Eigenlayer In 2024 With CEO Sreeram Kannan

Ethereum validators are earning yield for nearly a million wallets but what happens if you can restake that ETH for even more yields? Eigen Layer is one of the most ambitious projects in crypto and crossed a billion dollars in deposits while recording this episode. Joining us today is special technical co-host Mike Neuder to discuss all things Eigen Layer with Sreeram and Teddy from the team. ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ----- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING https://bankless.com/MetaMask ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.com/Arbitrum ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.com/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🌐 Layer Zero V2 Launch https://bankless.cc/LayerZeroLabs ------ Timestamps 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:26 Episode Overview 00:09:20 Current State of Eigen Layer 00:12:01 Cap Limits and Accepted Tokens 00:19:42 Economic Security 00:25:51 Eigen Incentive Structures 00:34:12 What Is Eigen DA? 00:40:29 Benefits From Eigen DA 00:45:28 Why Eigen DA? 00:55:31 Throughput and Slashing 01:05:58 Finality Layer 01:10:51 ABS Aggregation 01:16:53 The Veto Committee 01:21:04 Neutrality 01:24:40 Networks in 2024 01:28:27 When Mainnet ------ Resources Mike https://twitter.com/mikeneuder Sreeram https://twitter.com/sreeramkannan Teddy https://twitter.com/TedBreyer ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Let's keep all the blockchain wars, L1, L2, L3, aside, right? Just let this sink in. It's insane. It's amazing. It's unusual. It's like we're becoming this much, much more coordinated. In fact, as a species, I think our evolutionary advantage is that we're able to cooperate at a scale that is simply not possible for other species in a flexible way.

• 0:27David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Eigenlayer. Eigenlayer is just about two quarters away from mainnet, and the excitement and demand for Eigenlayer has been relentlessly crescendoing. And while recording this very episode with Sreeram and Teddy from the Eigenlayer team, Eigenlayer passed $1 billion in deposited value into the Eigenlayer system, making the future of Eigenlayer in 2024 a very interesting topic to explore here on the show today. And to help me explore a more technical topic, I've brought in a technical co-host. Mike Nordert from the Ethereum Foundation is joining me today. He's a researcher at the EF. He is a Malady on Twitter, and he's most known on Bankless as my rock climbing buddy in Brooklyn. Mike, how's it going, my dude?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  It's going great, David. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Have been a Bankless listener for a long time, so to be here hosting with you is a real treat. So, thanks again.

• 1:18David Hoffman?

  Well, whenever we need technical co-hosts to explore technical topics, I always learn more than a few things, and that's definitely what happened here on the episode today. We just finished recording the episode with Sreeram and Teddy. What were your big takeaways? Did you get all of your questions answered? What did you think?

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say my biggest takeaway was kind of a new mental model for thinking about how Eigenlayer fits into the system. And that is as a way of democratizing access to restaked rewards. So, the point Sreeram made was that in today's world, like without Eigenlayer, a dominant liquid staking token issuer could have internalized all of that restaking yield and given it only to people who issued restaking or liquid staking tokens with them. And this would be like a stronger centralizing force because, you know, only that single pool would have access to those rewards. So the way Eigenlayer kind of fits into this picture is by creating an open permissionless marketplace for both the buyers of economic security and the sellers of economic security.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  And to kind of allow everyone to access it in a more transparent way, hopefully will help democratize and distribute those rewards more evenly.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  I think perhaps said another way, I think that description I think really fits into what the EF people care about, the Ethereum Foundation people care about, which is antitrust, antitrust forces around protocols. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to with Eigenlayer is that without Eigenlayer, there might be a monopoly in a single liquid staking token becoming the dominant restaking token. But I think maybe your mental model after this is Eigenlayer is kind of the resource traffic controller for restaked assets and networks and yield and security. Is that a fair way to articulate this?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, a way of kind of opening up the market and making sure that it doesn't centralize around one single shelling point. Yeah. And also, another really cool point, just to kind of add on to that, is how he described Eigenlayer as a way of kind of propagating the meme of ETH as a unit of account, right? So the initial set of tokens that can be restaked are all denominated in ETH. And so this Eigenlayer is kind of a vehicle by which ETH as the unit of account for economic security in the whole ecosystem continues to be spread was another really cool mental model that he brought up, so.

• 3:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that facet specifically, I think I resonate with on a very large degree. And I think that's going to be a big theme in 2024. So, Mike, I mean, we're going to have more restaking content throughout the year, I think. It's just, it's nerd snipe to me. I think it's nerd snipe to you. I think it's nerd sniped a lot of people in Ethereum. What questions do you have left? What is still on the frontier of this like restaking meta that you want to explore?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the the last thing that still sticks with me, and and this is kind of one of the first things we talked about with Sreeram, is this idea of like, what is economic security in the context of delegation, right? So when the there's a principal agent problem, where the principal is the person who owns the stake and is restaking it, and the agent is the node operator, how can we think about economic security when the slashing is associated with the node operator, not the person who actually owns the capital that's at risk? So yeah, I kind of want to keep deep diving on that. And as Sriram mentioned, that applies like beyond just Eigenlayer, that applies in ETH delegated staking and across the board.

• 4:35David Hoffman?

  So I think the principal agent problem is one of the main problems that plagues not just crypto, although definitely crypto, but really humanity at large. And now we are also discovering it inside of the Eigenlayer system. Guys, we're going to get right into the episode with Sriram and Teddy from the Eigen Labs team. But first, quick disclaimer, me and Ryan are both advisors to Eigenlayer. All Bankless disclosures are available at bankless.com/disclosures. And with that, let's get into the episode. Kraken Knows Crypto. Kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade, and as one of the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Kraken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be. Human history is a story of progress. It's part of us, hardwired. We're designed to seek change everywhere, to improve, to strive. And if anything can be improved,

• 5:20David Hoffman?

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• 6:05David Hoffman?

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• 6:50David Hoffman?

  Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. And now, something big is happening. Introducing the Cello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Cello's rapidly-growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared his excitement for the Cello Layer 2 on the Cello forum, so has Ben Jones from Optimism. But why? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one-block finality. What does all that mean? Rock-solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Cello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas using ERC20 tokens.

• 7:33David Hoffman?

  But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forum. Follow @celloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Bankless Nation, I'm excited to introduce you to Teddy Knox, a research engineer over at Eigenlayer, working on the EigenDA team, that's Data Availability. Previously Teddy was working inside of the Cosmos ecosystem and later as a protocol specialist over at Stakefish and has joined Eigenlayer, bringing all of his previous expertise into the world of restaking and with EigenDA is as the first AVS developed in-house by Eigenlayer. Teddy's skills being put to the test. Teddy, welcome to Bankless.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, David.

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  And returning to Bankless, we have Sreeram Kannan, the father of modern restaking. Sreeram was a professor over at the University of Washington where he ran a lab focusing on information theory and his applications in communication networks, machine learning, and blockchain systems. But eventually, the nerd snipe of crypto economics got him like it got the rest of us and he started Eigenlayer in 2021 in order to open up a new dimension of trust networks built on Ethereum. Sreeram, welcome back to Bankless.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  So we're excited to be here, David.

• 8:47David Hoffman?

