Eigenlayer creates significant opportunities for ETH stakers to support a wide range of ecosystem projects. ETH stakers will be able to choose any number of specialized services to support such as DEXs, bridges, or more. However, today’s ETH staking distribution makes the optionality Eigenlayer creates difficult to access. Major LSDs will have difficulty providing this optionality to users. For example, some users won’t want to use Eigenlayer, while others will desire to support one specific project over another. The optionality of Eigenlayer will make it difficult for a single LSD to provide for all users and would likely force LSDs to issue either a blended LSD or multiple LSDs dependent on the Eigenlayer use case, which could affect fungibility.
My team is working on Casimir, a self-custody, no-minimum decentralized ETH staking platform that doesn’t require an LSD. It allows users to self custody and stake any amount of ETH to any number of high performing validators/operators.
How could this work with Eigenlayer?
Because users maintain access to their ETH natively and through self-custody, Casimir can support the optionality of Eigenlayer by providing an easy to use UI that allows users to choose whether they want to opt into restaking through Eigenlayer and which project to support.
This not only gives more power to the individual staker but also can maximize the reward to the user who is now directly restaking and not depending on a third party and LSD intermediaries.
We’re still in development but our platform will be live on Goerli in the coming weeks.
You can track our progress here: GitHub - consensusnetworks/casimir: 🌊 Decentralized staking and asset management
Read more about how we’re designing it here: @casimir/ethereum - HackMD
Join our Discord here: Casimir
I would greatly appreciate any feedback or discussion on this topic as well. My basic position is that Eigenlayer can remove some of the need to stake through an LSD as now users can rehypothecate to create their own LRD (or any number of other things) and still maximize their stake rewards. They just need a platform to do so.
