Shared security protocol Symbiotic came out of stealth today.
Symbiotic allows networks to customize their staking implementation, including collateral, node operator selection, rewards, and penalty mechanisms. Ethereum acts as the coordination and orchestration layer of the protocol.
While EigenLayer is promoted as “a marketplace for decentralized trust,” Symbiotic is a kind of operating system for decentralized coordination.
“The goal was to create a protocol suitable for virtually any decentralized network,” Symbiotic co-founder and CEO Misha Putiatin told Blockworks.
Symbiotic acts as a thin coordination layer that provides network builders with high flexibility and control. As such, it will be immutable from launch – like Uniswap – and will not require a token to function.
Ambition to “create an industry”
Truly decentralized networks change the way we think about security, trust and coordination in the digital world. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work allowed a decentralized network of miners to secure digital transactions without relying on a central authority.
Ethereum’s proof-of-stake achieves broadly similar security levels by using economic collateral instead of electricity consumption.
Shared security extends these concepts further by allowing multiple networks to share their resources. This allows new and emerging networks to fuel their growth by piggybacking on the established security of larger, more mature networks.
Implementations can involve complex coordination to ensure that node operators comply with the rules of the protocol in different networks. Some of the most well-known shared security vendors include Polkadot’s Relay Chain, Cosmos’ Interchain Security, and EigenLayer.
“Polkadot was one of the pioneers in that, and then Cosmos continued with their own flavor,” Putiatin said. “Our idea is that we wanted to create a protocol [with as few] possible compromises.”
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Symbiotic began development about nine months ago, co-founded by Putiatin and Algys Ievlev and built by the team behind audit and security company Statemind. Previously, Putiatin was CEO of MixBytes, a smart contract audit firm where Ievlev served as Chief Technology Officer. The couple both studied in Moscow and now live in Dubai.
Their experience at Statemind led the team to “expand their mission to secure everything blockchain and everything decentralized” with Symbiotic, Putiatin said.
Symbiotic has raised a $5.8 million seed round from venture capital firms Paradigm – which also funded Uniswap – and cyberFund, the venture capital firm founded by early Lido contributors Konstantin Lomashuk and Vasiliy Shapovalov.
The protocol’s overarching design architecture is “permissionless, neutral, and flexible.”
Neutral means that Symbiotic will not compete with other market participants – so no offer of native staking, rollup or data availability.
Being ‘symbiotic’ means ‘running away from competition’ [from] fire and to be as selfless as possible and as disinterested as possible,” Putiatin explained.
Maximum flexibility
All major decisions remain with the networks building on top of Symbiotic, such as what collateral they will accept, which node operators can participate, who resolves disputes – i.e. cutting and punishing – and how much commitment they want from each party.
A key differentiator from other shared security systems is that Symbiotic can accept any token and, in theory, from any chain.
To create an industry around shared security, “we needed to create a protocol that could be super modular, and collateral abstraction is one of them.”
Putiatin puts that in the ‘neutrality’ category, because while Symbiotic is an Ethereum protocol, the collateral does not have to be on Ethereum, although Lido staked ether (stETH) is a likely candidate for core collateral.
“You can create a liability on the Ethereum side,” he explained, “and if so [the] network sees that the messaging is trusted enough, within the slash window the item on another chain can even be in DeFi – actually being used somewhere – but still be sliced reliably.
This modularity allows networks to adapt and evolve based on their specific security needs and stages of decentralization.
“When you launch a centralized network, there is a gap between being super creative and innovative, having a great idea, and starting in a way that is secure – because you had to build your own economic security model,” Putiatin said.
This is why, according to Putiatin, we have seen a proliferation of tokens and decentralization compromises such as multisigs, proof-of-authority networks or substandard validator sets.
“The goal of our project is to shift the narrative – you don’t have to launch native – it will be more secure and easier for you to launch on top of us, on top of shared security,” he said.
He envisions the system being applied to jump-start all kinds of networks, citing cross-chain oracles, threshold networks, reassertions and MEV infrastructure, interoperability, and shared sequencers, to name a few.
“We believe that this kind of primitive people can help many people, and for that we must be as neutral as possible,” Putiatin said.
Although the protocol’s ambitions in the field of shared security are enormous, its architecture has been deliberately kept minimalist.
It will be permissionless and immutable, with no multisig anywhere. It will not collect fees nor will it rely on a centralized front end.
“If I die and every engineer dies, our system will still be fully operational. I don’t expect our front end to be used much,” he said.
Launch partners include household names like Ethena, LayerZero and Hyperlane, plus a slew of networks still in the early stages of development, according to a Symbiotic blog post.
Putiatin expects that the Symbiotic mainnet will be operational for some networks by the end of the summer.
“Why would you create a complex protocol when you can create a very simple and flexible protocol?”