  Guys, I'm really excited for this conversation. The excitement around Eigenlayer has definitely been heating up and there's been a lot of things happening inside of the Eigenlayer ecosystem. And so today on the show, I kind of just want to get a download as to where things are and where things are going with the world of Eigenlayer as it approaches real time, like production, in-house, the mainnet, all of the cool things that is going to impact Ethereum and all the trust it's going to bring. So I kind of want to start just getting a high-level snapshot of where we are with Eigenlayer. Sreeram, I'll start with you, just the current state of Eigenlayer development. Where are we on the roadmap? What is in the near-term roadmap and what are people over on the Eigenlayer side of things excited about?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, the few things. Number one, on the mainnet, we started, we launched the protocol, just a staking side on mainnet, you know, around June, July. And, you know, we started conservatively, it was a guarded launch with a small TVL cap and we've been successively raising that over time as we test the stability of the protocol. And so there was a cap rise a day before. Today of this recording and I think we are now at one billion dollar TVL for restaking. So that is on the main net. The broader ecosystem of Eigenlayer comprises stakers, node operators, people building new services, and our own service called EigenDA.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And all of these are live on our public testnet, where, you know, stakers have staked and delegated to node operators. Either the node operator can be themselves or they can delegate to a third-party node operator. We have a bunch of really strong node operators from the blockchain ecosystem, BlockTainment, Coinbase Cloud, Google Cloud, Peer-to-Peer, Figment, all the major operators on our testnet.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  On the, and also our service EigenDA is live on the testnet. So this is a data availability service, which is intended to expand the data bandwidth available for Ethereum rollups and layer tools. And then finally, anybody can build and deploy actively validated services, which are basically, you can think of them as Eigen apps, like applications. But these applications are not necessarily consumer-facing. These applications will be used by consumer-facing applications. These could be oracles, data availability, bridging, finalization services, all these kinds of things. So that's where we are on the ecosystem. So the testnet is public and live.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  We are going to this, to the mainnet, this exact same configuration to the mainnet, between Q1 and Q2, depending on audit and hardening. So very excited to have the full ecosystem kind of get together to start up more open innovation.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, congrats on the, the recent raise of the amount that you're allowed to restake. So just to add some color here for the listener, there's about 447,000 Ether-denominated restaked tokens. So yeah, that's almost exactly one, one billion dollars. And about 200,000 of that, so nearly half of that, is with STEETH. So I was just kind of curious how you choose the different limits for the different. Liquid restaking or liquid staking tokens that you allow people to restake? And also a follow up question, why did you choose only ETH-denominated tokens? Like, have you thought at all about people restaking like USDC or other, you know, tokens? Because generally speaking, like, it's just the the value of the token more so than the fact

• 12:26Speaker 02

  that it's ETH-denominated that that adds value to the system.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Mike. Also excited to have this conversation with Mike here. Why are we choosing this particular set of tokens? Why it denominated? How do we choose the caps? All kind of complex questions, but the the first thing is we chose a guarded launch so that we can test the protocol at various levels of TVL and safety, right? So that's the first thing. And we chose the liquid staking protocols to have a cap, whereas native staking does not have a cap. So native staking is uncapped. This is because native staking is already very complex to actually go and execute, because you have to go and when you stake in the beacon chain, you have to set the withdrawal credentials to the EigenPod.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  And furthermore, any lags, so the withdrawal lags exist on the Eigenlayer platform. So whenever you want to withdraw any unit of ETH or any other token from the Eigenlayer staking platform, you can actually, it takes seven days before you can withdraw it. This withdrawal lag is there so that if, you know, when you're staked and providing services to operators, if there's anything that malicious that you've done, you can be slashed within this period. So, you know, it's standard in all kinds of staking protocols. But it also acts as a measure of safety for us, because, you know, actions do not happen instantaneously, like if you're doing on a bridge, you know,

• 13:56Speaker 00

  who knows, somebody can drain a pool's TVL like instantly, whereas... Staking is a necessarily long-term activity. So having this kind of like a one-week withdrawal lag gives us a measure of safety that, you know, simply other protocols may not be able to achieve just because the time scale of staking is fundamentally very different from the time scale of other kinds of financial activities. But adding on to this is when you have native restaking, you have the additional lags on Ethereum itself, right? Because you have to go and like withdraw from the beacon chain becomes more noticeable. So all of this means as far as the safety limits are concerned, we can be more aggressive on the native restaking than we can be on liquid restaking.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  So that's why the native staking is uncapped. And, you know, we have to decide onto some cap for all of these different services. And we just chose, you know, these numbers based on both market representation that, you know, we do know that some LSTs are more dominant than the others. So we don't want to say that they're all very low, but we want to also have representation of multiple different liquid staking tokens in the platform. So that's why we did that. Regarding your question, why restrict to LSTs? You can think of, the question's premise is absolutely right. Eigenlayer, you know, even though we popularly call it a restaking platform and that's a narrative, the fundamental thing is it is a permissionless programmable staking platform.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  It's staking, you stake your ETH, you could stake your USD, you could stake a bond, you could stake whatever you want. It is programmable, so anybody can come and program it to like what the staking conditions are, and it's permissionlessly programmable. It's not programmed by us or anybody we know. Anybody can come and create these slashing, staking and slashing conditions. So yes, the premise is absolutely right that Eigenlayer can incorporate all kinds of tokens. But the reason we focus on, you know, the ETH and

• 15:57Speaker 00

  ETH-related tokens to begin with is that we think, number one, clearly there is a big market opportunity that, that, you know, ETH, there is, you know, a lot of the LSTs as well as native staking is locked in. And when you're promising to validate Ethereum, you can, might as well promise to validate some of these other networks. But more, more broadly, I think we are also trying to support a lot of the services for the Ethereum ecosystem. And when your risks are denominated in ETH, it is much better for your underwriting economic safety mechanism to also be denominated in ETH. Imagine I'm doing like a, like a hundred thousand ETH transaction between one rollup and

• 16:42Speaker 00

  another rollup. And you want to say like, hey, I have enough economic safety out of like Eigenlayer to do this transaction. Now, if I know that I have LSTs worth maybe hundred and twenty thousand ETH backing this claim, that's actually like a much more rigid, you know, the mapping than to say, oh, I have hundred thousand ETH, but I have like some X dollars USD backing it because now I have to account for the volatility and slippage between these two different tokens over the period of, you know, the collateral unwrapping. Add to this the capital efficiency of LSTs because LST is already earning certain amount of reward. We found that this is the best configuration to

• 17:27Speaker 00

  start this platform off with.

• 17:29David Hoffman?

  Sreeram, is this just an articulation that the Ether unit of account has network effects? And so it's just easier to use that unit of account because the risk is denominated in ETH, the collateral is denominated in ETH. In these networks, people tend to think in ETH. And so while it doesn't necessarily need to be ETH, it just kind of makes sense to be ETH. Is that just a fair summary?

• 17:52Speaker 00

  That is absolutely right. And this is what we want to incentivize the Most. And so, you know, the idea being that initially, so over time, we are going to completely make this permissionless. Like, anybody can list any token, and each AVS can decide how to relatively value these tokens. You know, somebody may not like to use USD, they may only want to use certain LSTs, some people may want to use any of them, as long as they have enough economic value. So this is up to the services. So we want to get out of like, this layer of saying, hey, you can only do this or that. And but, you know, we just have to steward this platform in the beginning. To add to one of David's point, I think people, when people think of the network effects of ETH,

• 18:37Speaker 00

  I think this is a new dimension of network effect of ETH, which is that when you are transacting and denominating in ETH in the system, that means the right backing collateral for economic safety and validation is also ETH. This creates, so this is a network effect between the monetary premium of ETH, which is that this is used as a unit of denomination, to the utility of ETH, which is it is actually used as the backing system for economic safety. I think this is a new, I would say, emergent effect that Eigenlayer brings to this market that, so that strengthens actually the dominant position of ETH.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Cool. Yeah. And just to kind of double click on this, you know, economic safety, economic security point, I think we might have talked about this offline, but just so to kind of bring it into this conversation, I guess one thing that always feels a little weird about the meme to me is the fact that the economic security denomination is in ETH, and like, the owners of that ETH aren't necessarily the ones running the services that that could be slashed, right? So this is the classic principal agent problem. It shows up in Ethereum staking too, right? So I guess, how do you think about economic security when the the people who are at risk of being slashed aren't actually the ones doing the the task of the AVS operation? They're they're the ones who the capital

• 20:05Speaker 02

  was delegated to, but they're not actually the owners of the capital itself?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  This is a great question and I think maybe one of the most important for our entire field to actually like consider and understand. So I wouldn't claim to have, you know, simple answers to this question. So to rephrase this question, the idea is economic safety is coming because somebody's putting down their stake and then running the node operations, let's say themselves, and saying that, hey, if I don't run these operations correctly, then I'm willing to lose my ETH. So the first point I want to bring here is that this, if the staker and operator are the same person, this is a very unusual type of risk. I call this endogenous risk. Endogenous risk means, you know, unlike going and putting your ETH into a lending platform

• 20:55Speaker 00

  with, you know, 10x margin position or 100x leverage, where you're underwriting certain kinds of price volatility risk. That's what you're doing when you're doing that. When you're staking in the Eigenlayer platform, and Eigenlayer is constrained to validation tasks, you are underwriting endogenous risk. Endogenous means something that you do yourself, you can control yourself, you not being malicious and if the protocol is correct, you will not get slashed. It's very different. This is why the usual mental model of people thinking of, oh, this is leverage, leverage, is not quite accurate because, you know, it is endogenous whereas all other forms of risks, you know, that people are used to when you think of rehypothecating stake or like

