# Exploring the Restaking Economy: A Data-Driven Look at EigenLayer’s Restaking Primitive

[Qianqian Liu](https://medium.com/@qianqian_51318?source=post_page---byline--7d39bea42186---------------------------------------)

3 min read · Nov 29, 2023

📄 Read the full paper at: [https://spice.ai/papers/eigenlayer-restaking-insights.pdf](/content/papers/eigenlayer-restaking-insights.pdf)

With $360M (~175K ETH) and growing already [restaked](https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/) on [EigenLayer](https://www.eigenlayer.xyz/), understanding restaking crypto-economic security is a must for Ethereum developers and ecosystem participants.

The Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network, [Ethereum](https://ethereum.org/en/), currently provides almost [$70 Billion](https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/ETH_STAKED/) (~33.5M ETH) of economic security for applications and smart contract protocols built upon it. [EigenLayer](https://www.eigenlayer.xyz/), introduces [restaking](https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/restaking-guides/restaking-user-guide), a new primitive that enables the reuse of ETH, Ethereum’s native token, on the consensus layer for pooled crypto-economic security.

Smart contract protocols are not the only participants that demand crypto-economic security. Blockchain infrastructure including bridges, oracle networks, and data availability layers require their own distributed validation semantics for verification to establish their crypto-economic security. However, [it’s extremely difficult to bootstrap such blockchain infrastructure](https://www.blog.eigenlayer.xyz/ycie/) (EigenLayer Research, 2023), not to mention one having the same level of crypto-economic security as Ethereum.

[EigenLayer](https://www.eigenlayer.xyz/) is created as a solution to such a dilemma. EigenLayer enables a market of pooled crypto-economic trust, where [restakers, operators, and actively validated services (AVS)](https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/overview/key-terms) all benefit. Understanding EigenLayer’s restaking economy and its players is therefore crucial for every Ethereum ecosystem participant.

To help provide a better understanding of EigenLayer, [Spice AI](/content/site-root.html) analyzed **restaking** **assets**: the underlying asset that sustains the economy, and **restakers**, the security provider of the restaking economy, and shared them through the paper, [**Exploring the Restaking Economy: A Data-Driven Look at EigenLayer’s Restaking Primitive**](/content/papers/eigenlayer-restaking-insights.pdf). Below are some of the highlights.

## **Restaking Assets Distribution**

The security provision of EigenLayer at this nascent stage is predominantly powered by liquid restaking (Figure 1.1). There’s a tendency among restakers to concentrate rather than diversify their restaking asset distributions (Figure 1.2)

## **Restaker withdrawal behaviors**

Restakers tend to speed up withdrawals when dealing with large amounts of withdrawals, which holds for both native (Figure 2.1) and liquid asset withdrawals.

## **EigenLayer NFT Owners**

EigenLayer NFTs have proved to be a true success: attracting both restakers and NFT collectors alike.

## **Restaker Background**

A significant proportion of mainnet restakers did not have any smart contract interactions 3 months before mainnet launch and the contracts they did interact with, they had in common (Figure 4.1).

Detailed analysis can be found in the paper: [Exploring the Restaking Economy: A Data-Driven Look at EigenLayer’s Restaking Primitive](/content/papers/eigenlayer-restaking-insights.pdf).

If would like to participate in EigenLayer or simply have a deeper understanding restaking ecosystem, we hope this paper will help provide some general insights and understanding.

[EigenLayer leverages Spice AI’s enterprise-grade, high-availability infrastructure](/content/cases/eigenlayer/index.html) and as a developer-first platform, [Spice AI](/content/site-root.html) will continue supporting the Ethereum community including providing mission-critical [beacon-chain consensus data](https://docs.spice.ai/api/ethereum/beacon-http-api). The complete set of EigenLayer datasets available on the Spice.ai platform can be found at [https://docs.spice.ai/reference/sql-query-tables/ethereum/eigenlayer-tables](https://docs.spice.ai/reference/sql-query-tables/ethereum/eigenlayer-tables).

## _References_

_EigenLayer Research. (2023, November 11). You could have invented eigenlayer: Explaining eigenlayer. EigenLayer Blog._ [_https://www.blog.eigenlayer.xyz/ycie/_](https://www.blog.eigenlayer.xyz/ycie/)

_EigenLayer. (n.d.). Key terms. Key Terms — EigenLayer Docs._ [_https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/overview/key-terms_](https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/overview/key-terms)