Re:Staking Weekly #11
Opacity Ecosystem Project Reaches $1M ARR, ELIP-003, Sony's Restaked Rollup, and Symbiotic's Upcoming Mainnet Launch
Welcome to issue #11 of Re:Staking Weekly!
This week has been quite a roller coaster. First, the launch of the TRUMP token, then a series of crypto-related policy changes from President Trump following his inauguration, and now it appears AI is picking up steam again.
Let’s take a break from all the buzz and dive into Opacity — one of the early restaking adopters supporting use cases that generates $1 million in annual recurring revenue. We’ll explore their product, their network, and speculate on future growth potential.
We’ll also cover EigenLayer’s operator user access management upgrade, Sony’s restaked rollup, Symbiotic’s upcoming mainnet launch, and more.
Let’s get started!
Opacity AVS Ecosystem Project ‘Daisy’ Generates $1 Million ARR in 5 Months
Editor’s Note / Correction
In an earlier version of this article, I stated that Opacity AVS itself generates $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That figure actually refers to Opacity’s ecosystem project, Daisy, rather than the main AVS product.The core points regarding Opacity’s technology, product roadmap, and future potential remain accurate. According to the Opacity team, the project began charging clients and generating revenue last week, and those profits will be distributed to Opacity operators in the near future.
I wrote about Opacity — a zkTLS network — once before. It was introduced to me by an investor friend who described it as a powerful tool whose potential the general public has yet to fully grasp. “It could change everything,” he told me.
Initially, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about Opacity because I didn’t fully understand its use case or technology. In my defense, there wasn’t much information available at the time.
This week, however, I learned that Opacity’s ecosystem project, Daisy, has already reached around $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — after only 5 months in existence.
It prompted me to take a deeper look into the network that’s driving this revenue-generating machine.
zkTLS is Web3’s Private Data Oracle
zkTLS initially threw me off because zero-knowledge proofs and TLS seem completely unrelated.
Zero-knowledge proofs allow data to be proven valid without revealing the data itself. In Web3, they’re often seen as a way to boost blockchain throughput.
TLS, meanwhile, is a well-known Web2 security protocol we all use in our day-to-day web surfing; it ensures we’re receiving data from the legitimate source (e.g. a bank), rather than an impersonator (yes, that could happen).
Why combine them?
Once I dug deeper, I realized zkTLS is a private data oracle.
In Web3, most oracles transmit public data on-chain (like token prices). However, they can’t easily verify private data — such as your bank balance — because that would mean sharing your statement (which could easily be forged in the first place) with every oracle node.
For private documents that define our IRL identity (passport, bank account, lease agreement, tax form, etc.), there’s currently no solution that can prove both
the document is valid, and
it’s issued by the legitimate authority (e.g. a government).
This is where combining zero-knowledge and TLS starts to make sense: zero-knowledge proofs validate the data without exposing its actual content (preserving your privacy), while TLS guarantees the data originates from the correct source.
In practice, you could generate a proof that your bank account holds $1,000, allowing anyone to verify it without ever seeing your actual bank statement.
And that’s interesting because then you can do all kinds of things on-chain that we couldn’t before, such as real credit scoring, supply chain tracking, and identity management — the holy grail of all things CeDeFi.
The Network and The Product
Opacity’s solution involves two multi-party compute (MPC) networks. I love that they give no shit about tokenomics (so far, I haven’t seen any mention of tokens) — yet they already have a valid and impressive early product-market fit.
You really couldn’t ask for a more ideal case for adopting restaking: Opacity operators can be paid to do their work with any token, facing consequences (like slashing) if they fail — no gimmicks.
The network is already bootstrapped. Opacity is extremely selective about bringing on new operators — they currently have 12 (compared with an average of 64 operators across all AVS) — and you’ll have to apply to join. However, they’ve already put together a reasonably detailed plan for their AVS design (read here) and network slashing (read here). The docs aren’t fully polished, but they’re available.
For the product, however, available information is scarce. As of my last check, the developer dashboard is live but offers limited functionality. The documentation still isn’t live, so you can technically dig through GitHub to access proof generation and verification, but it’s mostly at a playground level.
You can, however, glean hints about their future ambitions from a list of platforms where data could potentially be verified (including 23&Me and Uber). Further exploration of their GitHub shows that Opacity has put substantial effort into mobile — ranging from React Native and Flutter templates to native iOS and Android integrations (see demo here). I can only speculate that location, social, or even movement data could be part of Opacity’s future roadmap.
They’re certainly a young startup, but based on what we’ve seen so far, I think we can expect considerable growth in 2025 and the following years. If we’re optimistic, we might see rewards begin to roll out to current operators soon.
Read more:
News Bites
EigenLayer launches ELIP-003, a user access management upgrade for operators, on its testnet.
Read the recap of the first EigenHall, an EIGEN token holder community event.
EigenLayer is sponsoring Stanford’s Treehacks hackathon.
2077 Research has published an in-depth research article on EigenLayer’s rewards system.
Symbiotic will launch its restaking mainnet soon.
Sony’s rollup, Soneium, is being built on EigenLayer’s restaking stack using the AltLayer MACH framework.
Sreeram’s thesis on why Openledger AVS would accelerate the AI model training.
Watch EigenLayer’s AVS Spotlight episode with Nuffle, a cross-chain restaking protocol.
That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.
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See you next week and thanks for reading,