• 21:40Speaker 00

  rehypothecating your house or any of these are subject to exogenous price risks. Okay, that's number one. But the risk is purely endogenous only if the staker and operator are the same, like that's what Mike's alluding to here and it's absolutely true. The staker and operator have to be same or in our view to be inside the same trust zone. So the staker has to trust the operator that the operator will do right by them. The fact that the staker and operator are not necessarily the same means now they have to establish some other mechanism of trust between themselves to actually make sure that I will delegate to somebody while putting my ETH at risk.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  So these mechanisms, these mechanisms can be manifold. And one mechanism is social or legal. Oh, there are major operators and they are legally regulated and they're not going to go and do like something which is provably malicious. When we think of all the kinds of, you know, this is, I think, very important and people in crypto don't fully appreciate it. I think that among the set of like, you know, things, ways in which a company or like a system can cheat. They usually choose to cheat in ways that are not observable. Because you know, observable means like you're liable. And what these systems do is make it completely transparent.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Because there is a slashing condition, there is an observation that you actually double sign this block or whatever the set of things are. So it makes it perfectly naked that you're cheating. Like this doesn't happen very often. I think this is something when people think about, oh, you know, all these Wall Street guys, they do this and that and all that. Nobody goes and like does something where it's perfectly universally observable that they're actually cheating. Like this is very important. So what the principle, so how to solve the principal agent problem? The real world mechanisms are, hey, I'm in a certain jurisdiction. I trust certain other like entities outside my like blockchain protocol. And I'm therefore going to delegate to them. This might be one mechanism.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Another mechanism is they use technological substrates to actually minimize the principal agent problem. For example, we're working with this platform called, project called Cubist to build anti-slashers. Anti-slasher is this idea that, hey, there is a piece of code that simulates the slashing conditions. And then make sure that when I'm issuing a signature, the slashing conditions will not be violated. And this piece of code alone runs inside a trusted execution environment, like an Intel SGX or an AMD Trust Zone. So what this does is it gives a sense of correctness between the principal and the agent. Because even if the agent wants to manipulate it, they're still running it inside the T E.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  So therefore they cannot really cheat the principal. And in in our platform, we have a protocol called Puffer, which is based on trusted execution environment. And they are actually doing liquid staking for Ethereum itself and also restaking based on these T E's. These are, you know, two different ways, legal, social, and number two is technical. There's also like a third way, which is economic, which is the rocket pool way, which is saying, hey, yeah, you know, the principal and agent are, the agent's gonna, the principal's gonna lose something, but the agent's gonna lose something too. So like you just try to correlate the fates of these two people.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  But in in our like fundamental analysis of the economics, this really only works if the slashing is bounded or pounded for some reason or the other. And on Eigenlayer, being a fundamentally economic safety platform, it's not clear like what will be these bonds. So that's the three different ways, social, technical and economic, to minimize these kinds of principal agent risks. And I think this is a generic question, not for Eigenlayer, but for the entire field to actually answer.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And just kind of one more high level question before we dig into some more of the details of EigenDA and stuff. Yeah, one thing I think that comes into question when thinking about restaking is that it it does fundamentally change the incentives of being a staker in Ethereum, right? So if you think of the protocol as kind of like having two two incentives now, it has the consensus layer rewards and then the execution layer rewards, like consensus is for participating in in the block, you know, voting on blocks. What's the head of the chain? Execution rewards are kind of these congestion fees, like gas fees, and also the M E V rewards given to proposers. Eigenlayer kind of tax on a third set of rewards, right? Like these are these are restaking rewards.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  So the main issue I see potentially with this is that these rewards are outside the purview of what the protocol can see. What the protocol is designed for, right? So if this kind of warps the incentives of the the protocol, it might, for example, increase the demand for staked ETH significantly. Or also, it might make it so that solo staking, kind of the opportunity cost of solo staking is very high because restaking yields are are bigger than the other two components of the reward. And so in order to be competitive as as a staker, you also need to be a restaker. So, you know, these are, these are big, big kind of themes that I've been thinking about, but would be curious to hear your high level response on these before we we dive deeper.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I think also complex question and landscape to think about and and filled with second order effects which are not totally anticipatable. But I'll start with one thing. This is the hard thing about building permissionless platforms. Who knows what somebody else, somebody else can do, right? When Ethereum is building in, you know, the MEV was one example. Liquid staking is another example. Restaking is another example where these are emergent effects that, you know, could not be anticipated fully. So having said that, I want to make a bunch of observations. So the first observation is that anything you could do with

• 27:55Speaker 00

  restaking, you can already do with liquid staking, right? One major LST, the dominant LST, could just simply say, hey, you know, the economics are simply not only being used for, you know, Ethereum's taking, but I'm also making this promise as the dominant LST protocol that ABCD will happen, right? And this leads to a completely different set of effects, which is that like that LST, because it has figured out that it can do ABCD now completely consolidates the market because it is able to tack on additional things. This is exactly the kind of the problem that MEV Boost was trying to solve, which is that if you're a major player, you can do auto protocol deals.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  And, you know, if you're a smaller player, you cannot do auto protocol deals and you're simply completely subverted by an auto protocol deal. So just like MEV Boost and the PBS roadmap basically tries to democratize the opportunity for making these out of protocol deals, Eigenlayer is an opportunity to democratize these out of protocol deals and make it as formal, transparent, clear, and verifiable as possible, so that anybody can enter into these kinds of agreements, not only the dominant player. So that's the first thing. Anything that you could do with restaking could have

• 29:16Speaker 00

  already been done with LSTs. The second thing, I think, you know, in order to affect Ethereum's protocol economics, I mean, when I hear some of the concerns about Eigenlayer and restaking, makes me wonder, in one sense, because, you know, these people are much more bullish about Eigenlayer than I am, because they're basically saying, the statement, if once I formulate it, will break it clear, they're saying that the total amount of reward and yield that will come out of restaking should be higher or of exactly the same magnitude

• 29:59Speaker 00

  of all the DeFi yield that would come out of any kind of LST and other things. So that is, it's only at that scale that this starts to become, you know, significant. Okay, but having said that, maybe it can happen, and, you know, we are, of course, you know, believers in the technology, that's why we're building it. But how does it affect Ethereum's protocol economics? It does definitely warp the incentives, but it warps it lesser than if Eigenlayer wouldn't exist, and like, one LST basically significantly integrates this kind of an idea inside of its own protocol. I think people don't see it, like, a lot of people on Twitter, for example, saying, why doesn't Eigenlayer commit to self-limiting or whatever

• 30:43Speaker 00

  ideas? And I think it is the same reason why MEV Boost is a neutral platform, the same reason why PBS has to be neutral. There has to be a mechanism for new protocols to be built to be completely neutral, so that the playing field is level. Because if we self-limit...

• 31:02Speaker 00

  The dominant LSTs, what are they gonna do? They're gonna say, hey, I have to internalize this because these guys are gonna self-limit. So there are all these second-order games that people don't transparently understand. But these are, you know, and I'm not claiming to have all the answers for the second-order games, but at the minimum, the observation is that the presence of a more neutral platform democratizes restaking yield rather than centralizing restaking yield into only the LST. Now, at least, like if I'm a home staker, I can opt into Eigenlayer and then, you know, adopt at least a few of the protocols which are lightweight and easy to run and participate in that additional rewards. Whereas in the absence of Eigenlayer, that would just simply not be possible.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  So that's, that's number two. Number three, we, we know and, you know, hope that the number of such protocols is high, but we know that there are some protocols which fundamentally rely on decentralization rather than relying purely on economics. An Eigenlayer is a highly expressive platform because it has this feature we call double opt-in. Double opt-in means a staker and operator have to opt into the protocol and the protocol has to accept the opt-in. So double opt-in basically means protocols can express subjective opinions on who can opt into their protocol, you know, into an EBS as well as give additional rewards to certain people than to other people.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  So because Eigenlayer is this highly expressive platform and there are services which fundamentally rely on decentralization rather than fundamentally relying on economic safety, those services could actually incentivize decentralization itself. Like, for example, there's one of the services building on top of us is this thing called Witness Chain, which offers a proof of location protocol. Basically offers a geographic location oracle, which itself is geographically decentralized, uses like stakers and then like tries to measure network latencies across various nodes to certify that, hey, you are in this zone or that zone. Now, it's possible for an EBS to say, I want to add a geographic decentralization bonus to my reward structure.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  And home stakers being more geographically distributed could potentially, you know, take part in that. You know, other people can offer other kinds of subjective oracles which try to analyze, you know, stake flows and stake correlation to determine whether it's the same guys taking across these different, you know, entities, or it's actually distinct, you know, home stakers. So all these things give me confidence that there'll be some amount of incentives for decentralized home operators that can come through Eigenlayer, which in its absence actually just makes it significantly worse than centralizing.

