How is Hyve secured by Symbiotic?

In the early days of Hyve’s development, a strategic decision was made to utilize Symbiotic for security. Besides an experienced and motivated team, Symbiotic’s Universal Staking and customizable slashing mechanisms offer a security model that scales alongside the protocols it protects. Gone are the days of bootstrapping your own validator set, or relying on whatever limited security is available on a fast, up-and-coming chain. So, how does this actually work? Let’s use Hyve as an example.

Vaults, Restakers, and Operators

First, let’s define staking vaults.

Symbiotic provides non-custodial smart contracts that hold user assets, called staking vaults. These vaults contain the "restaked" assets that provide economic security to all and any networks.

A project like Hyve creates its own vault on Symbiotic with the help of curators. Besides deploying the vault, curators define key parameters such as: 

• What kind of collateral is accepted

• Risk settings (e.g., slashing conditions, liquidation thresholds)

• Operator eligibility criteria (who can participate in that vault)

Now that we’ve defined vault and curators, how about restakers?

Anyone who wants to help secure Hyve can deposit (restake) approved assets into this vault, putting their capital to work in exchange for rewards.

Now, operators: the infrastructure providers doing the actual protocol work for secured networks. Operators can be data availability nodes, proof networks, or other job-specific actors. Economic weight (collateral) is delegated to Operators by the Curator, empowering them to act on Hyve’s behalf.

While operators and restakers share the potential risk and the potential upside of native network rewards, curators set a fee structure based on assets deposited or vault performance.