In late 2023, restaking was a niche idea. By August 2025, it had become a core piece of blockchain infrastructure as the total value locked (TVL) reached approximately $30 billion, with EigenLayer alone accounting for around 70%.
While retail users, driven by liquid restaking, incentives and airdrops, have been the most visible players in this explosive growth, institutional interest is also increasing.
This shift from retail experimentation to institutional adoption was the central theme of a recent Cointelegraph AMA with Ali Boukhalfa, head of MENA at P2P.org — a staking-as-a-business solution. During the session, he discussed the challenges that institutions face in the restaking market and the infrastructure being built to bring them onchain.
Restaking at Scale: Institutional Adoption and Risk Models [Brought to you by @p2pvalidator] https://t.co/2sU2Ia3M7D
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) September 8, 2025
From retail innovation to institutional scale
“Retail brings innovation, institutions bring scale,” said Ali Boukhalfa. “The shift is happening, but institutions need clear risk models, operational visibility and simple integrations.” According to Boukhalfa, the primary challenge is the lack of standardized risk models, historical slashing data and institutional-grade operations.
Risk management dominated the discussion. Boukhalfa explained that institutions are already beginning to allocate into restaking. He pointed out that the emergence of standardized risk models, distributed validator technology (DVT), APIs and compliance tooling will accelerate this adoption and unlock larger flows.
Building an infrastructure focused on trust
On the infrastructure side, Boukhalfa highlighted DVT as a key solution. By spreading validator responsibilities across multiple operators, DVT reduces the chance of a single point of failure or slashing events. He noted that P2P.org uses DVT in its SSV-based white-label solution, alongside redundancy and slashing-protection practices tailored for institutional clients.
Integration, he stressed, is about ease of use. Institutions want staking and restaking to fit into their existing custody, portfolio and reporting systems. To address this, P2P.org focuses on application programing interfaces (APIs), curated vaults and white-label services that keep the complexity hidden while delivering transparent yields, uptime and compliance. The aim is to make crypto-native innovation simple and enterprise-ready.
The conversation also turned to regional trends. In MENA, Boukhalfa sees global players moving in, attracted by supportive regulation and faster adoption cycles. He described P2P.org’s growth in the region as built on three pillars: trust (validators run with DKG + threshold, full audit trail, SOC 2 attested and independently reviewed by PwC), plug-and-play tools (ready-to-use APIs and vaults) and risk readiness (institutional due diligence and governance alignment).
The takeaway from the session was clear: restaking is following the same maturation path as Ethereum staking. Retail has led the way, but institutional adoption will be the key to scaling the market. The appeal is capital efficiency, but the real value lies in shared security and the ability to build new financial products on top of staked assets safely, and at scale.
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