• 33:48David Hoffman?

  That was a fantastic, just high-level overview of, I think, some of the big questions about Eigenlayer and kind of restaking specifically. And I want to bring Teddy into this conversation to open up the EigenDA rabbit hole, because I think this can be a more narrow understanding of what it means to be an AVS. And because EigenDA is being incubated in-house by Eigenlayer, there's some, definitely some like additional knowledge I want to pull out of you, Teddy, here. So I want to ask the question, what is EigenDA? But I want to ask it in three different ways, because I think we can kind of get three different answers out of it. There is EigenDA, the Data Availability Network. There is EigenDA, the first internal incubated restaking network by Eigenlayer.

• 34:32David Hoffman?

  And then there's EigenDA as this, like, very proximate data availability layer to Ethereum. So what is EigenDA as it like, as it needs to be for Eigenlayer to incubate its own network? Like, why does Eigenlayer, EigenDA need to be a thing internal to Eigenlayer? How does EigenDA compare to other DA layers? Like, there's many DA layers out there. How is Eigenlayer different? What are the unique properties? And then lastly, what does EigenDA specifically do for Ethereum, the Ethereum ecosystem that other data availability networks don't do? So three questions, all about what is EigenDA? You can start however you want to start, Teddy.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Well, so EigenDA was both an opportunity and a necessity for Eigen Labs, because we had the plan for Eigenlayer and we needed a way to demonstrate it to the world. We wanted to build a product that was truly useful for people to attract stake and other AVS projects to Eigenlayer. But on the other hand, it was also an opportunity because we looked at the landscape of DA providers and saw an opportunity to build a DA layer from first principles that was better.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  The goal of EigenDA is a trustless, decentralized, hyperscale DA layer built on top of Eigenlayer. And

• 36:05Speaker 03

  you know, alluding to your, one of your questions about alignment with Ethereum, that sort of implies alignment with Ethereum, given that we're building on top of Eigenlayer.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  So I think the main thing people want to know is how is it trustless, decentralized, and hyperscale? And how does that set it apart? I guess I'll start with trustless.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  EigenDA operates on the basis of operator nodes which opt into the EigenDA network via Eigenlayer. And so, operators are providing storage bandwidth to the EigenDA network on the basis of the amount of stake that they have attributed to them. So if I'm an operator and I manage to get 5% of the EigenDA network stake, that means I'm going to be receiving roughly 5% of the data. And this is how we achieve this trustless quality to EigenDA.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  We ensure that every operator is only handling the amount of data that it is on the hook for providing. And this is different, this is also what sets it apart from a naive data availability committee, which although very simple, does not provide these trustless decentralized guarantees. The hyperscale part is what I think is the most interesting about EigenDA, which is that EigenDA's capacity scales with the total bandwidth of the operator set. This means that as the number of operators joining the EigenDA network grows, the amount of data that EigenDA can support writing and reading to also grows. And how do we do this?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  I mean, most other DA layers either involve relatively simple data availability committees, or maybe involve some amount of consensus. And we try to take a hybrid approach where we remove peer-to-peer consensus from the the dispersal process of data. So EigenDA can generally be thought of as this operator set, which is interacted with via a disperser service. So data is sent to these operators, and this disperser service, which can be understood as something like a decentralized sequencer in a rollup analogy, is responsible for collecting

• 38:32Speaker 03

  these various signatures that form a data availability proof, and posting these signatures on-chain to Ethereum to certify availability. And there are several other pieces of technology which I can't go into yet, which ensure that data is available, not only that it's stored, but that it's not being withheld, and, you know, systems for payment and for slashing.

• 38:57David Hoffman?

  I want to go into the unique properties of EigenDA just a little bit more. Just my mental model, my map for understanding EigenDA is kind of like a Dank sharding sidecar, where it has a lot of properties that EIP4844, full Dank sharding, also have, except that it's also a separate network, except it is also secured by ETH. So it seems to be like a very proximate replication of Dank sharding, just as like a sidecar network running in parallel to Ethereum. And why is it in parallel to Ethereum? Well, because it's using Ether as stake. And so it seems to be like the closest approximation to Dank sharding data availability, while

• 39:38David Hoffman?

  also retaining the security of Ether, but yet it is a separate network from Ethereum data availability. First, Teddy, is that a fair articulation? Do I need to amend that? Is that accurate? Is that inaccurate? And to what degree that is accurate? How does that, how is that extra useful to Ethereum versus other like far more distant data availability networks that aren't so close to Ethereum?

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Sure, yes. Well, that's generally accurate. I like to think of Dank sharding is being sort of the the public option that will eventually arrive. And Eigenlayer is being a very closely aligned private option.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  So Eigenlayer has plans to support greater throughput than dank sharding. But in the short term, they generally align in terms of bandwidth planning.

• 40:31David Hoffman?

  And so why would someone use EigenDA over some sort of like more third-party networks that are alternative Layer Ones? Like, what benefits does Eigenlayer EigenDA bring to the table?

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Well, so EigenDA settles to Ethereum.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  This means that rollups will have lower latencies when settling to Ethereum themselves. This is one of the larger advantages. The other is that EigenDA is going to be

• 41:03Speaker 03

  a generally Ethereum-aligned product going forward. We don't have any, you know, plans to sort of

• 41:11Speaker 03

  try and and move away from the Ethereum ecosystem. And so when rollups who are already deciding to commit to Ethereum use EigenDA, they can be assured that we're planning on the basis of 4844 and dank sharding in the future.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  You know, you asked about how we got started with EigenDA, and I think Teddy gave a good answer there, which is that it is not only a proof of concept that, hey, you can build something interesting, but also a proof of value that you can build something useful on top of Eigenlayer. And value is needed when you want to get this kind of a platform bootstrapped, you know? You want to start Eigenlayer, who's going to use it? Who's going to come and build protocols on top of it? We have at least one useful kind of. Product on top of it, that's I can do it. But how did, how did we actually arrive at this? Is there's an interesting story. This was back in 2021 when we were working on,

• 42:14Speaker 00

  you know, just coming up with some of the core ideas around Eigenlayer and restaking. And, you know, I had decided to fund this startup, just, you know, bootstrap, use my own money to do it. And we were several, you know, maybe more than six months down the journey at that time. And I was talking to many VCs and one of the VCs I talked to was Kyle Samani from MultiCoin. And I gave this pitch, hey, you know, here's Ethereum, you can stake and then you can use it for other networks. And you can have these kind of slashing and things like that. And I said, oh, these are just looking like fraud probes and optimistic rollups. They suck, they're not going to work.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  And I was curious why he said it. And then I, I asked him, why, why do you think optimistic rollups suck and they're never going to work? And he said, because they're very expensive. And I hadn't like, I was not close, paying close enough attention to know that optimistic rollups are more expensive. And I said, thank you and like finished the call and then we went back and called the team and I said, hey, I heard that optimistic rollups are more expensive. Can we dig into why this is the case? Just go ahead and look at it and we find it's all just data costs, right? Because, you know, you don't even have to write a proof to Ethereum. So why is it more expensive?

