Insider: Lido Founder and Paradigm Engage in Secret Investment and Collateral Agreement “Symbiotic” to Compete with EigenLayer

Insider: Lido Founder and Paradigm Engage in Secret Investment and Collateral Agreement "Symbiotic" to Compete with EigenLayer

Insider: Lido Founder and Paradigm Engage in Secret Investment and Collateral Agreement "Symbiotic" to Compete with EigenLayer

According to a report by CoinDesk citing informed sources, Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov, co-founders of the liquidity staking protocol Lido, are secretly funding Symbiotic, a competitor to the restaking protocol EigenLayer, in the rapidly growing restaking sector.
Multiple sources revealed that Symbiotic has received support not only from Lomashuk and Shapovalov through their venture capital firm Cyber Fund, but also from the venture capital firm Paradigm, one of the main investors in Lido.
The sources also disclosed that when Paradigm sought to invest in EigenLayer from its co-founder Sreeram Kannan, Kannan declined their funding and instead chose another venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Paradigm also expressed to Kannan that they would invest in a competitor to his project.
Symbiotic, according to internal documents obtained by CoinDesk, will be “a permissionless restaking protocol that provides flexible mechanisms for decentralized networks to coordinate node operators and economic security providers,” developed by a team that previously built a staking service called “Stakemind.” The documents also show that Symbiotic allows users to restake 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 standard assets 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 restaking ecosystem, including those building on top of EigenLayer with active validation services (AVS) and liquidity restaking services, have indicated that they are already discussing integration with Symbiotic. Four sources consulted by CoinDesk revealed that they expect the platform to be released in some form by the end of this year.
Related articles: “EigenLayer Searches Dictionary to Find ‘Intersubjective’ as a Replacement for ‘Social Consensus'” and “Binance Research Report: Exploring the Restaking Sector.”