Scrolling through L2 capital flows in the middle of the night, I saw several chains competing for subsidies—it was pretty strange. Every time I watch L2s bicker with each other, I can’t help but take a second look. No matter whether fees are higher or lower, or whether the speed is faster or slower, in the end it’s still about who can retain users.

Recently I’ve been following discussions about LSTs and restaking, and it feels more and more like a nesting doll. A lot of people think it’s “free money,” but if you think about it carefully, the underlying interest is really only that much. The extra profit is basically either someone else’s borrowed leverage money or subsidized liquidity. Plainly put, the risk is that the trust chain is too long—one layer restakes, another delegates, another hits an on-chain protocol. What if one of the middle links blows up? I personally only dare to put in a tiny amount to test the waters; the rest is still the boring old habit of just taking the native yield.

I don’t regret the outcome—I regret that I once trusted the line “liquidity is safety” too much, and overlooked how fragile it is when protocols are interdependent with each other.