Introducing Risk-Aware Restaking: Winners of the 2025 IC3 Blockchain Camp Hackathon
Risk-Aware Restaking took first place at this year’s IC3 Blockchain Camp hackathon. We sat down with project lead Roi Bar-Zur (Technion, IC3) to find out what they built, the technical hurdles they overcame during the hackathon, and what’s next for their project:
Q: What was your project and how does it work?
A: Validators in restaking protocols can leverage their staked tokens to provide security for multiple decentralized services at once. We examine situations where these services would enforce caps to limit total restaking participation, a protective measure not currently used but potentially valuable for network security.
Our research aims to help validators optimize their stake allocation when services adopt these risk management practices. We prove that breaking your stake into smaller portions before allocating to services yields superior returns compared to keeping it as one large amount. To help validators implement this strategy, we created both a simulation-based algorithm that works for any scenario and a closed-form mathematical solution that applies only under specific conditions but runs thousands of times faster.
Q: How many people were on your team?
A: We had eight people on our team: myself, Mateo Bastidas, Hongyin Chen, Dor Malka, Daniel Lee, Austin Li, Max Tang, and Sarisht Wadhwa.
Q: Where did the initial idea for your project come from?
A: The idea emerged from my prior research on Elastic Restaking Networks. I believe these approaches could offer improvements over current network designs, so I wanted to explore practical tools that would support their implementation.
Q: What problems are you trying to solve?
A: We’re solving the problem of how validators should optimally allocate their stake when services implement risk-aware constraints.
As restaking networks mature, services will likely adopt degree caps to protect themselves from excessive restaking concentration, but it’s unclear what impact these measures will have on the broader ecosystem. This creates an optimization challenge for validators, who need to understand how to allocate their stake effectively under these new conditions while maximizing their returns.
Q: Were there technical setbacks or challenges you had to overcome during the week? How did you troubleshoot these problems?
A: We faced several technical challenges during the week.
First, we tried implementing elastic restaking and service degree caps directly in EigenLayer and Symbiotic, but these systems proved too complex to modify within the hackathon timeframe.
On the theoretical side, developing our allocation algorithms required multiple iterations and trial-and-error debugging to identify the exact conditions under which our approach works.
Finally, our simulations had limitations because the methods we used don’t guarantee optimal results, which made it particularly difficult to identify that we needed to incorporate stake splitting as a core feature.
Q: How do you plan to advance your project or further your research around elastic restaking?
A: I hope that major platforms like EigenLayer and Symbiotic will adopt elastic restaking principles and implement the risk management measures we studied.
There’s still much more research needed in restaking networks to fully understand how to maximize their potential while ensuring they remain safe to use. I plan to continue exploring these questions because the field is still developing, and there are many open problems around network design and security that need to be addressed.
Q: What were some key takeaways for you based on your experience at the IC3 Blockchain Camp?
A: I really valued how the camp brings together top researchers in a close format that nurtures deep discussions and collaboration.
The week-long timeframe is longer than typical hackathons, which gives you enough time to tackle meaningful research problems at a rapid pace. Working under time pressure pushed us to focus on refining and clearly articulating what we had rather than chasing after additional features or extensions. The camp is also a great place to find potential future collaborations.
Q: What advice would you give to future hackathon participants?
A: I’d suggest picking a problem that’s focused enough to make real progress but still impactful.
When you scope appropriately, you can organize your team so different people can tackle different aspects based on what they’re good at or interested in. Some of our team worked on the theoretical side, while others focused on implementing the algorithms and building the simulation tools, and we coordinated to validate our results against each other.
This approach let us actually prove our theoretical findings worked in practice while making progress much faster than if we’d all tried to work on everything together.
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