I waited in line for half a day, kept refreshing and retrying just to get into the on-chain game. Then I looked around at the economic model—an inflation + studio “double helix” strangling effect. No wonder prices can’t help but fall. In fact, LST/restaking has a similar flavor now too—many people only see the high “interest” the protocol offers, without digging into who is actually paying for that yield.

Plainly put: node operators borrow the liquidity of LST to run validation and earn rewards; that layer of profit is relatively transparent. But the extra upside from restaking, in essence, is harvesting the premium of “security as a service”—it still comes out of the early windfall from newly issued tokens. Once the token’s narrative and demand can’t hold up, the returns will shrink sharply.

It’s not that you can’t play—it’s that you need to understand the pace of the release curve and the sell pressure implied at the high end. The model design is like tailoring clothes: if the size isn’t right, it’ll end up misshapen. And in the end, it’s the people doing manual reinvestments who pay the bill.