Asset Ingestion and LST Linking

How GigaETH permissionlessly ingests heterogeneous LSTs while preserving safety, yield, and cross-chain coherence.

Asset ingestion in GigaETH is designed around a single principle: the protocol must be able to accept new forms of productive ETH without forcing downstream changes to users, borrowers, or payment rails. This requires treating LSTs as modular inputs rather than first-class currencies.

The ingestion process begins with permissionless LST registration. Any liquid staking or restaking representation that satisfies baseline criteria can be onboarded. These criteria are not arbitrary. At minimum, an asset must have:

• Verifiable on-chain accounting of underlying ETH

• Deterministic redemption semantics

• Observable yield accrual

• A bounded and modelable slashing or validator risk profile

Once registered, an LST is not immediately treated as equivalent to canonical ETH. Instead, it is assigned a risk-weighting function that reflects its specific characteristics. For example, an LST backed by a highly decentralized validator set with long operational history will be weighted differently from a newer restaked derivative with additional slashing vectors. These weights directly influence borrowing capacity, liquidation thresholds, and payment availability.

Cross-chain assets introduce an additional layer. GigaETH does not assume that bridge-wrapped ETH is economically identical to native-chain ETH. Instead, cross-chain LSTs are ingested with explicit bridge risk parameters. Internally, the protocol maintains a mapping from external representations to a unified ETH exposure graph, allowing it to reason about correlated failures and avoid overestimating diversification benefits.

From the user’s perspective, this complexity is invisible. Linking an LST is a single action. There is no need to select markets, set collateral factors, or manage per-asset positions. The protocol aggregates linked assets into a single internal balance that reflects risk-adjusted productive ETH.

Importantly, ingestion is non-custodial and reversible. Users retain ownership of their assets. GigaETH does not rehypothecate blindly. Instead, it establishes a permissioned right to reference the asset for borrowing and payments, subject to protocol constraints. If a user unlinks an asset, it exits the system cleanly, with yield and principal intact.

This design allows GigaETH to evolve alongside the staking ecosystem. As new LSTs emerge, they can be integrated without fragmenting liquidity or forcing migration. The protocol absorbs heterogeneity so users and payment systems do not have to.

In effect, asset ingestion is where GigaETH draws a hard boundary between what the system must understand and what the user must never see.