According to insider information cited by CoinDesk, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, the co-founders of the liquidity staking protocol Lido, are secretly funding Symbiotic, a competitor of EigenLayer, a re-staking protocol. Symbiotic aims to compete in the rapidly growing re-staking sector.
Multiple insiders have revealed that Symbiotic not only received support from Lomashuk and Shapovalov through their venture capital firm Cyber Fund, but also from Paradigm, one of Lido’s main investors.
Insiders also disclosed that when Paradigm sought to invest in EigenLayer, its co-founder Sreeram Kannan declined their funding and instead chose another venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Paradigm also expressed its intention to invest in a competitor’s project to Kannan.
According to internal documents obtained by CoinDesk, Symbiotic will be an “unpermissioned re-staking protocol that offers flexible mechanisms for decentralized networks to coordinate node operators and economic security providers.” It is developed by a team that previously built a staking service called “Stakemind.” The documents also indicate that Symbiotic allows users to re-stake Lido’s stETH token and other popular assets that are not natively compatible with EigenLayer.
The main difference between Symbiotic and EigenLayer is that users can directly deposit any Ethereum ERC-20 token into Symbiotic, while EigenLayer only accepts Ether (ETH) deposits.
These documents are labeled as “preliminary” and “not for distribution,” but several teams working in the emerging re-staking ecosystem (including active validation services and liquidity re-staking services built on EigenLayer) have indicated that they are already discussing integration with Symbiotic. Four sources consulted by CoinDesk expect the platform to be released in some form by the end of this year.
Related articles: “EigenLayer Searches the Dictionary for ‘Intersubjective’ as a Replacement for ‘Social Consensus'” and “Binance Research Report: Exploring the Restaking Domain.”
