Financial Dynamics and Interconnected Risk of Liquid Restaking

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the revenue drivers and interconnected risks of liquid restaking in DeFi, highlighting the impact of multi-chain expansion and assessing systemic risk through empirical and scenario-based methods.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of the revenue factors of the Renzo Protocol and investigates the interconnected risks arising from multi-chain expansion and protocol interdependencies.

Findings

Revenue is mainly driven by the EigenLayer ecosystem value and multi-chain expansion.

Bridging to other networks increases adoption but adds bridge risks.

Current bridge risk does not pose systemic risk to the ecosystem.

Abstract

Decentralized finance introduces new business models and use cases as part of digital finance. Restaking has recently emerged as a transformative mechanism in DeFi, promising extra yields but introducing complex and interconnected risks. The paper monitors the current restaking landscape, empirically analyzes the revenue drivers of a liquid restaking protocol, and conducts a technical investigation on the emitted risk arising from the interconnection between liquid restaking and other protocols. The revenue dynamics of Renzo Protocol are analyzed by employing an OLS regression model, Granger-causality and random forest feature importance tests. Our results identify that revenue is primarily predicted by the value locked in the underlying EigenLayer ecosystem, the yield of Renzo protocol's liquid restaking token and the multi-blockchain expansion of that token. The multi-blockchain expansion of the liquid restaking token presents a double-edged sword: bridging to other networks is crucial for user adoption, but it adds the bridge risks to the existing risks of restaking. We investigate the cross-contamination risk between different DeFi services and the liquid restaking protocol. By mapping the asset flow across the decentralized finance ecosystem, it is detected that the bridge risk of the current size of Renzo's liquid-restaking assets does not impose a systemic risk on the current restaking and staking ecosystem. To address the potential consequences of the emphasized interconnection risks, we introduce two hypothetical scenarios and a stress test, assuming a large number of compromised liquid restaking tokens and a smart contract logic failure in a DeFi protocol. Considering the overall liquid-restaking protocols and the growing interconnection, this analysis requires further work to explore the growing complexities.