How does Exocore address the risks of overloading L1 social consensus?

The post by Vitalik analyzed the risks associated with different ways of extending the security of Ethereum to additional modules. The main takeaway is that any design should not rely on the social consensus of the Ethereum validator ecosystem, which could potentially cause the breakdown of it and lead to a hard fork of the Ethereum network.

However, it is actually low-risk if the integration is purely limited to the restaking and slashing of the staked assets based on program-determined rules without involving Ethereum validators’ social consensus. This is exactly what Exocore is doing. Exocore’s integration with L1 chains such as Ethereum is kept purely to the usage of the restaked asset through a simple smart contract vault. Most of the complex business related logic is contained within the Exocore protocol itself, which will be served by a decentralized set of validators (potentially overlap with multiple chains’ validators).

This is in contrast to a single-chain restaking design, which is reliant on the social consensus of the chain it is implemented on as a last defense.