Restaking reuses staked collateral to secure additional services in exchange for extra yield. The mechanism is elegant and the risk profile is not what most participants think it is.
One pool, many obligations
When the same collateral backs several services, a fault in any one of them can trigger slashing that reduces the security of all the others simultaneously. This is correlation, and it is the failure mode that turns a contained incident into a cascade.
Liquid restaking tokens compound it
Wrappers that make restaked positions tradable are widely used as collateral in lending markets. A slashing event therefore transmits into liquidations in protocols with no relationship to the service that failed.
What would help
Per-service slashing caps, published exposure maps showing which operators secure which services, and conservative loan-to-value assumptions on restaking derivatives. Some protocols publish the first; almost none publish the second.
The yield is compensation for tail risk. That is not an argument against it, only against pretending it is a savings account.
