From Proof-of-Work to Restaking and Beyond

Decentralized networks require coordination mechanisms to incentivize and to hold accountable operators of infrastructure to provide the services they seek to deliver in the crypto economy.

The Bitcoin protocol introduced the first mechanism to trustlessly coordinate infrastructure providers (miners) to provide the service of digital money (Bitcoin) via Proof-of-Work. The invention of Proof-of-Stake allows decentralized networks such as Ethereum to source infrastructure providers (validators) to provide their services (for Ethereum: programmable money) through economic collateral (Proof-of-Stake). Shared security implementations seek to increase capital efficiency by expanding the services provided by a set of node operators using the same underlying economic security (prior work include e.g. Polkadot’s parachain and crowdloan designs, Cosmos Interchain and Mesh Security, and EigenLayer restaking).

Symbiotic is a permissionless protocol of enshrined principles that enables protocol participants to flexibly form trust-minimized shared security agreements. Participants of the Symbiotic protocol economy include node operators (from here on referred to simply as operators), decentralized protocols (from here on simply referred to as networks), and providers of economic security (restakers).

The Symbiotic Protocol Economy.

The Symbiotic Protocol Economy.

Symbiotic functions as a thin security coordination layer enabling builders of networks to fully control and continuously adapt their own (re)staking implementation in a permissionless manner to service any possible decentralized infrastructure use case and its requirements. This enables the Symbiotic protocol to help scale decentralized networks in a safe, transparent, and capital-efficient way. In the long run, we envision the Symbiotic protocol to extend to serve further innovative reputation-based operator and security coordination models.

The Value Proposition of Symbiotic

The protocol’s flexible and credibly neutral design brings unique benefits to participants in the Symbiotic economy:

Risk Minimization through Immutability

Immutable core contracts on Ethereum provide maximum security while removing external governance risks and single points of failure. Our simple, yet flexible contract design minimizes execution layer risks.
Flexibility through Modularity

Network builders control their restaking implementation including collateral assets supported, operator selection mechanics, as well as reward and slashing logic. All ecosystem participants can flexibly opt in and out of shared security arrangements entered into through Symbiotic. This enables Symbiotic to safely scale and cover all current and future use cases of sourcing node operators and economic security for decentralized networks.
Capital Efficiency through Restaked Collateral and Reputation-Based Curation

A flexible and permissionless, multi-asset and network-agnostic design enable capital-efficient sourcing of node operators and economic security. An evolving operator-centric cross-network reputation system will further enhance capital efficiency for network builders.

Protocol Design

Components of the Symbiotic Protocol

The Symbiotic protocol consists of 5 interconnected components:

Collateral (aka stake, commitments,…)

The security layer of Symbiotic. Collateral is an abstraction used to represent underlying onchain assets, which are chain- and asset-agnostic in Symbiotic. Collateral in Symbiotic can encompass ERC20 tokens, withdrawal credentials of Ethereum validators, or other onchain assets such as LP positions, without limitations regarding which blockchains the positions are held on.

Vaults (aka operator staking pools, liquid (re)staking protocols,…)