Over the past couple of days, I’ve been messing around with LST and re-staking in the spreadsheet again. If I’m being honest, the yield basically comes from two places: one is the small amount of “normal interest” from basic staking, and the other is lending out security again to earn rewards (various points, subsidies, and fee-sharing). But the farther along you look, the more that second part starts to feel like “the project uses tokens to invite you over.” The moment I see the reward source described in an unclear way, I start getting uneasy: is it real cash flow, or is inflation feeding the whole thing?

The risks are also pretty straightforward: contract risk, de-pegging risk, plus the risk that’s layered on top of re-staking in the form of “domino-liquidation / chained clearance” and “restrictions on exiting.” I used to be quite obsessive and always say, “I only look at on-chain,” but as I kept looking, I realized even on-chain can be packaged to look very nice… Now I force myself to add one more column: whether the yield is being propped up by new money and new incentives. The kind of collapse that happens in blockchain games—inflation + studios + token price spirals—can actually map onto some logic in re-staking as well. When subsidies start to retreat, who will step in is very realistic to consider. In any case, I’ll try with a small position first—if the data doesn’t look right, I’ll pull out. No need to wrestle with myself.