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 presents 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 undertaking’s first stage was launched on the Ethereum mainnet in June 2023.
Sooner or later, the group intends to nudge the undertaking into a significant decentralized utility platform and allow different tasks to launch, leveraging the so-called shared safety.
That model will allow the quantity of ETH re-stakes on EigenLayer — at the moment over $1.7 billion — to be provided to all companies developed on the community concurrently for the sake of a standard safety mechanism. This is able to 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 tasks like Polkadot, though the mechanisms differ vastly.
Polkadot is an ecosystem of blockchains secured by a relay chain and native token referred to as DOT, whereas EigenLayer will empower ETH stakers and people holding ETH liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to re-stake these belongings with a view to economically safe blockchains or companies that don’t essentially run on Ethereum.
EigenLayer and re-staking companies
EigenLayer will even let ETH stakers choose in to topic their ETH to further slashing danger for securing Ethereum ecosystem companies equivalent to rollups, oracles, information availability platforms, or related 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 operate as a security internet that, within the unlikely occasion the community fails to safe the undertaking, would allow it to obtain a specific amount of funds. The payouts would theoretically come from the staked ETH that could be slashed if these stakes are eliminated. EigenLayer refers to this as “attributable shared safety.”
In line with EigenLayer, the prospect of such slashing is minimal and is simply meant as a assure of provisioning financial safety for protocols constructed prime of the platform.
EigenLabs — the group behind EigenLayer — closed a $50 million Collection A funding spherical led by Blockchain Capital in March. The overall quantity of worth in EigenLayer’s sensible contracts just lately reached $1.7 billion.