How Symbiotic Empowers Builders

The Symbiotic Core protocol provides a modular onchain framework for creating flexible staking solutions — including collateral choice (native tokens, restaked assets, multi-asset,…), and rewarding, slashing or redistribution logic. Symbiotic is already adopted by dozens of teams with 15+ live networks secured by over $1.5bn in TVL on Ethereum.

Symbiotic Relay serves as an extension to the core protocol that radically simplifies integrating Symbiotic's universal staking primitives and enables leveraging stake across any execution environment — expanding the design space for multichain-native decentralized protocols.

The Problem So Far

Until now, accommodating for large validator sets and building truly multichain decentralized networks using Proof-of-Stake was next to impossible.

For example, on Ethereum, verifying results with standard consensus thresholds (such as 2/3+1 or 1/2+1 of voting power) becomes expensive when networks reach hundreds of operators. A need for frequent verification can mean annual costs reach millions of dollars and make decentralization costly.

Also, modern decentralized protocols increasingly seek to adopt native multichain operational models. They typically use Proof-of-Authority for practical reasons: verification against stake is impossible across multiple execution environments — the staking data simply isn't available cross-chain.

The Symbiotic SDK solves these problems in two ways:

Cheap Validator Set Verification: Leveraging a combination of BLS and ZK cryptography to provide constant (as opposed to linearly growing) verification costs on the EVM.
Native Multichain Settlement: Enabling networks to settle on multiple chains without introducing additional trust assumptions.

Comparison of Staking Frameworks

The following table compares existing frameworks and their functionalities:

Feature	Symbiotic Relay	Cosmos SDK	Substrate	EigenLayer
Staking	✅	✅	✅	✅
Multi-chain staking	✅	❌	❌	❌
Restaking	✅	❌	❌	With limitations
Single-chain settlement	✅	✅	✅	✅, but expensive
Multichain settlement	✅	❌	✅	✅, but expensive
Non-upgradable	✅	✅	✅	❌

Technical Implementation

There are several crucial modules in the Symbiotic Relay SDK:

Staking Module (onchain): A set of smart contracts deployed on the same chain as Symbiotic Core. This module defines the staking model using Symbiotic Core, handling operator onboarding, voting power calculation, reward distribution, slashing, and key management.
Signature Aggregation (offchain): A Sidecar Network that operates using staking information (stakes) from Staking Modules. Its primary purpose is to deliver validator set data to Settlement Modules. This Sidecar Network can also work alongside network nodes to commit arbitrary data after nodes come to consensus.
Settlement (onchain): A set of smart contracts deployable on with EVM chains (with other VMs to follow) for verification purposes. This allows networks to verify data on these chains using security derived from the Staking Module. As a result, networks can maintain stakes in Ethereum while verifying data natively on other chains—all without compromising security, requiring light clients, or native bridges.

Symbiotic’s Universal Staking Framework.