Written by: TechFlow
This year's re-pledge track is becoming more and more competitive.
Not only are there numerous re-pledge protocols associated with EigenLayer, but infrastructure projects that are not so directly related will also try to use the interest-bearing characteristics of re-pledged assets to inject more liquidity into their own chains by taking advantage of this hot spot with full traffic and revenue.
On February 23, Zircuit, a zk-Rollup backed by Pantera and Dragonfly, announced a new activity on social media: Zircuit Staking, where native ETH or liquidity pledge, re-pledge tokens, etc. are deposited into Zircuit to obtain points for the project and native rewards for re-staking.
This also means that the liquidity pledge nesting doll, which allows you to kill two birds with one stone, has a new destination.
If you have actively participated in EigenLayer-related re-staking projects before, you can make full use of the LRT on hand and deposit it into Zircuit, maximizing your returns while earning Zircuit's airdrops.
Considering Zircuit’s background of being backed by top VCs and its collaboration with many LRT projects, participating in this staking activity may become the next hot topic in the LRT track.
To help everyone understand Zircuit, this article will briefly introduce its business and provide ways to participate in staking and earn points.
What is Zircuit?
Zircuit is a zk Rollup that is fully compatible with EVM and is currently in the testnet stage.
The concept of Zk Rollup will not be elaborated in detail here. It can be generally understood as Ethereum L2 using zk technology. Its essence is to solve the performance and efficiency problems of Ethereum itself and help transactions execute better and faster.
Its architecture can be divided into 3 parts:
Collators that process transactions to build L2 blocks
The prover generates validity proofs for these blocks
Smart contracts interact with L1 systems
Compared to the OP architecture, what Zircuit can achieve is fast consistency of zkEVM Rollup without the need for a challenge period for withdrawal transactions.
Zircuit leverages parallel proof generation to generate proofs quickly, while also leveraging proof aggregation to generate a single proof that can be verified on-chain. By breaking the circuit into specialized parts and aggregating proofs, Zircuit achieves higher efficiency and lower operational costs. The final validity proof generated is an aggregation of proofs from a batch of L2 blocks.
It is also worth mentioning that Zircuit has another major feature, which is to use its sequencer-level security (SLS) to prevent malicious transactions/hacker attacks. Since this part involves many technical points, it will not be expanded here. Interested readers can visit the project documentation for more details.
Another point that everyone is more concerned about is:
Zircuit uses native ETH and currently has no governance token (which doesn’t mean there won’t be one in the future).
Therefore, how to take advantage of the interaction to win future airdrops has become a more practical topic at this stage.
Pledge again to earn points, a new way to kill two birds with one stone
As we all know, the biggest pain point of getting the best deal is the opportunity cost --- funds are limited, and it will be difficult to get B after getting A.
As airdrops become increasingly inward-looking and major protocols are more motivated to compete for user attention and liquidity, if one fund can kill two birds with one stone, it will naturally be the most popular choice.
Zircuit has also taken this to the extreme, and today officially announced its points earning activity, and the way to earn points does not require additional investment:
Deposit the re-staking tokens that users have already played into Zircuit to achieve the effect of killing two birds with one stone.
First, let's take a look at the rules of Zircuit integration.
The official statement is that users can participate in the Zircuit ecosystem through various tasks, thereby earning Zircuit points for future rewards. It aims to reward participating users and communities and help guide Zircuit to obtain more native liquidity. Users can earn Zircuit points through staking, but users who choose to migrate their assets to the mainnet when the Zircuit mainnet is launched can get the most rewards.
In other words, earning points by staking is only a current activity, and there may be cross-chain asset rewards in the future.
So if you focus on the current point earning activities, the first question you need to pay attention to is “What assets can I deposit to earn points?”
Zircuit divides deposited assets into two categories:
Native ETH, subsequent withdrawals will be returned in the form of wETH.
Various LST/LRT tokens, support various re-staking ETH on Swell, Renzo, KelpDAO, EtherFi, Liquid Collective, Lido
But it should be noted that Zircuit encourages you to deposit LST/LRT, because the efficiency of obtaining Zircuit points by depositing different assets is different:
Deposit ETH, the multiplier is 0.5 times
Deposit LRT/LST with a multiplier of 1x
In other words, the efficiency of obtaining points by depositing native ETH is only half of that by depositing LST/LRT.
Secondly, I believe that Zircuit’s points activity is more friendly to small investors.
There is no minimum deposit requirement to earn Zircuit points, and the above multiplier of the assets will not change regardless of the deposit amount; at the same time, there is no unpledge period, so you can unpledge whenever you want, and you are more flexible when taking assets.
Staking Operation Guide
The following will demonstrate in detail how to participate in staking.
First, go to Zircuit's official staking page here and enter the invitation code S5WN47 to register and link your wallet. If you enter the invitation code, you can get an additional 15% OG referral points when staking.
In the interface that appears, deposit any token supported by the LST/LRT protocol.
Enter the amount to be staked, then click Confirm below, pull up the wallet signature and the stake will be successfully pledged.
The detailed rewards for staking can be broken down into:
Total staking rewards = staking APR + re-staking APR + Eigenlayer points + LRT points (e.g. ezETH, rswETH, rsETH) + Zircuit’s own points (future rewards)
It is easy to achieve the effect of killing two birds with one stone.
However, places with high profits and low barriers to entry also mean that it is easy for people to gather together.
As of press time, there is not much content introducing Zircuit in the Chinese area; as time goes by, more and more people will inevitably participate in the process of staking and earning points.
Competition means smaller expected returns, but at the same time, more people also means more certainty in returns.
In a year of airdrops, active interaction and participation is the lower limit; as for the upper limit, it depends on more decentralized strategies and time.
