Solana restaking protocol Solayer soft-launches deposits

Solayer, a startup building a product akin to EigenLayer on Solana, opened restaking deposits Thursday afternoon.

The invite-only deposit period was capped at $20 million dollars. Users could natively restake SOL on Solayer, or deposit the liquid staking products mSOL, bSOL, JITOSOL, and INF. With the private access launch, Solayer becomes a horse in the race to build a restaking ecosystem on the Solana blockchain.

Few Solana restaking protocols have gone live, with the exception of Picasso, which runs its own version of Solana restaking.

Read more: Robinhood enables Solana staking for customers in Europe

Perhaps in a testament to the hype surrounding these protocols launching, Solayer hit its $20 million cap within 45 minutes of opening withdrawals, a member of the Solayer core team confirmed to Blockworks. And it’s not just degens placing bets on the new restaking protocol. Solayer is looking to raise $8 million at an $80 million valuation led by Polychain, CoinDesk reported.

Still, little is known about the company. Solayer said the protocol has “been in the works since [the] end of 2023” in a blog post. It called the first deposit period “epoch 0,” and restaked assets will be locked in the protocol until “epoch 3.” A roadmap Solayer posted Wednesday said that a liquid restaking token called sSOL would launch in epoch 6.

A Solayer team member did not say how long each epoch would last but confirmed sSOL being an LRT.

Read more: The risks of restaking are extremely overrated

Restaking refers to using the staked tokens securing proof-of-stake blockchains to secure another layer of applications — or essentially staking staked tokens a second time. This extends the security of the blockchain’s base layer and puts idle staked assets to use, creating additional yield opportunities. By distributing security responsibilities across multiple layers, restaking enhances network resilience and maximizes the utility of staked tokens.

Solana is secured by a combination of proof-of-stake and proof-of-history, meaning restaking could be applied to the network.

The concept was pioneered on Ethereum by EigenLayer, which has raised over $150 million in venture funding and secured over $14 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to DeFiLlama.

Read more: Funding Wrap: Investors place more EigenLayer bets

And now, the concept has made its way to Solana.

“In the coming year, we are excited about and hope to lead the movement of ‘scaling out’ of the Solana base chain,” Solayer wrote in a blog post.

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