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15 services rated

Best Liquid Restaking Protocols

LRT issuers ranked on added slashing risk, transparency and exit liquidity.Every score below is the weighted mean of the rubric marks, not an editor's gut feel.

How we score this category

Full methodology →
Added slashing risk
Which services the stake secures, what their slashing conditions are, and whether holders can see or refuse them.
25%
Contract security
Audit depth across the restaking stack, upgrade keys and time in production.
20%
Exit liquidity
Redemption queues, secondary depth, and how the token traded in past stress.
20%
Operator transparency
Whether the operator set, the services secured and the actual reward sources are public.
20%
Fees
Protocol cut on top of the underlying staking fee, and the total leakage from gross yield.
15%
7.9
Rank 1 · Solid

The category leader by size and disclosure: users keep their withdrawal keys, and the documentation actually explains what the collateral secures.

Added slashing risk
7.5
Contract security
8.0
Exit liquidity
8.5
Operator transparency
8.0
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2023Read full review →
7.6
Rank 2 · Solid

The protocol that created the category: extensively audited, deliberately slow to enable slashing, and still proving the economics work.

Added slashing risk
7.0
Contract security
8.0
Exit liquidity
7.0
Operator transparency
8.0
Fees
8.5
No protocol fee at the base layerSince 2021Read full review →
7.6
Rank 3 · Solid

The only protocol here whose central idea is preventing slashing rather than pricing it, sold at a below-market fee.

Added slashing risk
8.0
Contract security
7.5
Exit liquidity
6.5
Operator transparency
7.5
Fees
8.5
~5% of rewardsSince 2022Read full review →
7.3
Rank 4 · Solid

A permissionless restaking base layer with immutable core contracts — the most conservative engineering in a category that needed some.

Added slashing risk
7.0
Contract security
7.5
Exit liquidity
6.0
Operator transparency
8.0
Fees
8.5
No protocol fee at the base layerSince 2024Read full review →
7.2
Rank 5 · Solid

Accepts stETH, ETHx and native ETH into one restaked position — convenient aggregation, one more layer of contracts.

Added slashing risk
7.0
Contract security
7.5
Exit liquidity
7.0
Operator transparency
7.0
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2023Read full review →
7.1
Rank 6 · Solid

Restaking run by a team that already operates a working LST, which shows in the operational discipline if not the liquidity.

Added slashing risk
7.0
Contract security
7.5
Exit liquidity
6.0
Operator transparency
7.5
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2023Read full review →
6.9
Rank 7 · Mixed

A restaking framework from the team that already runs Solana's biggest LST — credible operators, unproven mechanism.

Added slashing risk
6.5
Contract security
7.0
Exit liquidity
6.0
Operator transparency
7.5
Fees
8.0
Set per vaultSince 2024Read full review →
6.8
Rank 8 · Mixed

Modular vaults where a named curator picks the risk, which is honest about the fact that somebody always does.

Added slashing risk
7.0
Contract security
7.0
Exit liquidity
5.5
Operator transparency
7.5
Fees
7.0
Set per vault curatorSince 2023Read full review →
6.6
Rank 9 · Mixed

Grew fastest, depegged hardest: the April 2024 ezETH dislocation is the clearest lesson in this category's exit risk.

Added slashing risk
6.5
Contract security
7.0
Exit liquidity
5.5
Operator transparency
6.5
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2023Read full review →
6.5
Rank 10 · Mixed

The leading Solana restaking protocol, applying a model whose Ethereum version is itself still unproven.

Added slashing risk
6.0
Contract security
6.5
Exit liquidity
6.0
Operator transparency
6.5
Fees
8.0
~5–10% of rewardsSince 2024Read full review →
6.4
Rank 11 · Mixed

Issues a separate token per underlying LST, which isolates risk cleanly and fragments liquidity completely.

Added slashing risk
6.5
Contract security
6.5
Exit liquidity
5.0
Operator transparency
6.5
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2024Read full review →
6.3
Rank 12 · Mixed

Extends restaking beyond ETH into Bitcoin-denominated products, which is novel and adds an entirely new bridge risk.

Added slashing risk
6.0
Contract security
6.5
Exit liquidity
5.5
Operator transparency
6.5
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2023Read full review →
6.1
Rank 13 · Mixed

A thoughtful Solana restaking design in its first year, which is not long enough to judge anything.

Added slashing risk
5.5
Contract security
6.0
Exit liquidity
5.0
Operator transparency
6.5
Fees
8.0
~5–10% of rewardsSince 2024Read full review →
6.1
Rank 14 · Mixed

A small protocol doing the isolation-per-asset thing competently, with all the liquidity problems that implies.

Added slashing risk
6.0
Contract security
6.0
Exit liquidity
5.0
Operator transparency
6.5
Fees
7.5
~10% of rewardsSince 2023Read full review →
6.0
Rank 15 · Mixed

Accepts almost any asset as restaking collateral across many chains, which is a lot of surface area for a young protocol.

Added slashing risk
5.5
Contract security
6.0
Exit liquidity
5.5
Operator transparency
6.0
Fees
7.5
Varies by deploymentSince 2023Read full review →

How OBOL rates liquid restaking protocols

Restaking takes staked ETH and pledges it as security for additional services, each with its own slashing conditions. The extra yield is real; so is the extra way to lose principal. Our rubric therefore leads with added slashing risk — what your collateral is actually securing, and whether you were told.

This is the youngest category we rate and it scores lower on average than any other. That is deliberate. Most of these protocols have existed for two years or less, several launched with points programmes instead of published yields, and the slashing mechanics they depend on have not yet been tested at scale in production.

Points are not yield

A large share of the returns advertised in this sector during the 2024 growth phase were points: unpriced claims on a future token. We do not score points programmes as yield, and we mark down protocols whose published returns depend on them without saying so.

Exit is the risk nobody prices

Redemption from a restaking protocol can require unwinding operator commitments before the underlying stake unwinds, which is a queue behind a queue. In stress, that is when the secondary discount appears. We weight exit liquidity heavily for exactly this reason.

FAQ

Is the extra yield from restaking worth it?
It is typically a fraction of a per cent over plain liquid staking, in exchange for an additional slashing surface and a younger contract stack. For most holders that trade is not obviously good.
Can restaked ETH actually be slashed by these services?
Yes, that is the entire mechanism — services pay for security precisely because they can penalise misbehaviour. How aggressively those conditions are enforced in practice is still being established.
Why do these protocols score lower than liquid staking?
Because they are the same risks plus more, with less operating history. A young protocol with a clean record scores well within this category and still below a mature LST.