Restaking

Restaking is the practice of committing already-staked capital as security for additional protocols, so one pool of collateral backs more than one set of obligations. On Ethereum this was popularised by EigenLayer, where a validator points its withdrawal credentials at a contract and opts in to secure services that lack their own validator set. The staker earns a second stream of rewards but accepts additional slashing conditions written by those services, on top of the base protocol's own penalties. The systemic concern is correlated failure: if the same collateral secures many services, a bug or a mass slashing event in one can cascade into the others, which is why restaked positions are not simply extra yield on the same risk.