From EigenLayer Inspiration to Omni-Chain Innovation

With over 12 years in the crypto industry, Anderson has witnessed and participated in, the entire evolution of blockchain infrastructure, building early Bitcoin OTC markets and ZK privacy solutions. When he and his co-founders discovered EigenLayer’s white paper two and a half years ago, they saw an opportunity to expand the restaking concept beyond Ethereum.

“We had a vision where we could effectively do a very similar protocol as what EigenLayer is doing, except extend it across multiple different blockchains,” Anderson explained. This led to the creation of Imua, a protocol that enables restaking of tokens from any chain type, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and other major ecosystems through a unified trust layer.

The Shift to Real-World Staking and Verified Trust

What started as a multi-chain restaking protocol has evolved into something more ambitious: extending blockchain’s core value propositions—decentralization, immutability, and censorship resistance—to off-chain systems.

“Trust in institutions has effectively plummeted. People just don’t trust anything anymore, especially online,” Anderson noted. “We see this interesting arbitrage where off-chain trust is plummeting, but on-chain trust is reaching new heights.”

This insight drives Imua’s mission to provide verified trust as a service, enabling developers to build systems secured by blockchain infrastructure without requiring their users to interact with crypto directly.

Solving Technical Challenges in Cross-Chain Restaking

Building an omni-chain restaking protocol required solving complex technical challenges, particularly around concurrency risk. How do you synchronize a blockchain like Bitcoin that settles in 60 minutes with chains like Solana that settle in seconds?

Imua’s solution: an epoch-based queuing system that settles transactions across all supported chains within a 6-8 hour window. “Staking is not a high-frequency operation,” Anderson emphasized. “It’s actually okay to be a little slower.”

Security First: One-Way State Mapping

Perhaps most importantly, Imua employs a one-way state mapping architecture using ZK light clients (via Layer Zero and Polyhedra) rather than traditional bidirectional bridges—a design choice that dramatically reduces attack vectors.

Anderson used a memorable analogy: “If a bank robber had to cross a bridge to do the heist and then cross the bridge again to get away, that’s what happens in these bridges. But if you have a one-way unidirectional bridge, the attacker can’t get back across the bridge to get away with the funds.”

In Imua’s model, even in a worst-case compromise scenario, an attacker could only burn tokens, not transfer them, eliminating the economic incentive for attacks.

Real-World Staking: Beyond Crypto-Native Applications

While traditional restaking targets DeFi protocols, Imua focuses on a broader opportunity: real-world staking for off-chain systems that don’t derive security from blockchain validators.

Target applications include:

• Bridges and oracles (traditionally secured by multisigs)
• RPC infrastructure (usually centralized on AWS/Azure)
• AI systems and networks
• Robotics and IoT devices
• Traditional finance systems
• Media platforms

Anderson suggested that there is a future where humanoid robots are backed by the underlying decentralized security of Bitcoin. He even proposed that Dogecoin could secure Tesla’s humanoid robots, which is consistent with Elon’s dictum that the most likely outcome is also the most entertaining. 

Removing Barriers: Fiat-to-Crypto Rails for Web2 Developers

To unlock this vision, Imua is building infrastructure that allows Web2 developers to access decentralized security without touching crypto. Developers can pay for verified trust with a credit card, just like their AWS bill, while Imua handles the conversion to crypto rails in the background.

This approach dramatically expands the total addressable market (TAM) for crypto beyond the estimated 50,000 full-time crypto developers to the millions building traditional applications. Instead of dragging Web2 developers onchain, Imua makes onchain security available to Web2 developers. It’s a feasible way to expand the talent building in and with blockchain technology by orders of magnitude. Imua’s goal is to help onboard the next million developers to the crypto space. 

The Five-Year Vision: Crypto as Invisible Infrastructure

When asked about the future, Anderson drew parallels to internet history. Just as early internet users had to manually configure TCP/IP networks, crypto users today must navigate complex multi-chain ecosystems. But in five years, Anderson predicted that all that complexity wil be abstracted away from users. Users, and builders, won’t need to worry about what network they’re using; things will simply work.

In this vision, real-world staking and verified trust become invisible infrastructure powering everything from financial systems to AI to robotics—secured by blockchain technology without requiring blockchain knowledge.

Conclusion: Building the Trust Layer for the Next Billion Users

Imua’s approach to restaking represents more than just technical innovation—it’s a fundamental rethinking of how blockchain security can serve the broader digital economy. By extending verified trust to off-chain systems through real-world staking, the protocol aims to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3, making decentralized security accessible to any developer building trust-critical systems.

As Anderson put it: “Instead of trying to bring everyone on-chain, we’re taking the core value propositions of on-chain verifiability and extending that off-chain.”