Byzantine Finance: A Key to Institutional Restaking

Restaking has been around for a bit more than a year, and yet it has garnered much attention from both institutional and individual players in the crypto industry. Still, the restaking scene is quite fragmented and not as accessible as regular staking. Byzantine Finance offers a solution to this problem through a transformative infrastructure enabling users to create personalized restaking strategies.

As a prominent validator, Everstake supports this vision and believes that it can bring restaking experiences to broader audiences. Below is a brief overview of Byzantine Finance’s solution.

What Is Restaking

In traditional staking, users support network security by locking their assets with validators who confirm transactions. Running one’s own validator may be expensive: in Ethereum, for example, the requirement is 32 ETH, or over $150k at current prices. This requirement is set forth to incentivize validators to act honestly, as they would otherwise risk having their funds slashed by the system. 

Restaking extends the concept of staking by allowing validators to support multiple networks or services simultaneously. This way, the same capital can secure various blockchain ecosystems, akin to holding a diversified portfolio of bonds. As validators work with more networks, they accumulate additional rewards.​

Byzantine Finance in a Nutshell

The complexity and fragmentation of restaking have made it hard to access for a broader audience and institutional players in particular. To tackle those issues, Byzantine developed a solution that offers the following:

• Aggregated access to staking and restaking: Byzantine works with node operators and restaking protocols to give clients access to all staking and restaking opportunities from a single touchpoint.
• Custom Portfolio Creation: A user-friendly interface that enables anyone to design personalized restaking strategies called vaults, selecting preferred networks, collateral assets, and validator partners.​
• Structured Product Development: A set of tools to compile those portfolios into structured products, such as ETFs, which can be branded and offered to institutional players.​

Thanks to that, restaking can become democratized and more accessible to both institutions and individuals.

Key Features of the Byzantine Protocol

According to the team, the restaking strategies in the Byzantine Protocol have the following features.

• Permissionless Strategy Deployment: Anyone can create and implement a restaking strategy without centralized approval.​
• Non-Custodial Asset Management: Users retain control over their assets, and Byzantine or the vault deployer can never access user funds.
• Isolated Risk and Funds: Each vault operates independently, so that any risks or loss events in one do not affect others.​
• Continuous Earnings Tracking: The protocol monitors and accounts for stakers’ rewards across all vaults in real-time.​

Vaults themselves are defined by four components: the chosen collateral asset, targeted networks/chains for validation, selected validator/operator partners, and specific access permissions.​

Everstake and Byzantine

Everstake supports Byzantine Finance’s vision as it perfectly fits our shared understanding of decentralization, transparency, and community-driven innovation in Web3. Byzantine Finance aims to build truly resilient, permissionless DeFi infrastructure that can thrive even under adversarial conditions, which is fully in line with Everstake’s focus on running secure, high-performance validator nodes across major blockchain networks. Everstake believes that supporting a cutting-edge protocol like Byzantine will help advance economic sovereignty, open access, and trustless systems that both our teams feel are at the core of Web3.

Future Plans

Byzantine Finance’s ambition is to make restaking a foundational element of DeFi. It seeks to simplify and democratize the creation of new financial products to increase the accessibility of complex blockchain-based solutions. Thanks to that, restaking can become “a new economic design space in DeFi.”

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Everstake is a software platform that provides infrastructure tools and resources for users but does not offer investment advice or investment opportunities, manage funds, facilitate collective investment schemes, provide financial services, or take custody of, or otherwise hold or manage, customer assets. Everstake does not conduct any independent diligence on or substantive review of any blockchain asset, digital currency, cryptocurrency, or associated funds. Everstake’s provision of technology services allowing a user to stake digital assets is not an endorsement or a recommendation of any digital assets by it. Users are fully and solely responsible for evaluating whether to stake digital assets.