Restaking Protocols

Slashing surface — 8/10

The 17.5-day figure is not your escape hatch, and this is the one thing to read before committing. ALLOCATION_CONFIGURATION_DELAY (126000 blocks) is the delay before an operator can CHANGE their notice period — it is not the notice you get. The window that actually protects you is ALLOCATION_DELAY, which EigenLayer's own reference table says is set by the operator and on which "The protocol provides no constraints", and which its contract documentation says "operators can choose to configure this delay however they want - including setting it to 0." Two further paths give you no notice at all: delegating to an operator who is already allocated makes "all funds of the `staker` … immediately slashable" on the spot, and an AVS adding a strategy to an existing operator set makes "any existing allocations to that strategy instantly slashable." So the security of your ETH here is a property of the operator you choose, not of the protocol you deposit into — and no vendor page enumerates the live operator sets: the app that would is returning HTTP 500 today, and the ecosystem page that might substitute now lists AI-agent demos with not one occurrence of the word AVS. The compensating fact, and the reason native restaking is the more conservative way to use this platform: native ETH is the one strategy an AVS cannot point at a redistribution address. "Native ETH and EIGEN are not yet eligible for redistribution" — so your worst case is that the ETH is destroyed, never that it is paid to whoever chose to slash you. Budget more than 24 days for a full exit, not the 8-17 days one docs page still advertises off a superseded 7-day escrow; its own legs come to about 24 days with the 14-day escrow, before an exit queue it says "has never exceeded 7 days" but which passed 46 days in September 2025 (CoinDesk); the escrow is 14 days, published on four other vendor pages and confirmed onchain.

EigenLayer publishes no deposit, withdrawal or management fee for native restaking on any restaker-facing page. It DOES publish the fee taken from rewards, in plain language, on its rewards concept pages (Layr-Labs/eigencloud-docs, the un-gated source of the Cloudflare-gated docs.eigencloud.xyz, fetched 28 September 2026): "Operators can [set their per-AVS fee rate](../../operators/howto/configurerewards/set-rewards-split.md) on AVS Rewards to any amount from 0% to 100%. The default split is 10%." (concepts/rewards/rewards-concept.md), and "By default, Operators earn a 10% split on Rewards. The rest of the reward is claimable by the Operator's delegated Stakers." (concepts/rewards/rewards-split.md). The same 10% default is stated for programmatic incentives (concepts/rewards/pi-split.md). Note one internal contradiction: concepts/rewards/rewards-claiming-faq.md still says "Operators get a fixed 10% portion rewards, though this is subject to change in a future release to be variable", which the 0–100% concept page has already superseded. The contract docs add a mechanical restatement — "The split lookup chain is: operator set split → global default split → 10% fallback." (docs/core/RewardsCoordinator.md in Layr-Labs/eigenlayer-contracts) — and mention an unquantified EigenLayer-level charge, "Takes the protocol fee (if the submitter is opted in for protocol fees)", without ever stating its rate. Checked 2026-09-28: nothing under docs/eigenlayer/restakers/ states a rate; the fee disclosure lives one directory over in concepts/rewards/. Native restaking is otherwise gas-cost bearing: "the web app will batch up to 80 validators per proof transaction batch." (restakers/restaking-guides/0-restaking-user-guide/native-restaking/README.md).