GigaETH’s Unification Layer

How heterogeneous LSTs become a single, spendable financial surface without destroying yield or provenance.

GigaETH’s unification layer exists to solve a specific, non-negotiable requirement: productive ETH must be usable as money without forcing users to reason about its internal structure. This is not a UX preference. It is an architectural constraint imposed by payments.

At a technical level, the unification layer ingests multiple liquid staking representations across chains and protocols and maps them into a single internal accounting system. Each linked asset retains its original yield source, validator exposure, and redemption mechanics. None of that information is discarded. What changes is where that complexity lives.

In legacy DeFi, complexity is exposed at the interface. Users are forced to choose which LST to hold, which chain to bridge to, which wrapper is supported by which protocol, and when to unwind positions. GigaETH inverts this. Assets are normalized at the protocol boundary, not the user boundary.

The unification process operates in three phases.

First, linking. Users connect their existing LST positions, regardless of origin. This is a non-custodial linkage, not a transfer. The protocol identifies asset type, chain, and risk profile, and registers the position as productive collateral.

Second, normalization. Linked assets are translated into a common internal unit of account. This does not mean converting them into a single token or forcing a swap. It means abstracting heterogeneous yield streams into a unified balance representation that reflects risk-adjusted ETH exposure. Yield continues to accrue from the original source. Slashing risk remains associated with the original validator set. What changes is how the balance is consumed.

Third, aggregation. Normalized balances are pooled into a single borrowing and payments surface. From this point on, the system treats the user’s ETH exposure as one coherent position, regardless of how many protocols or chains sit underneath.

This design has two critical properties.

The first is yield continuity. Users do not need to unstake, unwrap, or exit DeFi to make their ETH usable. Yield remains on while liquidity becomes accessible. This alone eliminates a major opportunity cost that has historically prevented LSTs from being used beyond speculation.

The second is provenance preservation. GigaETH does not flatten risk. Internally, the system tracks where yield comes from, how it is secured, and what failure modes apply. This enables accurate risk-weighting, conservative borrowing limits, and targeted liquidation paths without exposing that complexity to the end user.

From the outside, GigaETH looks simple: one endpoint, one balance, one borrowing surface. Underneath, it is deliberately complex, because that complexity is unavoidable. The difference is that it is handled once, centrally, and deterministically.

This is what makes payments possible.

A payment rail cannot accept ten representations of ETH and reason about them in real time. A card network cannot integrate per-protocol staking risk at the point of sale. By collapsing heterogeneous LSTs into a single spendable abstraction, GigaETH makes productive ETH legible to systems that were never designed for DeFi complexity.