Throughout the ether.fi journey, we have always strived to over-deliver for our users.
We started our journey as a next-gen liquid staking protocol, but that is not where our ultimate ambition ends.
Our long term goal is to help onboard the next billion users onto crypto. We want to make DeFi easy, safe and transparent for normal people.
To that end, we’re now excited to share the next step of our journey. On March 18th we will be launching of our next product: Liquid.
Staking is an important part of the DeFi ecosystem
Currently, staking is by far the largest category in DeFi by TVL. It serves as the base for a lot of DeFi, from lending to trading to RWAs.
However we need crypto to be more than just a self-referential casino. We need to make it easy for people to transact in crypto– to save in crypto, to earn their income in crypto, to spend crypto in the real world. That’s the long term vision for ether.fi–to help onboard the next billion users onto native crypto rails.
To this end, over the next 12–24 months our vision is a suite of 3 integrated products: Stake, Liquid, and Cash.
Stake
Our first product is ether.fi Stake — the first liquid native restaking solution, which made it easy for users to restake their ETH on EigenLayer.
We believe that restaking and staking aren’t actually two separate categories. Restaking is simply the next generation of staking.
Asymptotically, native ETH staking yield will come down to 1.5–1.8%. The reason for this is that as more ETH is staked and as low cost DA solutions come online block space will becomes cheaper, and staking yield will be spread over a larger amount of staked ETH.
So over the long term most ETH will be staked, and most of the rewards come from restaking. This means that restaking will become table stakes for all liquid staking solutions.
Liquid
The next product, which is launching on March 18th, is ether.fi Liquid — a managed DeFi strategy vault that deploys users’ ETH, eETH or weETH into DeFi to earn the highest quality rewards with managed risk.
The Liquid product will have a series of strategy vaults that are non-custodial, where users can withdraw at any time, and have complete transparency at all times with respect to how their assets are deployed.
Cash
Finally, over the next 12 months we will be deploying ether.fi Cash — a real-life spending account that will allow users to spend and borrow against their ether.fi balance in the real world. This will include a mobile app MPC wallet that connects to users’ ether.fi account, and a credit card that users can load with their ether.fi balance.
To support this, our plan is to create a payments L2 with built-in handling for payment disputes and many other features that are table-stakes for consumers when it comes to payments.
Cash is still in the very earliest stages of development and will continue to evolve over the coming months.
The product suite
The three products, Staking, Liquid, and Cash, allow users to hold, deploy and spend their crypto. Ultimate utility, that is Incredibly easy to use and completely transparent.
Through all this, ether.fi will operated as a decentralized system under DAO governance. This represents a major shift in the development of financial services, and shifts in the power dynamic away from rent-seeing institutions in favor or users.
