Why does Byzantine exist?

In liquid staking, the staked TVL can increase rapidly while APR is maintained, since the Beacon Chain will emit additional rewards. Therefore stakers are reluctant to reallocate funds to newer protocols while receiving comparable returns.

But AVS security budgets are fixed, and as TVL increases in the most popular restaking options their average return will decline. Countrary to liquid staking, restaking offers a cryptoeconomic incentive for capital to flow down the “long tail” of use cases in search of new opportunities.

But opposing this flow are significant complexities and technical challenges. Exchanges, protocols, and other platforms will likely not devote high-cost technical resources to integrating each new restaking opportunity. Similarly, every fund or investor would need a team of engineers to repeat the same work as their competitors to deploy assets to a range of different AVSs via various protocols, leading to a questionable ROI.

As a result, the flow of capital is impeded and innovation & diversification is stifled.

The answer to this is aggregation. An aggregation & abstraction layer would significantly mitigate these barriers and improve access to the restaking for everyone. This is what we’ve been working towards: Byzantine abstracts away the unique mechanics and complexities of building on different restaking opportunities and makes it easy for participants to assess and select any combination of protocol, node operator, and AVS.

LRTs do not present aggregation - instead, they introduce significant additional risks to Ethereum’s consensus. Even the EigenLayer whitepaper stands against them.

By taking early steps via aggregation and abstraction, we can not only mitigate potential risks to Ethereum’s consensus, but the underlying staking activity as well.