TL;DR

What is Overload?

1. Overload is a restaking primitive on Base.
2. Overload supports restaking of any ERC-20, to any contract.
3. Your stake cannot be slashed on Overload (you instead get "jailed" when doing an offence, assets get timelocked).
4. Overload allows developers to build AVSs.

What is Restaking?

You have 100 USDT.
You put 100 USDT into Overload.
You restake your 100 USDT into, say 10 AVS.
Now you are earning yield on 100 USDT * 10 AVS = 1000 USDT in total.

Why does Restaking work?

Restaking is mainly for protocols, networks or applications that need to be secured by value. For example, Proof-of-Stake usually relies on their native cryptocurrency to secure the network, but this can be hard to bootstrap from scratch. Hence, deriving the security of assets and validators on other chains can be used to help this process. This idea is not constrained to L1s only, but can also in theory hold for securing e.g. a decentralized LLM.