Collaboration and interoperability stand as essential pillars for fostering sustainable growth across digital assets. The industry faces a dual challenge: navigating volatile market conditions while broadening access in ways that are inclusive, efficient, and resilient.
Staking has emerged as one of the most significant growth engines for digital assets, even in the face of broader market downturns. The past two years have seen rapid expansion driven by new technologies, more sophisticated liquid staking models, and the rise of restaking and other innovations. Participation in staking has continued to climb as investors, platforms, and service providers recognize it as the foundational “risk-free rate” of proof of stake networks.
The growth of liquid staking, in particular, underscores both its long-term potential and the need to future-proof these core primitives. To date, much of the market has been shaped by retail-focused products. But as digital assets continue to institutionalize, the demand for enterprise-grade solutions—those that balance compliance, security, and decentralization—has become increasingly urgent.
This is the heart of Alluvial’s thesis: the future of staking and digital assets depends on our ability to work together. If networks and service providers build in silos, the result will be fragmented products that cannot scale. If we build interoperable systems, the industry can unlock liquidity, broaden access, and create durable infrastructure that supports a global, diverse set of participants.
History shows that lasting financial products are built on collaboration, shared standards, and harmonized market needs. Digital assets are no exception.
Collaboration has long been the secret behind resilient financial systems. From the earliest monetary networks to modern enterprise, aligned incentives and shared standards have consistently outperformed siloed, centralized models.
The Banco de’ Medici, established in 1397, is a powerful early example of the collaborative advantage. Banco de’ Medici operated not as a single entity but as a network of semi-autonomous branches across Europe, each adapting to local markets while adhering to shared standards and the central Medici brand. This distributed structure stood in stark contrast to the monolithic models of its contemporaries, which it handily out-competed.
The key to the Medici's success was the bank’s novel incentive mechanism. Branch directors were not mere employees—they were minority stakeholders, rewarded with a share of profits. Their incentives were tied directly to the performance of both their branch and the network as a whole.
This alignment created a culture of accountability, empowered local decision-making, and fostered agility across diverse regions. By distributing risk and decision-making, Banco de’ Medici built a resilient, adaptive system that could absorb economic and political shocks while expanding influence and facilitating trade. Ultimately, the banking and bookkeeping standards established by Banco de’ Medici formed the foundation of modern finance.
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In the 1960s, almost six centuries after Banco de’ Medici, Visa founder Dee Hock applied a similar collaborative principle to the fragmented, state-by-state credit card system.
Hock envisioned a future beyond the traditional, winner-take-all business models of the time. As described in his book, One from Many, Hock believed that the early computing and communications systems he was watching develop at “an ever-accelerating pace” could potentially unlock “the genesis of a new form of global currency.” From this perspective, Hock argued that a single-owner credit system would represent a critical single point of failure and a regulatory risk, ultimately failing to serve a global user base.
Hock’s solution was to create a ‘network of networks,’ built and owned by a diverse group of competing banks. He championed a "harmonious, oscillating dance of both competition and cooperation" to foster sustainable growth. He successfully convinced banking leaders that owning a smaller slice of a much larger, globally interoperable pie was more profitable than each bank trying to build and own a siloed credit card system alone.
Driven by Hock’s intensive stakeholder coordination, this collaborative model was a huge success. Thirteen of the largest banks signed up to operate this member-owned, distributed credit network from day one. When Visa expanded internationally, it enrolled 20% of all global banks within a single year. Hock’s strategy of leveraging collaborative advantages is what propelled Visa to become one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Collaboration is most powerful when diverse market needs meet innovative technology, and liquid staking is a prime environment for this synergy.Liquid staking is a win-win software solution for staking, as tokens can secure the network and users have the receipt (liquid staking token, or LST) to participate in other activities.
In a mature market, staking participation can be compared to accessing "the risk free rate" of participating in and securing blockchain networks. Ultimately, if appropriate liquid staking options exist for all market participants, it’s possible to imagine a circumstance where the capitalizable market, or total utilization market, for staking is much closer to the total market cap of the proof of stake blockchains it supports.
At Alluvial, we believe that by harnessing the advantages of collaboration, development teams can facilitate a model that amplifies mutual benefits and shares success across various stakeholders, expanding staking’s total utilization market in the process.
