To be honest, I've been farming LST / re-staking so much lately that I'm a bit anxious... Where exactly do the returns come from? Once I figured it out, it’s not that mysterious: part of it is the interest from underlying staking, and a lot of it is “others willing to pay for the risk you take,” like AVS needing a security budget, protocols issuing subsidies to pull TVL, or even new projects giving tokens to feed early participants. The problem is, once the subsidies stop, the returns genuinely drop.

The risks are pretty straightforward: you think you're just earning a bit more, but actually you're taking the same staking rights and making more commitments. If any link in the chain (contracts, operational permissions, nodes, liquidation logic) has an issue, it could quickly wipe out the “accumulated returns.” I’m also not sure if the market now treats this as a financial product...

By the way, regarding the recent wave of AI Agents / automated trading, many people are touting “automatic reinvestment and interaction,” but on the chain, it looks more like a contest of who dares to give unlimited permissions and who is less strict about security. Anyway, I’d rather earn a bit less now—if I can avoid granting permissions, I avoid it. Before sleeping, I still check the contract interaction records again; it’s pretty tiring.