• 43:39Speaker 00

  And then I looked at it and we have actually been working on data availability for a much longer period as an academic. In fact, you know, one of the first papers on, you know, fraud proofs and data availability that Mustafa and Vitalik and others wrote, I was actually the kind of on the program committee and I championed this paper to be accepted in financial cryptography. And so we'd been thinking about data availability for a long time. And I knew that of all the things we know how to scale, data availability is the one we know most how to scale. And looking at the cost, it's like, oh my God, there's a huge opportunity because we didn't know how to get this platform started.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  That was the other question that we couldn't answer in any of these VC pitches is, oh, you build this platform. Who's gonna come and build anything on top of it? I was like, I don't know, this is useful. From that, it became, we are going to build INDA, the first data availability service, because we know exactly how to scale data availability. And we have this platform. In fact, we even had a paper called A Is A Data Availability Oracle, like, you know, two years before this, this episode. And basically, that's basically saying that, hey, this is an off-chain network that certifies data availability to Ethereum. And we just didn't know like, uh, how to bootstrap this. And Eigenlayer was designed to solve the bootstrapping platform. So we became our own customers to actually then build EigenDA.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  So that's a, and I, I did tell Kyle this like a few months back and he's like, most people, when I say something like that, they just get annoyed and, you know, uh, but you're the only one who took it positively and came back and thanked me after some time.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I guess, um, yeah, so that's, so going to the other question on why EigenDA? And one of the things is, I think Teddy was alluding to earlier, is Eigenlayer is built as the only ETH-centric data availability layer. Okay, what does it mean by ETH-centric, Ethereum-centric? So it's Ethereum-centric in many ways, you know, other data availability layers are actually blockchains. You know, they say modular, but it's actually an entire blockchain. There is a consensus layer, there is a new asset, there is a new trust layer, there is also a new data availability system, all of them packaged. And actually packaging it brings you certain superpowers.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  And the superpower is if you natively run a rollup on top of that blockchain, you actually inherit much better security. Because, you know, if data is not available in that system, let's say something like Celestia, if data is not available, then the blockchain itself will fork around such a failure. So if you're a native rollup on Celestia, you actually get a lot of like, security guarantees. But if you're an Ethereum rollup, your ordering primitive in Celestia has no bearing on it. From the viewpoint of Ethereum, everything is just a committee. Like, all that, you know, if you're an Ethereum rollup, you have a rollup contract sitting on the Ethereum blockchain. And it's just viewing some certificate from some committee, like that's all it can do.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  It cannot do, a contract cannot do data availability sampling, a contract cannot do like whatever set of features that are actually available on that other platform. So, we instead of like clubbing all these things and clubbing two separate goals, which is I want to build a blockchain of my own. And I want to provide data availability services to the Ethereum ecosystem, started from first principles. How would one build just a data availability adjacent, a data availability layer which joins the Ethereum network? So the first thing is Ethereum has, can, in, rollups rely on Ethereum for ordering and consensus. Therefore, you should not need to have a separate consensus.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  A separate consensus adds nothing to your own, you know, Ethereum, uh, rollup ecosystem. Okay, so that was the first thing, remove consensus. And once you remove consensus, you see that the design space for actually maximizing throughput and reducing latency and all these other things explodes rather than reduces, because now you don't have to do another thing, you know, another module. Consensus being another module, you don't have to do it, you only have to do data attestations, you just have to certify that data is available. Now you can start to think from first principles, what set of things you can do.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  I can give you some examples, I think Teddy alluded to this earlier. The idea is, for example, in EigenDA, the way it works is there is this committee, this committee is staked. What do you stake, there's a natural thing to stake, which is ETH, and we have Eigenlayer, so that's, that's one side of this. The second side is because we had to think wearing the Ethereum hat on, we have to make sure that nodes that participate in EigenDA need to have very limited resources or can manage with very limited resources. Now, people say like, oh, this is a big constraint, like the Solana people, for example, say, oh, this is a big constraint. But, you know, there is a Power in adopting constraints and then seeing actually like how to, because these

• 48:57Speaker 00

  constraints are meaningfully adopted, right? They're adopted for, I want to maximize decentralization or whatever. And then ask, like, let's say each node has low amount of bandwidth, but you have an insane number of nodes. Like, you know, Ethereum has whatever, 900,000 validators, right? They may all not be distinct nodes, but the whole system is set up in such a way that if you have 32 ETH, you should not need a lot of bandwidth to participate in the network. So, one of the things we said is, hey, I want to adopt decentralization, but if you centralize, I'm going to make you pay more. In the sense that now you have to store more data. Now you have to expand more bandwidth if you're more centralized. So till now, you know, even if you're validating Ethereum, if you're, if you're a single operator

• 49:41Speaker 00

  running 10,000 validators versus if you're a single operator running a single validator, both of them have the same expense basis. So there's like an inevitable, you know, der, a drift to centralization, because if you centralize, you're more efficient. I can DA breaks this. Oh, I, if you centralize and you have 30% of the stake, and somebody has 0.1% of the stake, you have to do 300 times more work to hold 30% of the stake than you would if you're holding 0.1% of the stake. So we start not only from like, okay, when we think of Ethereum centric, the first thing, no ordering, let's just do like data availability. The second thing, what is the asset to use? Use ETH. The third

• 50:24Speaker 00

  thing, what is the principle? What is the philosophical substrate on which you're operating? Get as much decentralization as possible, get node operators to participate with very limited resources, while minimizing the benefit of centralization. So, these are some of the decisions that went into building like I can DA. There are certain emergent benefits from it. For example,

• 50:48Speaker 00

  When you want to do ordering and consensus in your own like chain, one of the things you have to do is you have to lock the state, have a leader, the leader proposes the next block and that's how you build the chain. Whereas in EigenDA, what happens is because we are not doing ordering, ordering can be just data attestations or data availability claims can be completely paralyzed. So I send, David sends a data availability claim to EigenDA nodes. They all receive a chunk of the data availability claims and send David a certificate. And similarly to Mike is sending a data, you know, a data blob, splits it into small chunks, sends it to the EigenDA nodes. They all send him the claim. They send the same thing to Teddy, all of them in parallel.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  So you're not deadlocking on the state at all. Second, your censorship resistance is not gated of EigenDA is not gated by some leader. There is no need for a leader. It is what we call self-leader protocols. Like if you're a sequencer, you can yourself decide, hey, I just send the data chunks, encode and send the data chunks myself. I don't need to wait for like, you know, that leader. And the leader becomes the MEV center of the entire data availability system. So essentially what we found is actually being a data availability adjacent to Ethereum as a first order design principle unlocks a variety of different things that, you know, we had to actually like innovate from first principles on.

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• 54:42Speaker 02

  Sweet, yeah, no, this is super good. And I kind of want to drill down into some of the mechanics. So Teddy, I'll ask you two questions about the day-to-day of running EigenDA. So I guess tying it back to 4844, the initial design is set up so that there's going to be target of three blobs per block, three blob transactions. Each blob will be about 128 kilobytes. And the design is conservative so that we know that if all Ethereum home stakers can keep running this on the same internet connection before, just alluding to what Suryam was mentioning. So just curious on the... Kind of the the numbers for for EigenDA as far as how many kind of kilobits per second? And also like me as a solo staker like on my home, you know, internet connection,

• 55:27Speaker 02

  will it be reasonable for me to be able to to run like a EigenDA restaking service? And kind of participate in that network? The second question I have is around these slashing conditions, right? So when we're thinking about like the the kind of settlement assurances of EigenDA, like someone who posts DA to to the service wants some guarantee that that DA will be available with, you know, with some economic security? Can you just talk about what what the slashing conditions actually look like? And how those violations would would be resolved if someone didn't fulfill their promise of making that data available?

• 56:03Speaker 03

  Sure, so I'll I'll take the throughput question and then pass the slashing conditions to you, Sreeram. But we've launched our testnet guaranteeing around 1,000 kilobytes per second. And we've launched our our, you know, network. According to the designs Sreeram just men talked about, the amount of bandwidth you need to run an operator is not at all related to the total throughput of the network. It's related to the amount of stake that you have assigned to you. And so this should make it possible for smaller operators within the EigenDA network to still receive chunks of data and and earn on their staked assets.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  So on our testnet, the the benchmarks we've run locally have suggested that it can support roughly up to three megabytes per second. And we're pretty confident that we can get to 10 megabytes per second by mainnet. You know, all of this is powered by roughly two things. One is improving the speed at which we can encode blobs. One, each blob has a combination of Reed-Solomon encoding and KZG encoding, which is somewhat expensive, but also not an optimization problem that can't be solved. On the other side is just increasing the number of operators.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  And so we see it is very possible to get to 100 megabytes per second one year from the launch of EigenDA on mainnet.

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  Teddy, you threw out some numbers just now, like 1,000 kilobytes per second, which, I mean, when I download stuff, I'm downloading stuff on my computer that's way, I need way more speed than that. But also, at the same time, we're talking about crypto econo, crypto economics. And so, you know, cryptography compresses stuff. And then you started talking about like 10 megabytes a second, which is starting to be a number I can like reason about. Just overall, like, is that a lot? Like, how much is that? How, what do we get from that? How can we compare these things in maybe more qualitative, less quantitative ways?