Alluvial and Liquid Collective were founded on this collaborative principle, born from the collaboration and investment of industry leaders—many of whom were direct competitors. In May 2022, Coinbase, Kraken, and Figment backed Alluvial’s formation with the goal of building an enterprise-grade liquid staking standard that could bridge institutional capital to proof of stake blockchains.
Drawing inspiration from successful precedents like USDC and Visa, a broad group of teams built and launched Liquid Collective to address the increasingly-apparent and growing gap between permissionless, crypto-native products and siloed, enterprise-grade services. The ecosystem of collaborators grew rapidly.
Bitcoin Suisse joined by the time LsETH launched on mainnet, and within its first year, Liquid Collective’s ecosystem of collaborators grew to include other key players like BitGo, Blockdaemon, EigenLayer, Twinstake, Hashnote, Rated Labs, and others.
Today, Liquid Collective has expanded to include over 30 leading platforms and protocols, such as Anchorage Digital, Galaxy, Chainlink, Fireblocks, and ParaFi Technologies. Liquid Collective’s LsETH is accessible across DeFi, on L2s, through Qualified Custodians and U.S. federally chartered banks, and can be used everywhere from institutional trading desks to permissionless restaking platforms. With the launch of Liquid Staked SOL (LsSOL) in July 2025, the protocol has begun its multichain expansion.
By combining the security and compliance needs of institutions with the resilience of distributed operations across diverse platforms, Liquid Collective’s model increases the utility and appeal of liquid staking for a new segment of participants—propelling the financial system’s broader adoption of decentralized, user-owned networks.
Throughout history, a collaborative advantage has been the key to building globally-interoperable networks. Liquid Collective’s development demonstrates the core thesis that leveraging collaboration, competition, and aligned incentives is a sustainable method for building the future-proof, interoperable onchain infrastructure that a truly global financial system will require.
Dee Hock’s musings in the 1960s, that the future would bring a global, interconnected financial system, powered by a new form of global digital currency, have become remarkably prescient. In the early days of founding Alluvial, Co-Founder and CPO Matt Leisinger sent all new hires copies of “One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization” in their onboarding materials; today, copies live in the home offices of Alluvial employees all over the world.
For Alluvial's founders, Hock’s lessons from launching Visa were a direct inspiration: a network of incentive-aligned collaborators can create far more impact than any single company alone.
Liquid Collective embodies this approach. Built with a positive-sum mindset, Liquid Collective drives collective growth and resilience through collaboration. Its first-of-its-kind compliance framework, developed with Capgemini, and the Node Operator Risk Standard (NORS), created with over a dozen participants including Aon, Galaxy and others, counting KPMG and PwC as Qualified Assessors, are key tools that help define professional, interoperable standards, raising the bar for staking operators. Integrated with 30+ leading platforms and operators, Liquid Collective provides enterprise-grade staking for institutional participants and retail users alike.
The Liquid Collective protocol also reflects a commitment to innovation through diversity, bringing together stakeholders across DeFi, TradFi, exchanges, custodians, policy and compliance experts. By embracing transparency, Liquid Collective fosters trust and alignment through open communication, collaborative working groups, and industry advocacy, including with POSA and CCI.
The next chapter for Liquid Collective is about supercharging its collaborative model. By engaging the right stakeholders, designing robust governance frameworks, and leveraging token-powered incentives, Liquid Collective is ushering in a new era for protocols that bridge market participants into the future of onchain finance.
What started with crypto-native funds and long-term holders is now pulling in the heavyweights: brokerages, custodians, hedge funds, corporate treasuries—and even banks. Liquid Collective sits at the center of this shift, with rising institutional participation marking staking’s move into the financial mainstream.
Enterprise-grade liquid staking doesn’t just simplify access—it unlocks entirely new products and solves critical issues, including the ability for structured providers like ETFs and ETPs to more flexibly meet redemption requirements. Liquid staking cuts through that complexity, giving institutions the guarantees they need without sacrificing flexibility.
Collaboration in digital and financial ecosystems drives the creation of profitable, equitable, and sustainable products and services. Liquid Collective’s model illustrates that collective collaboration—rooted in aligned incentives, open standards, and diverse participation—can expand market access, interoperability, and liquidity across the ecosystem.
Alluvial’s mission to enable global participation in securing the decentralized internet is just the beginning. Stakeholders across web3 and finance are invited to participate, help define shared standards, and contribute to a resilient onchain future. For the latest developments, visit liquidcollective.io.