On the sidelines of TOKEN2049 Dubai, Cryptonews caught up with Misha Putiatin, co-founder of Symbiotic, a fast-rising infrastructure protocol that recently closed a $29 million funding round. The round was led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and more than 100 angel investors, including members from teams behind Aave, Polygon, and StarkWare.
In an in-depth conversation, Putiatin broke down the startup’s vision to radically simplify the decentralization journey for emerging blockchain networks. Putiatin noted:
“We launched just a couple of months ago, and we already have 14 live networks running on Symbiotic—bridges, oracles, data availability layers, and more. We’re building the middleware and SDK to let founders focus on what differentiates their product, not waste years reinventing consensus, staking, or governance.”
A Plug-and-Play Framework for Decentralization
Symbiotic’s offering is essentially a modular stack of decentralized infrastructure—staking, delegation, slashing, voting, and shared security mechanisms—that can be tailored to any protocol.
“The decentralization journey is tedious right now. Projects have to do everything manually, talk to each validator, bootstrap incentives, and hope the network stays secure. We want to cut that down from twelve steps to one.”
According to Putiatin, Symbiotic is already working with over 40 networks preparing to launch. The value proposition: instead of building infrastructure from scratch or relying on outdated frameworks like Cosmos SDK, teams can integrate Symbiotic’s components and configure their network’s design with precision.
Symbiotic announced a $29 million fund that would launch the Universal Staking framework, extending blockchain security into broader economic coordination.#Symbiotic #Staking #BlockchainSecurityhttps://t.co/8lXScjcp88 — Cryptonews.com (@cryptonews) April 23, 2025
Beyond Restaking
While restaking protocols have become a hot trend, Putiatin emphasized that Symbiotic’s vision is broader.
“We’re generalizing staking,” he said. “Most protocols want to reward users and create meaningful alignment between users and protocol success. But there hasn’t been a flexible, modular system that lets you do that across multiple chains—until now.”
Symbiotic allows protocols to accept stake from multiple ecosystems—even across Ethereum, Solana, and L2s—while customizing how that stake is used, rewarded, or slashed. It also introduces safeguards that many current systems lack, such as configurable slashing committees, arbitration layers, and support for siloed risk management.
“Most failures in staking systems come from misaligned incentives or single points of failure. We’ve built Symbiotic so that each network can choose exactly how much control to retain, how decentralized they want to be, and who they accept stake from,” he added.
Built on Lessons from the Past
Putiatin’s inspiration for Symbiotic dates back to early experiments with Polkadot infrastructure.
“We’ve reanimated this idea a few times over the years,” he said. “We knew that modularity and shared security would become necessary. Once rollups, oracles, and bridges started growing rapidly, we knew it was time.”
Symbiotic began development in 2023, spending nearly a year ensuring the protocol could be both flexible and permissionless—an essential trait, Putiatin noted, if the team wanted to attract larger protocols wary of third-party control.
“We had to make something that serious protocols would feel safe using—without being dependent on us or anyone else. That’s why we focused so much on designing for permissionless adoption.”
Looking Ahead
Staking, Putiatin said, will continue to evolve as the foundational alignment mechanism in crypto.
“Every protocol wants staking now. Not just to secure the network, but to give users real participation—real alignment,” he said. “Restaking, reward flexibility, modular governance—those are the trends. That’s why we’re seeing strong demand from both large and small players.”
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