Symbiotic Launches as a Rival to EigenLayer with Backing from Lido Founders

Developers of Symbiotic have announced the launch of a “permissionless flexible restaking protocol.”

Today’s launch marks the beginning of Symbiotic’s bootstrapping phase and the initial onboarding of restaked collateral.https://t.co/nnq37pAfc0

— Symbiotic (@symbioticfi) June 11, 2024

Positioned as a competitor to EigenLayer, the project has attracted $5.8 million in seed investments from venture firms Paradigm and Cyber Fund. The co-founders of the latter, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasily Shapovalov, are also known for the leading liquid staking project Lido.

According to the developers, Symbiotic’s modular architecture is highly flexible.

Symbiotic’s modular design is highly flexible. It supports any mix of tokens as restaked collateral. Slashing and reward logic is fully configurable. pic.twitter.com/DbRxSa9JlV

— Symbiotic (@symbioticfi) June 11, 2024

“It supports any combination of tokens as restaked collateral. The slashing and reward logic is fully configurable,” project representatives noted.

They added that Symbiotic is immutable, and the non-upgradable core contracts on Ethereum eliminate external governance risks and single points of failure.

Furthermore, the developers emphasized the protocol’s capital efficiency, scalability, and support for multiple assets.

The platform’s launch also involved LayerZero, Ethena Labs, Fairblock, Mind Network, and other market players.

Symbiotic’s modular design is highly flexible. It supports any mix of tokens as restaked collateral. Slashing and reward logic is fully configurable. pic.twitter.com/DbRxSa9JlV

— Symbiotic (@symbioticfi) June 11, 2024

Similar to EigenLayer, the new protocol will offer decentralized applications and solutions collective protection through AVS — active validation services.

Restakers have the opportunity to earn income by placing assets to support various AVS.

The main distinction of Symbiotic is that it allows the direct use of the liquid Lido token (stETH) and other ERC-20 standard assets.

According to DeFi Llama, the TVL of the new project has already exceeded $81 million.

Earlier in June, the total value of assets locked in EigenLayer reached $20 billion.