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Sure. So, one Ethereum block is roughly 200 kilobytes. This is, uh, this is every 12 seconds. And, you know, you can do the math to figure out how much that is per second. EIP 4844 is moving us towards something like 32 kilobytes per second. And just to, you know, do an apples to apples comparison, Celestia is about 167 kilobytes per second. So, this is just comparing with the status quo. But I think that what we're looking at,

• 59:03Speaker 03

  just from a market perspective with Higgin DA, is a situation where the cheaper block spaces, which is essentially what DA is providing for rollups, the cheaper block spaces, the greater we're going to see induced demand. Everybody knows in their heart that blockchains would be mainstream if it was cheap enough and reliable enough for people to use. And so, you know, obviously, 10, 10 megabytes per second worth of transactions doesn't sound like a lot, but that would represent a roughly, you know, 50x increase over the current status quo when people are using Ethereum or Ethereum rollups.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  One quick follow up before Siriam talks about slashing conditions, because I'm sure that's going to be an interesting part of the conversation. So you mentioned that if you have more restaked ETH as an EigenDA node, then you're responsible for more data, right? Is there, just trying to understand the mechanic here, like, would that potentially incentivize large node operators to kind of, like, sibble themselves and have many smaller node ops, like, split into many smaller operators to not have as much data responsibility, but still earn the same rewards as people solo staking? Or like, is there kind of just a linear scaling on the amount there?

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  It's linear on the amount. It's basically proportional to the amount of stake.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Okay, cool. Yeah, and so I guess going on to the slashing conditions question, Siriam would love to hear.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll just add a little bit on the throughput thing. You know, when I first did the numbers and like, tried to calculate like, oh, Ethereum's data bandwidth is 80 something kilobytes per second right now. I was like, oh, why is it so slow? Why is it so small? And I think, you know, there is a lot to improve here, but I want to kind of phrase this in the broad arc of like, human evolution. I think of like, these bytes, you know, like, you know, inside the team, we say like, our goal in on building EigenDA is to maximize coordination bandwidth.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  You know, if you think about it, these are complex coordination systems. Like, we have like, all these parties in Ethereum, like, certifying and maintaining this ledger, based on which lots of coordination is happening, like, you know, movement of money and other things. So. Usually, just, you know, if you just neglect the last, like, whatever, five to ten or maybe even twenty years of history, we were, as a species, able to coordinate on very few things, like, we would elect who is the president, and, you know, a president can specify very simple immigration policy, immigration good, immigration bad, like, that's one bit, right? We had coordination bandwidth which was like five bits per five years, like, something

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  really, really, really, really small as a species. And suddenly, I think we are, you know, this is, this takes some time to, like, sink in, we are scaling that to, you know, kilobytes per second, to megabytes per second, to gigabytes per second. So what this means is suddenly the rate at which we can coordinate as a species, maintain common information, enact powerful, you know, coordination conditions, it's just like insanely scaled. And I think this is just like, if you think about it like this, like, you know, the internet unleashed this information superhighway, like, we can kind of talk to each other, but that's

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  still not the same as the ability to coordinate with each other, because, you know, I may be talking to you something, I may be telling somebody else something, because this is not global verifiable state. And with systems that promise like common data availability or like more block space, essentially, we are talking about the rate of the bandwidth of coordination as a species, right? Let's keep all the blockchain wars, L1, L2, L3, like, aside, right? Just let this sink in. It's insane, it's amazing, it's unusual, it's, it's like, we're becoming this much, much more coordinated. In fact, as a species, I think our evolutionary advantage is that we're able to cooperate

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  in, at a scale that is simply not possible for other species in a flexible way. Like, you know, you all know what Harari in his thesis says, like, our humans are special because we cooperate flexibly in large numbers. And it is cooperation, when you're talking about, you know, a shad, like, DA bandwidth, it is flexibly, because I can program all kinds of new VMs and conditions and contracts and interesting arrangements on top of it, and in large numbers, because we can have everybody agree on this common state. This is insane. And you know, as a, as a, as a community, that's what we're setting out to accomplish. It's, it's just good to put it in that perspective rather than the day-to-day thing of, hey, you know, I'm doing X better than Y or Z.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  We have two mechanisms right now for ensuring the fidelity of data availability. Number one, proof of custody, which ensures that people store the data, but it doesn't have a mechanism to ensure that people serve the data. So that's proof of custody. Proof of custody is basically if you don't store the data and you have to respond in certain ways, you have a secret, you have to sign some blobs based on like the state of the data that you're storing. And if you don't do it correctly, you'll be slashed. So proof of custody is a mechanism to ensure that you're storing. But, but what if you're storing, all the nodes are storing data, but they all collude and coordinate to not serve the data to anybody. So that's a problem.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  So while proof of custody relies on economic security, okay, because you'll be slashed if you don't do your proof of custody. How do we ensure that people serve? It is by ensuring that the operator set remains decentralized and collusion resistant so that there is a competition to serve. Because no one node has all the data. The data is dispersed across many nodes and as long as you can get a quorum number of nodes, you will be able to retrieve all the data. Now you have a market where there are many independent players who have the data and are willing to serve. Unless everybody colludes together or some large number of stakers collude together, you will be able to retrieve the data. So that's the mechanics. So it borrows both decentralization from Eigenlayer as a separate principle

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  as well as borrow economic security from Eigenlayer. Furthermore, we are actually building new security mechanisms, which are on, on top of this, which I think we can, we are not yet ready to share, but you know, we'll be ready to share in the coming months.

• 1:06:02David Hoffman?

  One thing that I think is pretty cool about just the primitive of restaked capital is that it opens up opportunities for interoperability across networks that wouldn't otherwise have been interoperable. And one of these things that I've been keeping an eye on is the superfast finality layer out of Near, which is in partnership and collaboration with Eigenlayer. Sri Ram, Teddy, I've been on a quest to learn how all of the many, many Ethereum Layer 2s, which are fragmented, how do they recompose back into one unified network? We have so much scale on Ethereum. We have horizontal scaling, we have vertical scaling, but we don't have yet a composed, coherent network, at least from the perspective of

• 1:06:45David Hoffman?

  the end user. And there seems to be many different answers as to how all of these networks become recomposed. But one answer that I always come back to is low latency settlement finality. If one rollup can have assurances that settlements from a different rollup are final, all of a sudden, we can unlock a lot of composability. And this is something that I think is what you guys, Eigenlayer and Near, are pioneering with this superfast finality layer. So Sri Ram, maybe you can just walk us through this partnership, this collaboration with Near and the superfast finality layer. What is it and what is it doing? And what is its impact upon the Ethereum rollup landscape?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  The idea of a superfast finality layer is to ensure that you get instant finalization guarantees. So what happens is the rollup writes to this layer. This layer is, think of it like a chain. The chain is getting economic security from each stake. Let's keep that on the side. Just think of it like a chain. You just write, the rollup writes settlement commitments to this chain. This chain then writes the settlement commitments to Ethereum. Okay, so but the order in which these commitments can be returned is rigid based on this chain. So what happens is I write a commitment to this chain and this chain gives me a certificate that yes, this is the order in which this is going.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Now I can take it to another rollup, which is also tethered to this like, you know, fast zone. And say, yeah, I know this fast zone is verified that this is actually happening. So I can move value back and forth. And what this does is solve some of the liquidity fragmentation problems because instead of liquidity residing primarily in the rollups. The liquidity can reside in this like fast zone. And you know, people have hooks to draw liquidity in and out of it, like each rollup has a hook. To draw liquidity out of this layer and then give it back. This is like just in time liquidity across all the different rollups because you know, now you have a common zone in which. Which can move really fast, which has economic security because it's borrowing it from each staking. And now it becomes a zone where like a lot of these things compose.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  So this is the idea that we are exploring with Near, but other projects are also building somewhat similar things on on Eigenlayer. One is Omni, which is building a shared liquidity layer. Archlayer is building a super fast final layer specifically tailored around like, you know. The the rollup and and Eigenlayer ecosystem. So these are some of the attempts at solving the rollup interoperability problem. There's another interesting thing, David, that goes on with the rollup interoperability. Even without this fast finalization. Imagine I want to move value between one rollup and another rollup.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  At a time scale which is much faster than seven days. Let's say both are optimistic rollups and I want to move value between them. Then the way to do it is if I had, you know, if I want to move like hundred thousand ETH. If I have from an Eigenlayer service, a promise of. You know, more than hundred thousand ETH slashability. Then I can take that commitment as final and then like use that trigger to move value between these two rollups. So the rollup fragmentation. And the fact that rollups are fragmented. And second, the fact that rollups are fundamentally denominating in ETH basically gives another utility to ETH as a staking asset for moving, you know, value across these different rollups.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  And so we have bridges, which are specifically building around this concept of what we call attributable security. Each bridging claim buys a certain amount of security from Eigenlayer and then moves value around. And as long as the total attributable security that the the bridge holds is less than the total value moved around, you're actually completely safe. So this adds another interesting utility to ETH as a staking asset in backing these bridging claims. A fast finality layer accelerates the rate at which you can do it. But, you know, that's that's basically the kind of like overall landscape that we're looking at here.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, super cool. And I think now that we've kind of covered a number of different use cases for Eigenlayer, I want to bring the discussion up to this idea of kind of aggregation across many different AVSs. So I think a common theme that's been discussed is this idea that, you know, as someone who has capital, they want to restake. They they might have a hard time deciding which AVS to delegate to, you know, or sorry, which which AVS to opt into, which node operator within that AVS to delegate to. And so this kind of brings forward this idea of of some abstraction layer between the restakers and the actual AVSs. So I think this is kind of where the the liquid restaking token discussion usually fits in. So I would be curious to hear how you think about layers building on top of Eigenlayer

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  and how they're like managing risk of of many different AVSs and many different node operators to ensure, you know, the fungibility of their the liquid restaking token and kind of, yeah, just generally your your opinion on these these concepts or these tokens as a concept and and the potential, you know, implications to the Eigenlayer ecosystem.

