Over the past two days, I’ve been looking at LST and re-staking, and the more I look, the more I feel like there’s a single sentence that sums it up: returns don’t just drop out of thin air. Basically, someone is paying for “safety/liquidity/narrative”—either via protocol subsidies or because other participants take on the risk. Put simply, if you’re getting a bit more, it may also mean you’ve taken on some of the blame for things like redemption queueing, penalties, contract vulnerabilities, and even layered leverage.

Right now, I’m in all kinds of “waiting” mode: waiting for on-chain data to confirm (whether the token holdings are too concentrated), waiting for a pullback so I don’t chase the heat, and waiting until I’ve fully thought through the redemption mechanism and the worst-case scenarios before making a move. Recently, meme coins and celebrity tip-off calls have attention rotating so fast—old hands say don’t catch the last baton. And I feel that with something like LST, which looks steady on the surface, once you start stacking and re-staking, it can easily turn into an “invisible last baton”… I’ll slow down first. After all, I’m not worse off for not making money yet.