Restaking’s Centralization Problem and Missing Product-Market Fit

[chainsniff]

Restaking is increasingly revealing a contradiction at the heart of DeFi: decentralization in theory, concentration in practice. Managing validator operations across multiple restaked protocols requires scale, infrastructure, and expertise—effectively excluding smaller participants.

As a result, a small cluster of validators ends up securing dozens of protocols, creating fragile trust bottlenecks in systems meant to be trust-minimized. This concentration raises a key question: why aren’t major DeFi platforms relying on restaking for core security?

The answer may be product-market fit. Outside speculative yield chasing, restaking has struggled to prove it can support real-world applications sustainably. Its growth appears driven more by incentives than by genuine demand for shared security.

[etfs]

interesting that major defi platforms aren’t relying on restaking for core security. maybe incentive-driven growth isn’t the same as real product-market fit.