenCloud, it now markets verifiable computing, which lets applications prove that work done off-chain was carried out correctly, with restaked collateral as the layer underneath rather than the thing on sale. Its holdings stand at $5.10 billion, down from $22.06 billion in August 2025.

What the sector has not settled is whether a market that shrank roughly 75% while continuing to secure everything it secured before has failed, or whether it was simply four times larger than the work required. Silagadze did not wait to find out. He moved ether.fi out of restaking while the argument was still running.