Late at night, I’m checking big transfers on-chain again—watching a whole bunch of LSTs going in and out, with people restaking as they come and go. It makes me feel more clear-headed. Put simply, there are only two parts to the yield: one is the little “base salary” from staking, and the other is basically the “bonus” created by someone throwing in incentives/points. Where does the bonus come from? Either the project team subsidizes it, or later participants take over the expectations that those incentives represent—anyway, it can’t just grow out of thin air.

The risks are also pretty straightforward: when things go wrong at the underlying layer (penalties/seizures, node/contract issues), it’s a single decisive blow; if you restake and stack the same asset repeatedly, once the correlations build up, the problem can turn into a chain of blows. Lately, there are more incentives pulling TVL for new L1/L2s, and I can genuinely understand the old users’ complaints about “mining, selling.” The stronger the incentives, the more it feels like a sprint—once you run it, everything disperses.

I’m more like someone watching the exits than someone focused on the annualized returns. That’s it for now.