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this is the this layer of abstraction that Mike is talking about. The idea is that, you know, as a staker, I don't want to kind of like sit and make these decisions as to what is the set of node operators, what is the set of AVSs. Maybe I should allocate some portion to some AVSs, some portion to others. Like, should I should I accept rewards in only ETH? Or can I accept rewards in new tokens? Like, there's just like a lot of different dimensions that simply don't exist as a staker in Ethereum. You just go download, stake and run. Like, that's it's it's clear, well specified. Being a double opt-in platform, Eigenlayer also brings all these new new things, like

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  at what price to accept an AVS, you know, is it, does it offset my operating costs? There's all kinds of questions that go around it. So these liquid restaking tokens are one subset that basically tries to address these kinds of questions. The idea being, they create a decentralized organization, which basically tries to adjudicate and make these decisions and take stake on people's behalf and then like go and delegate it to various operators. So the questions that are, you know, firstly, are LRTs good for the Eigenlayer kind of ecosystem? And I think I had a somewhat different answer six months back and then actually considering various things.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  I think on net, they're actually very good. The reason is, imagine that somebody wants to build a, you know, a lending protocol or some other like thing based on your Ethereum stake that's staked on Eigenlayer. Now, there are two ways to do it. One is to do it kind of inside the Eigenlayer platform and say that, hey, if you get slashed, I'll actually go and withdraw your stake from Ethereum. If you're you get liquidated, I'll actually go and withdraw your stake from Eigenlayer and Ethereum. And another option is, I have a liquid token and then I just have people exchange hands. Like, you slash, you know, I get liquidated, I give my liquid liquid restaking token to David. And

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  The previous one actually has worse cascade risks because you know, instead of when the liquidation happens, I now have to unwrap my like Eigenlayer position, which means Eigenlayer's security fluctuates. And also Eigenlayer goes and unwraps your Ethereum position. So the Ethereum security fluctuates. So what I've started seeing liquids taking tokens as are a layer of buffering. Basically, let the financial thing be buffered at a higher layer, rather than any financial thing like create a shockwave that goes through the entire ecosystem, right? Imagine there is some like big decentralized stablecoin or something built on top of this, and some ETH to USD price change happens. And this,

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  without like this layer of buffering, you undergo this massive like shockwave which goes through Eigenlayer, which goes through Ethereum, rather than just like getting buffered out at the top and people just exchange, oh, you know, you got my liquid stake token instead of I got it. That is much safer, I think, for the entire ecosystem, knowing that these systems are permissionless and knowing that these things are anyway going to happen. Okay. Given that, now the same kind of alignment problems that Ethereum had to wrestle with get either amplified or similar problems show up with Eigenlayer because one of the things is if there is one single dominant staking token and that

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  DAO makes all these decisions, Eigenlayer loses the free market property. Like one of the, you know, at least in Ethereum, price discovery was automated and algorithmic. And Eigenlayer relies on two sides of the market. AVS is bidding a certain price and stakers accepting or rejecting that price. If you had one collusion on, you know, one party representing the interest of the entire other side, then you don't have the free market. Movement. So you know, this is something that we have to figure out like Ethereum had to figure out or we have to figure this out over time. But one high level lever is unlike Ethereum, which has to be like absolutely neutral and completely protocol, Eigenlayer

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  can have some governance levers to actually like, you know, move the system in, in, in to be healthy across the multiple sides of the market. So that's just a lever that we have. But in general, I think these liquid restaking tokens, we're seeing like many highly talented teams come in and build this, which I think is, is net positive, not only for Eigenlayer, but for Ethereum itself, because it uses more competition, a new opportunity to actually participate in the liquid staking market by also being part of the liquid restaking protocol.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And just to kind of continue on in the, in the risk direction, because I think it's super interesting. So you were talking about how Eigenlayer can kind of be more opinionated about some of these risks. I think maybe part of that equation is the slashing veto committee. So I guess I'm curious how you see, you know, the importance of that as, as a tool to like underwrite the risk of, of things built on top of Eigenlayer. And also kind of the trade off between being a permissionless kind of platform that, that anyone can build on, anyone can launch any, you know, node AVS, but then also like some of them are going to be kind of king made in that the committee is supported for them versus not for others. So can you just talk about the tension there?

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So the, the goal of Eigenlayer is to be like completely permissionless. But you know, how we start up the platform, I think, you know, in Justin's words, these platforms have path dependence. So you want to make sure that the platforms start off safe. So we are going to start with a bit more permissioned than totally permissionless on day one. And the way it's going to work is the slashing veto committee needs to know what slashing to veto. So which means it needs to know what is your AVS. So there is an onboarding condition, either the slashing veto committee themselves do or they Like trust some other committee to basically the onboarding of various AVSs. That minimizes the risk profile, you know, it has to be audited, it has to follow certain guidelines.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  All these kinds of things are enforced in that layer. So that we can onboard safe and useful services before, you know, eventually becoming a completely permissionless platform. So each service, you know, over time, they either are on, you know, they they start out with the slashing veto. And then over time, as the platform matures and as also the services mature, there's going to be an option to be free of the slashing veto committee. Like you can just go and say, hey, I don't want the slashing veto committee because I'm rigid, I'm ossified. I don't need to actually like trust us. Okay, so that is an option, but more generally, I think, you know, I made the MEV and PBS analogy earlier. We can follow some of the kind of like ideas from that space.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  One of the things that in MEV Boost happens is there's this concept of a relay. A relay is a doubly trusted party from both the block proposer and the block builder. Both of them trusted for different properties, but that is a doubly trusted party. Similarly, a slashing veto committee is a doubly trusted party from the AVS and from the staker side. The staker are trusting the veto committee to veto illegitimate slashing. The AVS is trusting the veto committee to not veto legitimate slashing. So it's a doubly trusted party. So you can take that abstraction and think of like this veto committee as an entity. And now you can say just exactly what happened in MEV Boost, you can create a marketplace of veto committees.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  There doesn't have to be one veto committee that like some small group of us decide. There can be a marketplace where people can come in and say, hey, here's a new veto committee we have self-coordinated to form. Essentially, this is like an adjudication committee between like the, you know, AVS and stakers. And of course, if the AVS is completely rigid and solid and ossified, you don't need adjudication. So you go to a null or empty adjudication committee. But the more untrusted you are, you're underwriting some amount of trust from the adjudication committee. So. We envision this as one of the ways in which Eigenlayer as an ecosystem evolves to remove this permissioning. This is one of the ethos that we want to follow is minimize subjective decisions at the Eigenlayer level.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Like, this is one of the reasons we don't build a liquid restaking token. This is one of the reasons we don't say which tokens can be staked and which tokens cannot be staked. You know, initially, even though we are starting with a permissioning procedure there, over time, it's going to be completely permissionless and people can decide. And this is the aesthetic, I think, a protocol should minimize subjective decisions. Subjective decisions should be made by agents who have both rights and responsibilities, and they can figure out how to exercise it. So that's the ethos in which we are building.

• 1:21:07David Hoffman?

