Symbiotic Releases Cross-Chain Staking As SEC Clarifies Staking

Forbes

2 days ago

Connection of different chains with a link
On May 29, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a statement that clarified protocol staking on DeFi proof-of-stake networks does not in itself constitute a securities offering. For those building and providing DeFi infrastructure that deploys staking, it is a long-awaited regulatory green light.
The timing could not be better for Symbiotic, the re-staking protocol on the move, who announced 'Relay' a new universal staking protocol, earlier this week. Relay is designed to enable staking on one blockchain protocol and verify decisions across many. Relay is pitched as a 'crypto-economic' coordination layer for the modular multichain future of Web3.
Symbiotic, recently completed a $29 million Series A round backed by Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, and hundreds of angel investors. The round helps to take on rival market leader EigenLayer, and to further fund the development of Relay.
Staking is foundational to DeFI infrastructure with total value locked (TVL) market of $116.6 billion, according to DeFiLlama. Ethereum dominates this market with over $62 billion in DeFi TVL and is seen as a main destination for real-world-asset (RWA) tokenization, a market Solana is now a serious contender for.
Staking is the process of distributing the economic benefits of Web3 across the network, while defraying and reducing the many risks of network participation, to help ensure the bedrock of the protocol network remains stable.
New transactions are added to DeFi networks through Proof-of-take (PoS) consensus mechanisms, allowing users who stake their tokens, like ETH or SOL, to earn fees in return. Staked tokens are 'locked' in the DeFi protocol ecosystem and earn fees as new user transactions use the network digital rails.
Liquid staking is very popular in DeFi as it enables earning fees from two DeFi networks. With liquid staking, once the original token is staked, a derivative Liquid Staking Token (LST) of the same value as the original staked token is issued and can be then re-staked in the DeFi ecosystem for further incentives. The LST is swapped back when the original token is un-staked.
Liquid staking (re-staking) is similar to 'collateralization' in the TradFi world, popular with sophisticated financiers and asset managers, and is one of the key incentives for seasoned finance professionals to deploy capital in the Web3 ecosystem. Q2 2025 liquid staking alone accounted for over $58.9 billion in TVL across the DeFi landscape.
Symbiotic's Relay enables developers to 'plug into' and unlock the ability to stake from any ecosystem to verify protocol decisions on any supported chain. This enables protocol developers to build bridges, settlement layers, oracles, and rollups without relying on multisigs or proof-of-authority setups, and without sacrificing decentralization.
It also means that a protocol can secure decisions on Ethereum and execute or settle on Solana or Monad or tap into Bitcoin-based systems that support programmable layers.
Algys Ievlev, co-founder of Symbiotic, says, "Until now, building secure multichain infrastructure meant expensive custom work or reliance on centralized relayers. Relay solves that. It makes verifiable, stake-backed coordination between chains as simple as a plug-in, without any trust assumptions or permissioning."
The decentralized finance (DeFi) market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53.7% from 2025 to 2030, considered a conservative estimate by many in industry.
Leading crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken offer staking services to their customers, facilitating broader participation in staking activities while specialist platforms like Lido, Rocket Pool, and Marinade Finance command the liquid staking market.
Eigenlayer, backed by a16z, Coinbase Ventures and Polychain, is the largest and most established re-staking protocol and leads the re-staking market with $15 billion of TVL. Eigenlayer enables ETH and LSTs Allows ETH and LSTs to be re-staked to secure Actively Validated Services (AVSs), that are continuously monitor and verify services by a network of validators to ensure their integrity, security, and accuracy.
Symbiotic supports a mainnet already live across 14 networks with over $1 billion staked. Relay now enables crypto's largest ecosystems to be unified into one seamless interoperable layer. The Bitcoin Network brings a $2.2 trillion market cap to add to $116 billion DeFi TVL with thousands of programmable assets across Ethereum, Solana and other protocols, now no longer siloed.
Historically, developers had to choose which trade-offs to embrace when choosing protocols for projects. Relay seeks to remove 'protocol walls' by allowing protocols to use staked capital on one chain to verify and secure actions on another, whether Symbiotic is natively deployed on the protocol.
Developers are already exploring use cases from fast-finality rollups to oracles and decentralized insurance layers. Relay integrates directly with Symbiotic's validator set and SDK, enabling teams to add multichain coordination without reimplementing consensus mechanisms.
Symbiotic Relay's launch arrives at an opportune time. The SEC's recent statement addresses a key concern for developers about whether building protocol-level staking mechanisms could expose them to securities enforcement. The answer, for the time being, appears to be no.
The SEC's ruling follows the U.K. Treasury's January legal amendment clarifying that crypto staking necessary for proof-of-stake blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana doesn't fall under the definition of a 'collective investment scheme (CIS),' and is outside the scope of the CIS regulations.
In a space where regulatory uncertainty often slows innovation, that kind of clarity has been, in recent years, rare and is proving commercially valuable. It shifts the conversation from fear of noncompliance to a renewed focus on DeFi infrastructure design.
Financial institutions deploying distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as Blackrock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs will be spurred on by more favorable regulatory signals, and the recent SEC staking statement is likely to help accelerate this.
Relay's architecture, which is open-source, permissionless, and has no custodial token wrappers, is precisely the kind of model that fits into this regulatory shift.
Symbiotic Relay represents a broader trend being witnessed in the DeFi landscape - the push toward a more modular and interoperable infrastructure in Web3. According to Electric Capital's 2024 Developer Report, 34% of active crypto developers now work across multiple blockchains, a significant jump from just 10% in 2015. The tooling needs to catch up.
Whether Symbiotic Relay becomes a standard, or even 'the' standard remains to be seen in this very hotly contended competitive space. One thing is for sure, a week is a long time in DeFi. Symbiotic's timing couldn't be better with this week's Relay announcement on the back of last week's SEC staking clarification.
For DeFi developers building the next wave of multichain apps, it might just be the interoperable plug-in they didn't know they were waiting for. For seasoned stakers, it is a killer app. Timing is everything.