Solana's march toward restaking took a big leap Thursday, with infrastructure project Jito Foundation releasing the code for a staking and restaking program – the network's first.

Restaking theoretically allows blockchain networks to utilize the value of other staked assets as a form of collateral to ensure they're staying honest.

The yet-to-be-audited code from Jito should allow any protocol building on Solana to set up a mechanism for providing economic security to nearly any on-chain application, or "actively validated service" (AVS). Notably, Jito's code would allow users to secure AVSs using whatever crypto asset they choose.

Jito's brand of restaking differs from the version popularized by EigenLayer on the Ethereum network, which restricts collateral to ETH, certain ETH derivatives and the platform's native EIGEN tokens.

"The flexibility and customization allowed in this architecture will be especially useful for the most important customer of these systems - the AVSs," said Lucas Bruder, a contributor at Jito Network.

A number of protocols and startups are seeking to build restaking services for Solana. Jito's code release puts it in the lead, though people familiar with the project told CoinDesk that it had not implemented the code on the mainnet. That's to come later this year.

Restaking Solana

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.