Restaking, to put it bluntly, is using the same money to “rent it out” in multiple places. It sounds pretty nice, but the risks are shared too—if one node has trouble, your principal could blow up in a chain reaction.

Lately, I keep seeing the claim of “attention is mining.” There’s a whole set of fan tokens and social mining, one after another. And it makes me think of the nonsense back in the DeFi summer about “lossless mining.” If someone had told you back then that your stETH could earn staking yields, then market-make on Curve, and also be looped via borrowing and restaking—wouldn’t you have thought you’d found a perpetual motion machine?

Anyway, I’ve learned the lesson now. When returns stack up, the illusion stacks up too. First, figure out how much this money could lose in the worst case, then calculate how much you can earn—this order can’t be reversed.