I’ve been looking into LST and re-staking again recently, and it feels like a lot of people describe “an extra layer of yield” a little too smoothly. To put it plainly, yield isn’t something that falls out of nowhere: either it’s the safety budget from the underlying staking, or someone pays for your “security/liquidity” (fees, incentives, peer-to-peer subsidies), or else new projects burn money to buy TVL. The further downstream it goes, the more it looks like a candy coating—sweet, but it could also stop very suddenly.

The risks are pretty much the same, just stretched across the same chain: base-layer penalties and confiscations, contract bugs, rule changes or operational mistakes on the re-staking side, and LST discounts during liquidity squeezes. Recently, everyone has been comparing on-chain yield products using RWA and U.S. Treasury yields. I understand that desire for “more certainty,” but that kind of certainty on-chain often comes at the cost of more complex structures… Anyway, I’ll withdraw a few old authorizations I currently have first, and then tomorrow I’ll continue drawing up an ecosystem map.