📝 Editor’s Note:

Happy Friday everyone. Today the OurNetwork community is digging into restaking, a subsector of crypto whereby staked assets' security is redesignated to secure other systems.

Restaking has had quite a glow-up. It's gone from an idea with less than $20M in total value locked less than two years ago, to a space with over $20B, according to our friends at DefiLlama. That's over 1,000-fold growth.

We'll be covering ether.fi, Swell, and Jito, key players in restaking, below.

– ON Editorial Team

ether.fi | Swell | Jito

• Ether.fi is the fourth largest DeFi protocol with $6.8B in TVL. Its diverse offerings include its flagship restaking token weETH/eETH. Over the past month, weETH/eETH saw supply grow by 154K ETH, reinforcing its role as a prominent staked ETH collateral. Onchain usage of weETH across decentralized exchanges (DEXs) saw positive momentum, totaling 27,749 ETH in TVL across 10+ chains as of May 27, 2025. As a destination for the asset, Ethereum leads with 16,608 ETH, affirming deep liquidity for core DeFi integrations. Berachain follows with 8,589 ETH. Then comes Arbitrum with 1,275 ETH and Base with 1,028 ETH.

• Aave dominates as a venue for weETH/eETH with 1.86M ETH in TVL and 88% utilization. There's consistent growth across other ecosystems as well though — Spark has 21.23K ETH, Compound has 18.82K ETH, Zircuit has 43.22K ETH, and Pendle has 11.86K ETH. All are gaining traction via specialized yield strategies. Aave v3 collateral grew to 1.69M ETH, worth well over $4B at the time of writing.

• weETH’s usage on DEXs continues to deepen, with total DEX TVL at 51.75K ETH. DEX-to-DeFi TVL ratio stands at 2.55%, which signals healthy trading depth. Liquidity is spread across multiple chains, reflecting weETH’s adoption across execution layers. Volumes also show stable accumulation patterns.

• Swell is a Layer 2 which offers restaking options for ETH and has over $100M on its network. The platform's users can segmented into four tiers the value of their transactions on the network. Tier 1 is the top 10%, the power users. Tier 2, the next 30%, call them active contributors. Tier 3, the next 40%, occasional users. Tier 4, the bottom 20%, low engagement. Although Tier 2 and 3 users make up most of its user base, and Tier 2 leading in transaction volume, Tier 1 users contribute far more value — pushing over 27,000 ETH in volume compared to just 532 ETH by Tier 2. This highlights the significant value contribution of top-tier participants.

• Tier 1 users interact with a far wider range of contracts compared to other segments. This higher level of smart contract interaction also appears in their average weekly activity, setting them apart from Tier 4 users, who have minimal contract engagement both in total and per week.

• While Tier 2 users has the highest average fee per user, here is a meaningful observation — Despite the increase in user and transaction counts over recent months, the average transaction fee per user has steadily declined. This suggests improvements in the chain's scalability and cost-efficiency.

• Jito is a liquid staking protocol now venturing into restaking. Jito's TipRouter feature decentralizes Jito tip distribution on Solana, which is over $1B annualized. Pools of JitoSOL, and other liquid staking tokens (LSTs), and JTO are restaked to a set of 13 node operators who participate in voting on the correct Jito tip distribution. For securing the network, these participants earn 0.3% of all Jito tips on Solana. Since its inception at the beginning of February, stakers and node operators have been rewarded 3,607 JitoSOL, approximately $682k at the time of writing.

• Jito DAO is another primary beneficiary of TipRouter flows. Today it earns 2.7% of all Jito tips on Solana. Year-to-date, DAO revenue is sitting at approximately 46,360 JitoSOL, and TipRouter fees represent roughly 48% of the total. Jito DAO’s annualized revenue is $36M.

• Jito tips make up over 50% of all REV on Solana, and in the coming month, TipRouter will also facilitate priority fees. This upgrade will allow validators to share a portion of priority fees with stakers, unlocking an additional revenue stream for Solana stakers and TipRouter participants.