Written by Pablo Gómez
Founder & CEO at Metlabs · Reviewed on October 11, 2026
The concept was popularized by EigenLayer. The staker re-stakes the same capital: beyond securing Ethereum's consensus, it serves as slashing collateral for external services called AVS (Actively Validated Services). An AVS is a chain, oracle, data availability layer or Proof of Stake network that needs cryptoeconomic security but does not want to bootstrap its own validator set and its own token. Instead, it rents the security of the restaked capital. There are three roles: restakers who deposit ETH or LSTs and choose whom to delegate to, operators who run the AVS software, and the AVS themselves, which define their validation and slashing conditions.
The proposal solves the security cold start: a new rollup, bridge or data layer can inherit Ethereum's economic security without issuing its own staking token. The central debated risk is correlation: if the same capital backs many AVS and several slashing events fire at once, losses amplify. That is why slashing design and operator diversification are the sensitive point, and why its activation marks the model's maturity.
