ether.fi has removed all restaking exposure from weETH, making its flagship asset a plain liquid staking token and confining restaking to weETHs, a separate token built on Symbiotic. The protocol announced the split on X on Thursday.
The change ends the arrangement that made ether.fi the largest business built on EigenLayer’s restaking model. ether.fi bundled Ethereum staking yield with EigenLayer restaking exposure inside a single token, grew fast on that pitch through 2024, and has now separated the two. Holders who want restaking have to opt into a second token.
ether.fi’s staking arm holds $3.3 billion, according to DefiLlama, making it the largest liquid restaking protocol and the third-largest across liquid staking and restaking behind Lido and Binance staked $ETH. It peaked at $12.43 billion in August 2025.
There are 1.72 million weETH in circulation. weETHs, the token ether.fi is pointing restakers toward, has a supply of 9,136 tokens worth roughly $18 million — about half a percent of the protocol’s staking base.
End Of An Era
ether.fi CEO Mike Silagadze quote-tweeted the announcement.
“End of an era. Sad,” he wrote. “I still think restaking will come back in one form or another, I think it was just a bit too early.”
In a follow-up reply on the original post, ether.fi said current holders “now have a clearer choice between basic staking exposure and additional restaking exposure depending on your goals,” and that for new users the split “simply makes the EtherFi stack easier to understand.”
Neither Eigen Labs, the company behind EigenLayer, nor Symbiotic had publicly commented at press time.
Less Than One Percent
The onchain wind-down happened before the announcement. ether.fi’s own slashing risk documentation states that as of August 2026, “less than 1% of ether.fi’s assets remain restaked with EigenLayer, down from about half in early 2026.”
The same page says the remaining restaked share is set to reach zero in the third quarter of 2026, and that ether.fi plans to “completely remove EigenPod withdrawal credentials from its validators by Q4 2026, eliminating the protocol’s last structural link to EigenLayer.”
ether.fi has not published a blog post explaining the decision — its only post on Thursday covered an unrelated weETH security review — and the most recent thread on its governance forum dates to November 2025. One reply to the announcement asked whether there were “any forum/posts or discussions why eigen was taken out of loop?” Parts of ether.fi’s documentation still describe eETH and weETH as tokens that automatically restake on EigenLayer.
Down The Delegation Chain
ether.fi’s post said the split leaves “no bundled risk.”
weETHs documentation says a portion of weETHs collateral is allocated to Cap Protocol, where M11 Credit borrows against it and deposits the proceeds into a Pareto vault that supplies capital to FalconX’s prime brokerage. The docs name slashing, FalconX counterparty risk, M11 Credit default, smart contract risk across Cap and Pareto, and liquidity risk, and tell depositors that weETHs “is no longer solely exposed to Symbiotic restaking risk.”
Restaking’s Shrinking Base
EigenCloud, the platform EigenLayer now sits inside, holds $5.10 billion, down from a peak of $22.06 billion on Aug. 14, 2025, DefiLlama data shows. Symbiotic holds $342.8 million, against a December 2024 peak of $2.70 billion. Ether trades at $1,906.
Liquid restaking has been contracting since December 2024, when sector-wide deposits topped out at $18.3 billion and then slid as points and airdrop incentives dried up.
Tokens Track Lower
ETHFI trades at $0.36, down 3.2% over 24 hours and 11.4% over the past week, with a market capitalization of $346 million, CoinGecko data shows. The token reached $8.53 in March 2024.
EIGEN trades at $0.18, down 3.2% on the day and 20.8% over 30 days, for a market capitalization of $133 million. Its high was $5.65 in December 2024, CoinGecko shows.