These days, I've been reviewing LST/re-staking again, and the more I look at it, the more I feel that the source of returns is actually quite "earthly": part of it is the basic yield from the underlying staking, and the rest relies heavily on people willing to pay for "more usable liquidity" (market making, lending, leverage, various packaged certificates). To put it simply, you're not getting extra tokens out of thin air; you're sharing the risks, durations, and liquidation troubles, and the market is willing to pay a premium for that. The risks mainly come from these areas: penalties or halts of the underlying chain itself, protocol contract missteps, and the most annoying—liquidity—things look smooth most of the time, but when everyone wants to run at the same time, the discount is like tearing apart the narrative for you to see. Recently, during the extreme wave of funding rates, the community argued whether it's a reversal or just more bubble squeezing. I personally care more about this: when hedging starts to get expensive, do those "liquid" notes in your hands still move freely? Enough rambling, I won't touch the big picture for now.