Liquid restaking platforms jump to near $8 billion in total value locked

The total value captured in cash recapture tokens has approached $8 billion.

Protocols such as Etherfi, Renzo, Kelp, Puffer and others have seen dramatic increases in deposits in recent months. This increase is due to users choosing to use EigenLayer through these platforms, allowing them to maintain access to their funds.

Etherfi has the highest TVL among these LRTs, valued at over $3.2 billion, followed by Renzo with $2 billion and Puffer with $1.3 billion. Kelp has over $740 million in user deposits, while EigenPie has a TVL of $328 million, and Swell $265 million.

Other smaller LRT protocols include Bedrock with a TVL of $145 million, Prime of $42 million and ClayStack of $10 million.

Liquid Restaking allows holders of liquid staking tokens to stake their tokens on EigenLayer, contributing to its economic security. This differs from traditional liquid staking, where assets are staked through a staking service provider and receiving tokens are received in return.

EigenLayer’s contribution to the growth of TVL of these protocols is remarkable. It allows users to deposit and withdraw ether from various liquid staking tokens.

EigenLayer enables the depositing and “re-staking” of ether from various liquid staking tokens, with the aim of allocating these funds to secure third-party protocols.

The total value captured in EigenLayer now exceeds $13 billion, according to The Block’s data dashboard. The goal of the project is to use these funds to improve the security of other networks such as rollups, oracles, data availability platforms or similar services.

In February, the window for re-withdrawing deposits on EigenLayer with liquid staking tokens was briefly opened, but has since closed. In this context, LRTs serve as an alternative, allowing users to deposit funds to Eigen when limits are close to being reached, as direct withdrawals to EigenLayer using ethervalidator stakes are not subject to limits.

That’s why LRT protocols like EtherFi, Renzo, and Kelp still accept ether deposits, repossess them for users, and issues a derivative token while promising to distribute all points earned with Eigen.

EigenLayer rewards users with points for their ether deposits, which could increase their chances of obtaining a token from EigenLayer. Currently, a significant number of users are using LRTs to make deposits on Eigen, with the aim of securing rewards from both the LRTs and potential double airdrops.

Moreover, these protocols offer additional incentives by awarding two types of points: one set of Own and one of the protocol in question. For example, when users redo an LST like sETH through Kelp, they earn points from both EigenLayer and KelpDAO, increasing their chance of receiving rewards from each entity.