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Restaking on Solana: Jito, Solayer, and Fragmetric compared

Restaking reuses staked SOL/LSTs to secure extra services (NCNs/AVSs) for more yield — and more risk. Here's the model and how Jito Restaking, Solayer, and Fragmetric differ.

Restaking 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.

text
         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.

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Restaking on Solana: Jito, Solayer, and Fragmetric compared | devrels.xyz