Re-staking protocol EigenLayer plans to undertake a “shared safety” system, a mechanism permitting protocols to affix the community by leveraging a standard pool of ETH stakes.
EigenLayer affords a protocol for customers to deposit and “re-stake” ether from numerous liquid staking tokens, aiming to allocate these funds to safe third-party networks. The venture’s first stage was launched on the Ethereum mainnet in June 2023.
Sooner or later, the workforce intends to nudge the venture into a significant decentralized software platform and allow different initiatives to launch, leveraging the so-called shared safety.
That model will allow the quantity of ETH re-stakes on EigenLayer — presently over $1.7 billion — to be provided to all companies developed on the community concurrently for the sake of a standard safety mechanism. This might make it economically unviable for an attacker to take down any given protocol.
“You want $1 billion capital as an attacker to go and assault anyone service, and there’s a sure rigidity, a sure hardening of safety if you pool safety collectively,” EigenLayer founder Sreeram famous.
Such shared safety fashions have beforehand been launched by initiatives like Polkadot, though the mechanisms differ vastly.
Polkadot is an ecosystem of blockchains secured by a relay chain and native token known as DOT, whereas EigenLayer will empower ETH stakers and people holding ETH liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to re-stake these property so as to economically safe blockchains or companies that don’t essentially run on Ethereum.
EigenLayer and re-staking companies
EigenLayer can even let ETH stakers decide in to topic their ETH to extra slashing danger for securing Ethereum ecosystem companies akin to rollups, oracles, information availability platforms, or comparable companies. In return, these stakers (or re-stakers) earn yield from these companies.
Tasks constructed on prime of the framework may purchase insurance coverage for a subset of the general community stake, EigenLayer stated. This insurance coverage will perform as a security internet that, within the unlikely occasion the community fails to safe the venture, would allow it to obtain a certain quantity of funds. The payouts would theoretically come from the staked ETH which may be slashed if these stakes are eliminated. EigenLayer refers to this as “attributable shared safety.”
In accordance with EigenLayer, the possibility of such slashing is minimal and is just supposed as a assure of provisioning financial safety for protocols constructed prime of the platform.
EigenLabs — the workforce behind EigenLayer — closed a $50 million Collection A funding spherical led by Blockchain Capital in March. The full quantity of worth in EigenLayer’s sensible contracts lately reached $1.7 billion.