The Aethos Network is a decentralized policy engine for smarter contracts. It enables developers to abstract away and seamlessly maintain their protocol’s rule system, ensuring that their smart contracts are always up-to-date with the latest requirements. Liquid restaking is a new primitive, providing a platform for novel use cases and structured financial products that can onboard new users and generate additional yield for them. Policies, however, are necessary to realize the full potential of restaking—one immediate example is offering new gamified models. As an actively validated service (AVS), the Aethos Network is uniquely situated to service liquid restaking protocols and foster a bi-directional relationship to both advance the mission of liquid restaking, while also bolstering underlying cryptoeconomic security for the Aethos Network and other AVSs. We at Aethos are excited to build the policy infrastructure for liquid restaking and collaborate with partners like EtherFi to support permissionless DeFi products that meet the needs of users around the world.

Smart contracts need to be increasingly complex as they service more users and broader use cases. Today, advanced interactions require pre-transaction logic that can dynamically bring together information about the user, historical states, offchain data, and data from other blockchain networks. For example, a DeFi application needs an effective way to deal with incoming assets that have been stolen from another ecosystem. Or similarly, a privacy protocol needs mechanisms to ensure that users avoid commingling their assets with those of blacklisted users without being forced to KYC.

Every financial transaction between participants is an expression of values. In the traditional financial system, individuals and organizations make decisions every day with their financial assets. They shop at some places instead of others, donate to specific causes, and even choose to not engage in certain financial interactions. Examples include not lending money to known criminals, fossil fuel divestment, and sending money through certain trusted intermediaries.