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Hello world! We are Byzantine Finance and we’re here to change the way institutions and professional investors participate in restaking. Byzantine is the the gateway infrastructure that allows anyone to access fully custom restaking portfolios.
Staking - the internet bond
Staking is the act of depositing collateral to back a blockchain’s security.
Consider two people: Person A wants to buy a house from Person B. To close the transaction, it must be verified that A has the house and B has the money. In the off-chain world, this is usually done by a notary.
For on-chain transactions, this is done by validators. Validators are participants of a blockchain that store its history and, for every transaction, validate whether the payer has sufficient funds and the payee is able to accept them. The system therefore relies on the trustworthiness and accuracy of its validators
To ensure this trustworthiness, validators must put a stake a sizeable amount of capital: Around $150k in the case of Ethereum. This stake is locked during the period of validating network transactions.
If a validator validates a fraudulent transaction or otherwise acts maliciously, a part of this stake is taken from them and destroyed. If on the other hand they perform well, the chain remunerates them with staking rewards, effectively an interest on the assets put at stake.
This staking process can be separated into two actors:
- The validator is the actor operating the network node who has computing power, but limited capital.
- The staker holds capital, but does not have the equipment or skills to operate a node.
For the staker, staking is effectively like a bond due to its risk structure: Interest is inherently linked to the health of the chain as a whole, just as a bond is liked to the health of a country.
Ethereum staking can be understood as an “internet bond” because it mirrors the structure of fixed-income securities while offering exposure to a blockchain ecosystem. Like government or corporate bonds, staking involves locking up capital in a trusted system to earn a yield while contributing to its security and stability.
What is Restaking?
Besides Ethereum, many other blockchains and networks require transactions to be validated or need other work performed. What if a validator were to scale up their work and start validating for 1, or 3, or even 10 networks, gaining exposure to and earning interest from all of these other ecosystems?
That’s restaking. Think of it like a bond ETF: Exposure to multiple countries/chains at the same time, with the same amount of capital. The difference here is that the interest rate stacks for every ecosystem for which transactions are validated.
Byzantine summarised
The current state of staking and restaking is extremely fragmented, hard to access, and expensive to integrate. Imagine if bonds were never listed anywhere: Investors had to fly to Brazil to buy their bonds. This makes the market inaccessible for most investors!
Here’s what Byzantine does:
- From a single interface, anyone can build their custom portfolio: Pick any selection of staked chains/protocols, arrive with any collateral asset, and work with any validator / operator partner.
- Build custom portfolios or use them as the base for structured products: Wrap them into a custom ETF, whitelabel it, and open it to clients.
Byzantine allows professionals to have easy access to “bonds”, as well as build new “ETFs” and structured products in staking and restaking extremely easily.
Byzantine protocol features
The Byzantine protocol is an open infrastructure for custom restaking portfolios (”strategies”).
The protocol's core function is strategy creation and interest accounting. Anyone can create a strategy and deploy it as a vault, and there's no limit to how many vaults can exist. The protocol continuously tracks stakers' earnings across all vaults.
Each vault is defined by four elements: a collateral asset, a set of networks/chains to validate, a validator & operator partner, and a set of permissions. The protocol places no restrictions on the types of strategies across staking and restaking that can be created.
Byzantine strategy vaults are:
- Permissionless: Anyone can create a new strategy, reducing Byzantine counterparty risk.
- Non-custodial: Custody of the assets remains with you or your custodian. Byzantine never has access to or control over client funds.
- Fund segregated: Funds in your vault never co-mingle with those of other users.
- Risk segregated: Your portfolio performance is not affected by slashing incidents in other vaults.
Institutional clients do not need to move their capital from existing custodians: Byzantine integrates with wallets, exchanges, custodians, and other web3 platforms.
Investors are able to tailor their portfolios to their specific risk appetite. For those looking to outsource portfolio construction, Byzantine works with professional risk manager to have them design a portfolio tailored to a custom risk tolerance.
The Byzantine Vision
Our vision is to make restaking accessible to all. Like staking is now, restaking will be one of the cornerstone primitives of Decentralised Finance, and Byzantine builds the base layer to make this possible.
One of the greatest strengths of Decentralised Finance is its openness and composability. Anyone can build on existing protocols to optimise them or build new products. At the end of the day, as contributors bring new ideas, the global efficiency of the whole system will increase for the benefit of the end users!
This is what Byzantine is about: Being the base layer for a new generation of structured restaking products. This not only optimises yields and capital efficiency, but - for the first time - opens up restaking to be a new economic design space in DeFi.
Join Us on This Journey
Restaking is more than just a new DeFi primitive—it’s a fundamental shift in how we think about crypto asset management. At Byzantine Finance, we are proud to be at the forefront of this transformation, building the gateway infrastructure that will unlock the full potential of restaking for institutions and professional investors.
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