,
Tim Roughgarden
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
We study the risks of validator reuse across multiple services in a restaking protocol. We characterize the robust security of a restaking network as a function of the buffer between the costs and profits from attacks. For example, our results imply that if attack costs always exceed attack profits by 10%, then a sudden loss of .1% of the overall stake (e.g., due to a software error) cannot result in the ultimate loss of more than 1.1% of the overall stake. We also provide local analogs of these overcollateralization conditions and robust security guarantees that apply specifically for a target service or coalition of services. All of our bounds on worst-case stake loss are the best possible. Finally, we bound the maximum-possible length of a cascade of attacks. Our results suggest measures of robustness that could be exposed to the participants in a restaking protocol. We also suggest polynomial-time computable sufficient conditions that can proxy for these measures.
@InProceedings{durvasula_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.48,
author = {Durvasula, Naveen and Roughgarden, Tim},
title = {{Robust Restaking Networks}},
booktitle = {16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025)},
pages = {48:1--48:21},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-361-4},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2025},
volume = {325},
editor = {Meka, Raghu},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.48},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-226769},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.48},
annote = {Keywords: Proof of stake, Restaking, Staking Risks}
}