Solana's re-staking protocol Solayer secured a $12 million financing. Can its all-star investment lineup successfully replicate Eigenlayer?

On August 28, Solana re-staking protocol Solayer completed a $12 million seed round of financing, led by Polychain Capital, with other investors including Big Brain Holdings, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, Race Capital, ABCDE, and Arthur Hayes' family office Maelstrom. Prior to this, Solayer also conducted an undisclosed pre-seed financing round, with angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. In early August, Solayer also received investment from Binance Labs. Solayer's star-studded capital lineup and the Solana re-staking narrative have attracted much attention from the community. Will Solayer become the next Eigenlayer of Solana? There is limited public information about Solayer's entrepreneurial story and team background. Currently, it is known that Solayer has two founders, Jason Li and Rachel Chu, both veterans in the crypto industry. Jason Li previously created the non-custodial enterprise wallet project MPCVault, while Rachel Chu, before founding Solayer, also created the NFT creation tool platform Vibe. In addition, Rachel Chu is also a core developer at SushiSwap. In terms of product positioning, Solayer is essentially the Eigenlayer on the Solana chain, often using Eigenlayer as a reference and comparison. However, due to significant differences in the design architecture between Solana and Ethereum, Solayer also has its own logic in the design approach. In Solayer's official documentation, it is stated: "We do not fundamentally agree with the technical architecture of EigenLayer. Therefore, we have somewhat restructured and restandardized re-staking in the Solana ecosystem. Re-staking is seen as a way for applications to ensure network bandwidth. Our goal is to become the de facto infrastructure for staking-weighted service quality and ultimately become a core primitive of the Solana blockchain/consensus." One of the key innovations of Solayer, the endogenous AVS, is mentioned multiple times. Solayer introduces a new concept in blockchain infrastructure: dApps can dynamically allocate their processing power based on staked tokens. This staking-weighted approach allows dApps to influence network operations based on their staking ratio, enabling faster and more reliable user transactions. The biggest difference between this endogenous AVS and Eigenlayer is that Solayer focuses more on dApps native to the Solana ecosystem rather than external ones. These native AVS are directly allocated by validators, allowing them to prioritize transaction processing. On August 15, Solayer announced the launch of the first batch of endogenous AVS in collaboration with four Solana native projects: Bonk, AltLayer, SonicSVM, and Hashkey. Since its launch in May 2024, Solayer's highest TVL has exceeded $190 million, with approximately 100,000 independent deposit addresses, currently ranking fifth in the re-staking track. Re-staking protocols were previously a hot narrative in the Ethereum and Bitcoin ecosystems. Therefore, as one of the hottest public chains this year, re-staking protocols on Solana have also garnered attention. On August 27, DWF Ventures released a lengthy post introducing several re-staking protocols on Solana and expressed continued interest in re-staking protocols on Solana. In addition to Solayer, Picasso, Jito, Cambrian, and Fragmetric are also planning to launch re-staking protocols on Solana. Currently, Solayer is the most popular project and the first re-staking project on Solana's mainnet. However, the recent re-staking track has not maintained high heat. Data on August 29 shows that the TVL of the leading project EigenLayer has dropped to $11.70 billion, nearly half of the peak $20 billion locked. According to defillama data, the total TVL of re-staking protocols across the network is currently around $14 billion, and re-staking-related tokens have also generally been on a downward trend in the past month, with a decline of over 20%. Solayer has not yet disclosed specific plans for its native token, with co-founder Rachel Chu stating that the token is "in the design phase." Recently, as the MEME coin craze gradually subsides, various data on Solana are in a declining range. In the future, can Solayer successfully replicate the heat of Eigenlayer? PANews will continue to follow the project's progress.