The coffee had gone cold before I remembered to drink it—and my brain was cold too, half of it. Lately, I’ve been seeing re-staking projects getting hyped all over the place: things like “LST stacking and earning while lying back.” I thought, isn’t this just the yield of U.S. Treasury bills in a doll-in-a-doll version? On the RWA side, at least there are government bonds standing in as a backstop. But on-chain, the APR is often 20%+—so where do you think the returns come from? Either inflation dilutes it, or the project team digs into their own pocket to issue tokens and subsidize the yield. Plainly put, it’s using the money from the later entrants to fill the holes created for the earlier entrants.

The risks are another story entirely. If the consensus layer starts having problems, it can just plunge into a bloody collapse. That last year’s LSD de-pegging incident is still fresh in my mind. If you re-stake ten layers or eight layers, and the underlying protocol gets hacked and turned into a cash machine, you won’t even find anyone to help you—because I’m definitely not willing to stake my entire fortune on the assumption that “others won’t run off.”

That said, when Gas is low, writing a few scripts and skimming a bit of MEV is a lot more practical than researching all these flashy, convoluted nested structures. That’s it for now—the coffee is cold, and so is my heart, half of it too.