Restaking on Solana: Jito, Solayer, and Fragmetric compared logoRestaking on Solana: Jito, Solayer, and Fragmetric compared
Restaking lets your staked SOL pull double duty: secure Solana, then secure other services for extra yield. Jito coined NCNs, Solayer split endogenous vs exogenous AVS, Fragmetric built it on Token-2022. The model, the three players, and the honest question — where's the real slashing risk and demand?
devrels.xyz/a/38Restaking 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.
Firedancer does not give you a new transaction type. It changes who packs the block you are trying to enter, and what a validator-side RPC is willing to store.
You are not integrating an Aave clone. You pick a market, talk to klend (or a vault on top of it), and you use the same oracle the liquidators use.
Get new articles in your inbox
Technical deep-dives on Solana tooling, infrastructure, and ecosystem. No noise.
