Renzo Protocol  REZ

Renzo Protocol is a project built on the EigenLayer ecosystem. This is an ecosystem that seeks to facilitate permissionless innovation on Ethereum.

Renzo plays a crucial role here, as one of its main goals is to promote the widespread adoption of EigenLayer and its goal of acquiring trust programmatically.

Essentially, users can stake ETH and become active participants in the network’s security. But, more than that, they get to earn higher yields compared to traditional ETH staking methods.

The protocol was founded in 2023, with Lucas Kozinski and Kratik Lodha as founding contributors. It was created to be the bridge that would allow users to enter EigenLayer, and engage in secure re-staking of Ethereum.

Renzo’s own mainnet launched on October 30, 2023, allowing community members to deposit and stake native ETH tokens.

Renzo Protocol’s main feature is re-staking ETH tokens via the EigenLayer. However, its unique feature is cross-chain re-staking, which it introduced on its platform in collaboration with the Connext Network. As the name suggests, the feature allows users to re-stake their assets on popular L2s by way of wrapped ETH.

Apart from that, cross-chain re-staking also removes the complexities of traditional staking across different projects, which provides a broader range of use cases for the Ethereum landscape.

Renzo also has its native token, known as ezETH. The token represents users’ re-staking activities, and they receive it when they deposit ETH or some other approved token. The received ezETH holds a similar value to the staked amount and can be used for transactions.

Stakers can withdraw their staked tokens at any time, but this unstakes the deposited assets. The only downside is that the withdrawal process can take seven days or possibly longer, depending on a variety of factors.