Here is a purely English blockchain news article based on the context table in the response you provided, not the Chinese content.
The Ethereum restaking sector is currently defying gravity. Total Value Locked (TVL) in liquid restaking protocols has surged past $35 billion since EigenLayer’s mainnet launch, fueled by promises of "shared security" and points-farming mania. But the hash does not lie, only the narrative does. When I trace the actual capital flows and exit strategies of the largest operators, a different picture emerges—one that rarely gets covered in the bullish headlines. Freshly funded protocols with billions in TVL are now competing for a slice of a pie that may not exist. The core issue is not competition; it is that the underlying asset of the restaking economy—the "Actively Validated Service" (AVS)—is often little more than a placeholder in a whitepaper, not a revenue-generating product.
Context: The Hype Cycle of a New Asset Class
To understand the current state of restaking, we must strip away the marketing and look at the original premise. EigenLayer introduced a primitive that allows Ethereum validators to restake their staked ETH (or liquid staking derivatives) to secure third-party networks. This creates a mechanism for new protocols (AVSs) to bootstrap their own cryptoeconomic security without launching their own token or building a new validator set from scratch. The design is elegant in theory. It treats Ethereum’s security margin as a commodity that can be doled out to those who need it.
However, this concept was born at the peak of the last cycle where "yield" was the primary demand driver for retail. The narrative quickly shifted from "security-as-a-service" to "yield amplification." We saw the rise of Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs) like ether.fi and Renzo, which accept ETH, deposit it into EigenLayer, and hand back a token that accrues both staking rewards and "restaking points." These LRTs became the hottest collateral in DeFi, chasing native yield on top of potential future token airdrops. The current bull market has masked a key technical and economic flaw with this design. Everyone is focused on the points and the potential upside, but few are asking a basic question: who pays the AVSs for the security they are renting? Based on my audit experience, we need to examine whether the "security" being sold is actually being used, or if it is just a delegated proof-of-stake shell game.
Core: Dissecting the Revenue Vacuum of the AVS
Let’s dissect the inventory of AVSs that have launched or announced on EigenLayer. A quick filter of the current mainnet shows a long list: data availability layers (e.g., EigenDA), oracle networks, and soon, fast finality bridges. The most prominent example is EigenDA, which launched alongside EigenLayer mainnet. The issue is that EigenDA pays for its security in EigenLayer tokens. It does not generate revenue in the traditional sense by paying fees in ETH or stablecoins to its restakers.
This creates a circular logic that is often overlooked. The restakers get EigenLayer points (or later tokens) for securing EigenDA. EigenDA is a product that primarily reduces costs for rollups using blob storage. But the rollups themselves pay negligible fees to EigenDA—often less than $1,000 total per day early on. Now, if the rent paid by AVSs is zero, where does the promised yield for restakers come from? It has to come from the inflation of the AVS token itself, which is usually given to the operator to bootstrap the service. Mining protocol points through restaking is not a viable long-term economic model. Minting errors are not bugs; they are confessions of a broken revenue model. Eventually, these token emissions will dilute the restakers, creating a feedback loop that undermines the value proposition of the AVS.
The "intersubjective" work—like oracles—is where the security magnitude of restaking is actually justified, but we need to look at the capital efficiency. A classic oracle network with fiat collateral has to deal with the risk of "trusted third parties." When you restake $10 billion of ETH to secure an oracle that processes perhaps $100 million in volume, you have a massive asymmetry. The validator set is over-secured. This is not security; it is a liability. Restaking does not make the oracle inherently faster or more truthful. It penalizes the validator if the oracle lies, but the cost of the lie (the damage to the protocol) can easily exceed the slashed amount. The cold math here says that you are paying for insurance at a premium that doesn't match the actual risk it insures against. The chain remembers what the mind tries to forget: a slashing event destroys capital, it doesn't fix the off-chain data issue.
Contrarian: What the Bulls Got Right
The entire premise is not a scam. Despite the structural inefficiencies, the bulls have identified something physically valuable: resilient capital. By pooling economic weight, EigenLayer creates a credible threat to act honestly because of the slashing conditions. The "Programmatic Incentives" and "Permissionless AVS" expand the addressable market for security.
But their biggest blind spot is around the mechanics of governance and coordination. In a Proof-of-Stake system, the operator has limited processing power and is required to actively monitor the state of the AVS. This adds a significant "operational risk" to the validator. Most restakers are passive LPs; they are not running nodes or reading the AVS consensus rules. This delegation of responsibility creates a principal-agent problem. You have a silent mass of "capital" that is being slashed by an operator they don't control, governed on a schedule they didn't approve. The bulls say this is all "trustless." But in the real world, this is akin to signing a blank check for a security deposit.
The contrarian truth is that infrastructure-level innovation usually has a slower adoption curve than the financial layer predicts. The explosive growth has come from the finance side (issuing points, creating LRTs), not the restaking side. This is a demand problem. The ecosystem is over-producing security with no supply constraints, and the demand for that security is highly elastic. EigenDA is a sequencer for Layer 2s. High-throughput rollups need cheap data. But cheap data was already available on Celestia and even through blobs on Ethereum directly. The current retaking architecture offers an order-of-magnitude increase in cost per unit of security, which is a hard sell for cost-sensitive Layer 2s. I dissect the code to find the human error. The human error here is that the bulls mistook a financial marketing layer for a primitive product use case.
Takeaway: The Accountability Call
Silence is the loudest proof in the ledger. The silence from the EigenLayer leadership regarding when AVS revenue will actually start accumulating for the broader liquid restaking economy is telling. They are leaning into "points" rather than hard unit economics. The next step is not to stop building—that is wrong—but to demand a technical standard of fee absorption rates.
The current model is a "yield landfill" where empty blocks provide token emissions. If you are staking with LRTs, look at whether the underlying AVS is generating off-chain revenue. If not, you are not restaking for security; you are staking for inflation. The cryptographic core of Ethereum is robust. The financial shell built around it, however, is starting to crack under the weight of its own theoretical null hypothesis: There is no such thing as yield from nothing. The physical world demands a contract. Verify the code. Verify the fees. Otherwise, you are just betting on the next narrative.
## Tags - EigenLayer - Restaking - Ethereum - DeFi
## Prompt for Article Illustrations A forensic visualization of a glowing digital vault with a massive crack running through it, revealing empty spaces and hollow tubes instead of coins inside, surrounded by interlocking chains and cryptographic symbols, in a dark blue and amber color palette.