Recently, I’ve been seeing a bunch of people talking about LST and re-staking “passive income,” and I can’t help but feel both amused and a little on edge. The returns, plain and simple, come in two parts: one is the normal interest from the underlying staking, and the other is taking the same security/safety and “taking on work” to earn commissions or subsidies. It sounds great, but at its core it’s just making more money while taking on another layer of risk—meaning: you collect an extra fee, you carry an extra bag of liabilities.

The risks are also very direct: de-pegging, redemption delays/queued redemptions, contract issues, and then a black swan on the re-staking side that triggers contagion—when liquidity tightens, the floor price (oh no, the LST price) starts tormenting each other. It’s like adding condensed syrup to milk tea, or lending the same umbrella to two people; with rain, who gets soaked first is anyone’s guess. As for those recent interpretations like “ETF inflows and outflows = crypto goes up and down” and “US stock risk appetite takes crypto along with it,” I see it more like an emotional remote control…

Right now, I only dare to test with a small position—one I can withdraw at any time. Don’t treat “an extra layer of yield” as a free lunch.