Recently, there’s been even more discussion lately about LSTs and re-staking. I’m walking along the beach, and I keep thinking: where does the return really come from? Put plainly, is it just that someone/the protocol is willing to pay for “security” and “liquidity”—either through validation rewards, or through extra service fees, incentive subsidies, and the like? The real question is how much of this money is sustainable, and how much is just early-stage hype that gets burned off.

The risks are also pretty obvious: the more you stack, the more entry points there are for things to go wrong. Contract vulnerabilities, penalty mechanisms (slashing) causing unintended harm, discounts during liquidity squeezes, and—on top of that—the longer the operational chain, the easier it is to make mistakes yourself… In any case, it’s not as simple as “adding one more layer of yield”; it’s more like adding several more layers of uncertainty.

Over the past couple of days, everyone has been comparing RWA and U.S. Treasury yield rates with on-chain yield products, and I understand the anxiety that, “is the chain just hard-assembling a rate anchor?” But for me, it’s more of a drill: don’t get itchy just because you see others showing off their APY—ask first, who is footing the bill for this yield, and in the worst case, can I hold up? For now, that’s it.