Last night, two major topics in the Ethereum staking community were EigenLayer’s $100 million investment from a16z and the investment of Renzo Protocol, a liquidity staking protocol built on EigenLayer, by Binance Labs. These developments signify the increasing attention of venture capitalists towards the staking space, expanding the overall potential.
According to Binance Labs, Renzo is the staking hub of EigenLayer that facilitates trustless collaboration among stakers, node operators, and AVS demanders, simplifying complexity and making collaboration easier for these participants.
He Yi, Co-founder of Binance and Head of Binance Labs, commented:
“Renzo’s funding will be used to allow BNB Chain users to directly stake ETH for Renzo’s liquidity staking token, ezETH, without the need for bridging, and receive EigenLayer points and Renzo’s ezPoints rewards.”
Before the investment from Binance Labs, Renzo recently completed a $3.2 million seed round on February 15, with a valuation of $25 million. Other investors include Maven11, Figment Capital, SevenX Ventures, IOSG Ventures, and OKX Ventures.
Renzo is Binance Labs’ second investment in the Ethereum staking space, following their investment in Puffer Finance on January 30. Since its launch on February 1, Puffer Finance has rapidly grown to become the second-largest liquidity staking protocol. According to DeFiLlama data, Puffer’s TVL exceeds $1 billion, while Renzo closely follows as the fourth-largest staking protocol with a TVL of over $390 million.
The ecosystem of Ethereum liquidity staking began with the launch of EigenLayer in June last year, introducing the staking system to Ethereum. Currently, according to DeFiLlama data, EigenLayer’s TVL is approaching $7.9 billion, with the TVL of the liquidity staking space based on EigenLayer exceeding $3.8 billion.
Renzo supports deposits of ETH and LST, such as stETH and wBETH. For each LST or ETH deposited into Renzo, users will receive an equivalent amount of ezETH liquidity staking tokens and will have access to EigenLayer points, Renzo ezPoints (airdrops), and regular ETH staking rewards.
Alvin, the founder of Crypto Wesearch, also shared more advanced strategies, where users can purchase Renzo’s YT Token on Pendle and enjoy 8 times the mining efficiency. However, the risk is that the future airdrop returns may be lower than the cost of purchasing YT Tokens, and readers should consider this themselves.
Source: DeFiLlama