Early efforts on the Solana blockchain to develop a framework for “restaking” – a way of securing new protocols and applications without having to spin up additional validator networks – appear to be gaining traction.
Jito Labs, a developer of infrastructure tools for Solana, has yet to launch its planned restaking effort on mainnet. But the mere prospect of this potentially lucrative greenfield is already attracting launch partners.
Liquid restaking protocol Renzo, known primarily for its work on Ethereum-based restaking projects including EigenLayer and Symbiotic, disclosed Wednesday that it’s preparing to launch a SOL derivative token, called ezSOL, that offers holders exposure to Jito’s yield-generating infrastructure, plus the extra tokens generated by staking and restaking.
It’s a change of pace for one of the established players of EigenLayer’s pioneering restaking ecosystem. Renzo’s ezETH is among the Ethereum world’s biggest liquid restaking tokens: It takes users’ ETH or ETH liquid staking tokens and “restakes” them with certain blockchain apps to provide a measure of economic security, generating interest along the way.
The same general principles will apply in Jito’s upcoming restaking protocol, said Renzo founding contributor Lucas Kozinski, albeit with some different verbiage. EigenLayer refers to blockchain apps secured via restaking as “actively validated services,” or AVSs, whereas Jito calls them Node Consensus Networks (NCNs).
“We think that restaking is going to be the largest DeFi segment, similar to how liquid staking grew, and because of the complexities associated with restaking, I think everybody focuses on the token, but they don’t realize how much infrastructure needs to be run to essentially be able to secure AVSs and in Jito’s cases, NCNs,” Kozinski said.
Renzo’s ezSOL will work in close proximity to Jito’s own staking token, jitoSOL. Solana users who deposit SOL into Renzo will get back the ezSOL token, Kozinski said. Behind the scenes, Renzo will stake that underlying SOL with Jito to get jitoSOL, where it MEV rewards and gains exposure to the native yield of the Solana blockchain. Renzo will then restake that jitoSOL with NCNs.
Despite some similarities between Renzo’s liquid restaking setups on Ethereum and, soon, Solana, getting it all going is far more complicated than simply plugging the old system into the new. Solana follows an entirely different architecture than Ethereum and its apps are written in a different coding language.
Kozinski said he has hired Rust engineers to build smart contracts for ezSOL. A press release said those smart contracts will relay the value generated by restaking into the price of ezSOL. If all goes according to plan, ezSOL will trade in tandem with but slightly higher than SOL, much like Jito’s staking token, jitoSOL does.
Solana also has a different crypto culture than Ethereum. Its user base of crypto traders, stakers and borrowers crossover but hardly match up. Each chain has its share of partisans, some of whom believe this network or that is practically – sometimes even philosophically – superior to the other.
That dynamic helped doom other blockchain apps who tried to cross the cultural and technological chasm. Ethereum’s liquid staking leader Lido once tried to challenge Solana’s resident staking services and gain dominance on both chains. It failed and in February retreated.
That makes Renzo – a name brand only in the Ethereum restaking world – a somewhat unlikely candidate for success on Solana. It isn’t abandoning its Ethereum product, but it is betting expansion to another has more potential than staying put.
Kozinski is nevertheless insistent that Renzo can make it work. He said his team is culturally similar to Jito’s and can align in ways that incentivize activity. He also pointed out that Renzo is not working alone. Its product feeds directly into Jito, one of the Solana’s most successful startups to date.
“Ethereum users might be interested in using Solana. Solana users might be interested in using Ethereum. But the bigger play here is growing the Renzo user base and bring in that expertise that we’ve developed over the past year, building on top of EigenLayer,” he said.