  The credible neutrality of Eigenlayer, of course, is going to be super important, especially as, oh, by the way, congrats, guys, because during this podcast, Eigenlayer just crossed $1 billion in TVL. I'm sure that makes you feel fantastic and also perhaps a little bit nervous, at least I think it should. And we have all of these liquid restaking token teams that are like going after that pie, right? That it's a big pie, it's super valuable. And, you know, the credible neutrality of the Eigenlayer protocol, of course, makes plenty of sense, it ought to be that way. But what about the neutrality of Eigen Labs, the organization, as it tries to help some of these liquid restaking tokens bootstrap?

• 1:21:48David Hoffman?

  Because, of course, we do want these things, but I can name like five names in my head about who would enjoy to be like the Eigenlayer-approved liquid restaking token. And of course, you also can't like work with every single liquid restaking token down the long tail, A, because you don't have enough resources, and B, because one of them will be a rug. And so like, how do you guys think about just like neutrality when it comes to supporting the liquid restaking token ecosystem from the Eigen Labs perspective?

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, you know, it's not only for liquid restaking tokens. This is the case for AVSS. Let's say there are three bridges which you want to build or like, you know, finality layers and all of these things. So we face this kind of a problem. So one of the ways, at least we want to minimize our own role in many of these processes. So we want to create external committees, which will make a lot of the decisions over time. For example, onboarding, right? Onboarding AVSS. We don't want to say, oh, I like this AVS more, therefore we're going to onboard it, but not that AVS.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  Rather, the onboarding process should be merit neutral, but risk sensitive, right? You cannot onboard based on, oh, this is going to be a bigger AVS, that is going to be a smaller AVS. Instead, it is onboarded based on this is going to be more risk, this is going to be less risk. So, so it's risk aware, merit neutral kind of onboarding process. But it is a hard, hard trade off because we have to also make sure that at least some people build. If nobody builds, it's like, you can have all the, you can be credibly neutral if, when nobody's building. So it is a hard trade off. I think Layer Ones, many of them had to do this. Ethereum itself had to do it. Do you support Uniswap or not support Uniswap?

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  And, you know, there's a position of the protocol, there's a position of people and, you know, Eigen Labs itself is a big team that are like, you know, it is complex. So I, I don't, I'm not going to pretend I have like some great answer here. But we're trying to both make sure that projects build on top of Eigenlayer, but also make sure that other projects don't feel like there's a barrier to come and build on top of Eigenlayer. So that's, that's how we split the difference here.

• 1:24:06David Hoffman?

  Teddy, over as a research engineer at Eigenlayer, one of the things that excites me about Eigenlayer is that it can spawn an entirely new dimension of crypto economic networks. The way I kind of articulate Eigenlayer is that we were living once upon a time in flatland space when all we have were, all we had were blockchains. And now with Eigenlayer, we're entering like a more, a third dimension, a new dimension of cryptoeconomic trust networks. And I would imagine that that is a fantastic nerd snipe for you over as a research engineer. Just the success of Eigenlayer depends on many networks coming on board. And so I'm sure you like you engage with some of these networks. Some people have ideas about networks that could be built. There are stealth networks

• 1:24:50David Hoffman?

  being built, I'm sure, because that's just how it works. Can you kind of just like, give us a vibe, a charcuterie board, a taste test of all of these like different kinds of networks that maybe you're working with or just in discussions with. Are we going to see millions of networks in the fullness of time, or maybe just like 10 to 100 networks in the fullness of time? Like, what can you say about like all the yields that these networks are going to spit off? Are they going to be great? Are they going to be little? Just kind of like, give us a taste of the future for Eigenlayer in 2024?

• 1:25:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Sreeram has this slide in his talks where he goes over, there's like five different categories of ABSs and probably more. We've got coprocessors, oracle networks, obviously a variety of DA layers. There's going to be a Cambrian explosion in the same way that there was with L1s and other sort of general token-based cryptoeconomic schemes.

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, one way of thinking about it is like, how many SaaS services exist on like the cloud era? Like, people think about modules, they think about like, oh, there's data availability, there's settlement, or whatever. But if you look at like, you know, if you took a, put a similar hat, you may say, on a cloud, there may be like one database platform and one virtual machine. Like, there'll be two, two layers. But actually, if you look at the cloud, you'll see like, thousands of successful SaaS companies, software as a service companies. And it's because, you know, as a civilization, I think our tendency is to hyper-specialize. Because when we specialize, there is like, a lot of value in specialization and

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  Like composition, right? I specialize and I just do, oh, a database for games for this, like, you know, for games which are coming from like AAA studios or whatever, like something very, very, or just for like a database for games for the Android engine, right? Like something super special. And but that itself is a big enough and interesting enough market that somebody will build that kind of a special layer. So that's our long range thesis is there's going to be like lots and lots of modules, just like there's lots and lots of SaaS services.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  We can think of it as a new kind of financial market. Because, I don't know, if you look at, for example, bonds, bonds are, you know, a generalization of a loan, where money is actually changing hands over time. Restaking is different from that. Because money is not directly changing hands, it's enforcing a crypto economic set of incentives and scheme. But the, I guess, the the gravity of the invention of a generalization of this kind of financial instrument is on the same order of magnitude. We think that, you know, similar to how the the number of bytes

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  and kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes of coordination we're able to generate through blockchains and DA layers continues to grow, that that the number of crypto economically secured services will also grow.

• 1:28:23David Hoffman?

  All right, guys. Well, I've already learned quite a lot in this episode. I'm going to have to relearn this, rewatch this, re-listen to this to make sure I can understand some of Mike's questions and Sreeram's answers. Sreeram, I think you said mainnet sometime Q1, Q2 2024. Is that all of the details you can give us? And what else are you looking forward to in Eigenlayer in 2024?

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, the, um, we have an upcoming main and large in Q1, Q2. We will have, we'll expand the scope of, you know, uh, what kind of slashing and attributions that, that can be done. For example, we have this, uh, mechanism we call attributable security where you're not just getting this idea that, hey, you know, if my service goes wrong, X dollars will get slashed, but I will be able to redistribute specifically a portion of that, you know, X dollars. So combining the, the idea of pool security and attributable security and creating mechanisms where, you know, a particular AVS has a portion

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  of that pool as a specific attribution. That's something that we are expecting to launch also in 2024. We have, of course, EigenDA, which I think is going to be a very important and useful primitive for rollups. We have many partners launching rollup services like decentralized sequencing from Espresso. We have Alt Layer launching these, uh, uh, finalization and other, uh, services for rollups. We have major bridge partners like Polymer, uh, Lagrange, Wormhole, launching a bunch of different bridging services. Um, we are also excited about AI-related services coming up on Eigenlayer. Like, imagine you're sitting inside an Ethereum

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  contract and you can make a call and get an AI service and its answer certified with a certain amount of economic security so that if you take an economic action, you have protected till that amount of value. So you can, you can think of DeFi itself becomes more intelligent because now you have, you have this ability to get like, you know, much more computational resources at, on, on your disposal. This is the category of coprocess that Terry was referring to. So we're excited about all these, you know, cascading. No, there's, there's also other things. For example, that is MEV, which you know, value which can be controlled more by a protocol rather than MEV value necessarily going all to the validators. So an application can say, hey, you know,

• 1:30:57Speaker 00

  this group has to consensus in order to like certify the MEV and they will redistribute a portion of the MEV back to protocol. All these kinds of really interesting use cases coming up with Eigenlayer this year. So looking forward to encourage more builders to come on top of our platform, both as rollups on EigenDA, but also as building brand new services on Eigenlayer.

• 1:31:20David Hoffman?

  If people want to just learn more, get information, open up the docs, get started, Sreeram, where should they go? Eigenlayer.org.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's also like, you know, forums where we have like, you know, research discussions on the Eigenlayer system. There is a blog where we put up regularly material on new things. Also, the Eigenlayer Twitter handle, which points to all these different things over time.

• 1:31:46David Hoffman?

  Well, Sreeram, I think the evolution of restaking networks, AVS networks, is going to be one of the more fascinating things in 2024. And one of the reasons why I like it is it because it goes right down to the heart of ETH, which I think the monetary arc and development of ETH as a monetary asset, I think, is one of the most fascinating things in crypto. And Eigenlayer seems to be the next evolution on that story. So as a podcaster who likes interesting podcasts, I thank you for bringing this this evolution to the world. Teddy, Sreeram, thank you so much for coming on Bankless today.

• 1:32:20Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, David.

• 1:32:21David Hoffman?

  Thanks, Jess.

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  And Mike, our pleasure to be here.

• 1:32:23David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you know the deal. Crypto is risky, staking is risky, restaking is even riskier, but you know, it's probably more fun, too. You can lose what you put in. We're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.