HyveDA To Enable wstETH as Collateral in Strategic Collaboration with Lido

As HyveDA gets ready for testnet deployment, we’re pleased to announce a strategic collaboration with Lido, the leading liquid staking protocol, to bring Wrapped Staked Eth (wstETH) as collateral to HyveDA. Pioneered by Lido, wstETH has seen widespread adoption and integrations across the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space, and now across the restaking space, standing as the leading collateral asset in Symbiotic. wstETH extends Ethereum through the restaking of staked assets, allowing HyveDA to leverage the underlying economic security ensured through staked ETH. This added utility to ETH stakers makes HyveDA, through Symbiotic, a very attractive opportunity to bring further value out of assets they already own in a safe and secure fashion.

wstETH: New Collateral on HyveDA

On November 7th, HyveDA announced a collaboration with Mellow Protocol, a modular Liquid Restaking primitive for permissionless LRTs (Liquid Restaking Token) creation and curation on Symbiotic. This integration of Mellow Protocol facilitates the implementation of wstETH as restaking collateral, and emphasizes HyveDA’s efforts towards securing its upcoming Data Availability solution with the most liquid, secure and widely accessible assets.

With $1.4B worth of wstETH deposits on Symbiotic, the implementation of wstETH as collateral by HyveDA will remove the barrier to over one billion dollars in liquidity and economic security to potentially flow into HyveDA. Besides bolstering Hyve’s ability to attract TVL, enabling wstETH will increase the number of potential integrations given its dominance among restaking collaterals and the overwhelming benefits of utilizing it to secure the network.

Dominance of wstETH

Instead of focusing on plain ETH like incumbent restaking solutions have done, the Symbiotic ecosystem has taken a different, better aligned, and more capital efficient route by focusing on ETH Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs).

Alignment: Staked ETH is a more Ethereum aligned solution than ETH itself, as it indirectly encourages ETH staking via any of the available collateral alternatives on Symbiotic. Thus, securing the Ethereum blockchain.

Capital Efficiency: Staked ETH is a more capital efficient alternative than ETH, as it comes with baked-in validator rewards. By using ETH, restakers would be leaving these rewards on the table. Not to mention, restakers are able to continue to leverage the value of their asset to support protocols and generate even further value.

Within the different flavors of staked ETH available through Symbiotic, wstETH stands out as the clear leader with more than 67% of Symbiotic’s two billion USD worth of deposits. At this point, wstETH has created a self-reinforcing cycle in which:

Secured Networks want to enable wstETH because it’s the most liquid and widely-used collateral.
wstETH keeps growing as the most liquid and widely-used collateral because Secured Networks want to enable it.

Introducing Committee X

HyveDA achieves the highest data availability throughput up to date, while preserving its decentralized nature thanks to its Permissionless Data Availability Committee (DAC) design. The first Data Availability Committee (DAC) on HyveDA, Committee X is a pure Ethereum-aligned DAC. Committee X will essentially extend Ethereum’s security, as the underlying economic security from Ethereum validators will be leveraged through wstETH to secure HyveDA.

Additionally, since wstETH will be the only asset initially taken as collateral, the X Committee is creating new use cases, adding value to Ethereum by indirectly encouraging ETH holders to secure the Ethereum network. Hyve secures its spot in the wstETH flywheel, increasing demand for wstETH while also providing industry leading DA.

Symbiosis

As Symbiotic’s Founder and CEO, Misha, says: There’s Symbiosis in Symbiotic.

Besides leveraging Lido’s wstETH’s economic security for its data availability solution, HyveDA will directly and indirectly create value for Symbiotic and wstETH by enabling use cases and protocols that weren’t previously possible, creating demand for these services (Symbiotic’s hared security framework and Lido’s wstETH) that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. This would be accomplished through use cases such as:

AI Agents
DePIN
High-Frequency Trading

Tl;dr

HyveDA's new strategic collaboration with Lido will enable wstETH as the first collateral type in Hyve's X Committee. This will allow for integrators to leverage HyveDA's 1GB/s throughput, its permissionless nature, and Ethereum's extended security by combining both: wstETH's underlying validators and the Symbiotic-enabled slashing mechanism. This is a big step as Hyve keeps surrounding itself with the more reputable and battle tested orgs/protocols to launch the most robust product out there.

Stay tuned for upcoming updates.

About Lido

Lido is a liquid staking protocol backed by industry-leading staking providers that supports staking for Ethereum and Polygon. Lido lets users stake their tokens - without locking tokens or maintaining infrastructure - whilst participating in on-chain activities, e.g. lending, farming and more.

Lido is on a mission to make staking simple and decentralized, whilst opening up staking to as many people as possible.