Restaking on Solana: Jito, Solayer, and Fragmetric compared
Restaking reuses staked SOL and LSTs to secure extra services (NCNs/AVSs) for more yield and more risk. How Jito, Solayer, and Fragmetric differ.
devrels.xyz/a/38short linkRestaking reuses already-staked SOL (or liquid staking tokens) to simultaneously secure additional services — operator-run networks in the AVS model — for extra yield on top of base staking rewards. You deposit into a vault, get a liquid receipt token, and that stake is delegated to operators running extra workloads (oracles, bridges, MEV distribution, sequencing). The upside is more yield; the downside is more slashing surface.
The three players
Jito Restaking — two programs: a Restaking program (a registry for NCNs and operators) and a Vault program that mints VRTs (Vault Receipt Tokens). Jito coined NCN (Node Consensus Network) as Solana's term for an AVS. Its first NCN is TipRouter, which decentralizes distribution of Jito MEV tips (operators vote on Merkle roots).
Solayer — issues sSOL, its liquid restaking token, and distinguishes endogenous AVS(Solana-native programs using stake for stake-weighted QoS bandwidth) from exogenous AVS (EigenLayer-style off-chain services). It has since pivoted hard toward InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated high-throughput SVM, with the LAYER token.
Fragmetric — liquid restaking with fragSOL, fragJTO, and fragBTC. fragSOL was Solana's first LRT built on Jito's VRT system. Its FRAG-22 / Normalized Token Program uses the Token-2022 transfer-hook extension to recompute reward balances on-chain per transfer and normalize multiple deposited assets into one fungible token.
receipt token AVS term distinctive angle
Jito VRT NCN TipRouter (MEV tip distribution)
Solayer sSOL endo/exo swQoS bandwidth + InfiniSVM
Fragmetric fragSOL/JTO/BTC AVS FRAG-22 (Token-2022 transfer hooks)The honest read
Two caveats worth internalizing before you chase the APY:
- Slashing is largely not live. Solayer's endogenous AVSs explicitly don't enable slashing (they're mostly swQoS bandwidth), so "extra yield for taking on slashing risk" is partly aspirational across the board today.
- AVS demand is the open question. Restaking only pays if real networks pay operators for security. Who those paying NCNs/AVSs are, and how much, is still being proven out.
And the risk genuinely stacks: smart-contract risk of the LST plus the vault plus the operator plus the AVS, on top of liquidity/depeg risk on the receipt token. Restaking is a real primitive with real yield, but it's earlier and riskier than the marketing suggests — size positions accordingly. (All TVL figures move fast; check live dashboards.)
References
Restaking turns idle security budget into a marketplace. Whether that marketplace has buyers is the whole game.
Keep reading
The restaking overview tells you jitoSOL earns extra yield. This article tells you how: NCNs are opt-in decentralized services that operators run in exchange for a slice of protocol fees, backed by slashable restaked SOL. Here is the account model, the registration lifecycle, and what it actually takes to ship an NCN.
Card acquirers settle in three days; prediction markets and fintechs want money now. Credible Finance fronts that float with stablecoin liquidity pools, orchestrates 86+ pay-in methods across 42+ markets, and settles merchants T+0 in USDC, USDT, USD, EUR, or GBP. Colosseum-backed, $700M+ processed, $CRED ownership token live on MetaDAO. Architecture, developer surface, and the honest read.
Rank programs by what actually gets called on Solana and you get a different picture than TVL charts: SPL Token at 346M invocations a day, the Pump.fun stack summing to ~100M across three programs, Meteora's open-source DAMM v2 out-calling Jupiter, and — at #6 — a program that looks like anonymous bot infrastructure on every explorer but resolves to Phoenix Perps once you dig. Sourced from ProgramWatch's free API, then cross-checked against the OtterSec verify registry, Solana Compass, and each team's repos — which is where the real story turned out to be.
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