Mike Silagadze

Mike Silagadze is a Canadian software engineer and entrepreneur who founded ether.fi in 2023 — building the protocol that would grow into the largest liquid restaking platform on Ethereum by TVL, reaching over $5 billion in staked ETH within its first two years of operation. Before ether.fi, Silagadze co-founded Top Hat, a Toronto-based education technology company whose software is used by hundreds of universities across North America for interactive learning — giving him experience building and scaling a company to a large user base before entering DeFi.

Silagadze's entry into the Ethereum staking landscape was motivated by a specific architectural frustration: all existing liquid staking protocols required users to surrender custody of their validator keys to the protocol operator. In Lido's model, for example, users deposit ETH and receive stETH, but the validators processing their stake are operated by Lido's curated node operators using keys that those operators control. If Lido were compromised, censored, or forced to comply with a regulatory demand affecting validator operations, stakers would have no recourse.

ether.fi's foundational design innovation is a non-custodial validator architecture. When a user stakes ETH through ether.fi, the protocol generates a validator key pair where the withdrawal credentials — the keys that control the validator's exit and the recipient of its staking rewards — point directly to the user's own address, held in a dedicated withdrawal safe contract that the user controls. The user delegates operational duties (running the validator software, maintaining uptime) to a professional node operator, but retains ultimate ownership of the withdrawal rights.

The practical security implications are significant: ether.fi's smart contracts cannot take validator exit actions that direct funds away from the user's own address. The node operator operating the validator does so without holding the keys to the user's withdrawal funds. In the event of ether.fi's failure, regulatory action, or smart contract exploit, users retain the ability to exit their validators through the Ethereum protocol directly and recover their staked ETH.

This non-custodial model required substantially more engineering complexity than custodial alternatives: each staker effectively has their own validator configuration rather than sharing a pooled key structure. Silagadze and the ether.fi team worked through the smart contract architecture necessary to make this work at scale, including on-chain key management and the integration with EigenLayer's restaking system.

ether.fi's early and deep integration with EigenLayer distinguished it from conventional liquid staking protocols and positioned it to benefit from the restaking boom. Users who stake through ether.fi automatically restake their ETH through EigenLayer, earning EigenLayer restaking points (and eventually AVS rewards) in addition to base Ethereum staking rewards. The eETH liquid staking token accumulates both yield streams.

The stacking of staking yield, restaking rewards, and ether.fi's own ETHFI token incentives created a compelling multi-layered return profile that drove exceptional TVL growth. ether.fi quickly surpassed other liquid restaking competitors including Kelp DAO, Renzo, and Puffer Finance, establishing itself as the dominant liquid restaking protocol before EigenLayer opened deposits to native ETH restakers.

ether.fi has also launched 'Liquid' — a suite of yield-maximising strategies built on top of eETH, including weETH positions in DeFi protocols like Pendle Finance, Balancer, and lending markets — allowing users to further optimise their restaking yield through structured DeFi strategies without managing positions themselves.

The ETHFI governance token launched in March 2024 with one of the most anticipated token generation events of the year. A large portion of the initial supply was airdropped to early users who had deposited ETH into the protocol ahead of the launch, rewarding participants who had taken the risk of early adoption. ETHFI reached a fully diluted valuation of several billion dollars on its first day of trading.

ETHFI holders govern ether.fi's protocol parameters, node operator selection, fee structures, and treasury allocations. Silagadze has continued to expand ether.fi's product suite, adding a crypto debit card product ('Cash') that allows users to spend against their staked ETH holdings, a lending market, and cross-chain deployment on multiple networks. His stated goal is to build ether.fi into a comprehensive non-custodial financial services platform — not merely a staking infrastructure provider — built on the foundation of user-controlled ETH stake.