EigenLayer Ecosystem Unraveled
🔍🌐 Uncovering the Potential of EigenLayer: A Comprehensive Exploration 🌐🔍
EigenLayer Ecosystem Unraveled
With the EigenLayer operator and AVS testnet recently going live, and over $1.74bn in total value locked (TVL) we are starting to get a first glimpse at what exactly the restaking economy will look like. EigenLayer isn’t the most easy to understand concept when first met with its innovative new approach to pooled security offerings, but I’ll explain that in this piece as well, along with all the moving parts that go along with it.
But if you don’t have the time to read all this, I’ll be brief. The bull case for EigenLayer is simple: We have just seen approval for a Bitcoin ETF, next up is ETH. Once that is approved, we will see an increased demand for staked ETH as well. More staked ETH lowers the natural staking rewards rate for the entire network, thus EigenLayer will become the canonical blackhole for onchain liquidity and yield.
What EigenLayer is and why it matters
Ethereum has received incredible adoption over the last few years and has given users the confidence to be settle over $835bn in the last 12 months alone, and well over a trillion throughout its entire existence. As Ethereum adoption continues to grow at the layer 2 level, the value prop of Ethereum’s settlement layer is proliferating, and EigenLayer will capitalize on this even further. With over $72bn of staked Ethereum securing the network, EigenLayer is looking to build a second layer of security on the network via “restaking”. Restaking is simply using staked ETH to form another layer of security on top of the existing Ethereum network. ETH can either be restaked natively or in the form of a liquid staking token (LST) - a liquid receipt token representing a claim on the user’s underlying ETH and staking yield, such as stETH.
What is Restaked Capital Used For?
When restaking ETH through EigenLayer, the user has a choice to delegate to an operator. If you’ve ever used any Cosmos ecosystem based project for staking, this is a very similar structure. An operator is an actor within the network who maintains technical oversight of supporting various applications that are secured by EigenLayer, referred to as actively validated services (AVS). An operator has their choice of which AVS’ to support, and the more AVS they support, the more staking rewards are directed back to them, as these services are paying for the EigenLayer security.
Who are the operators and how should users decide where to delegate their stake?
When a user is looking to delegate their restaked ETH, they should keep a few things in mind. Personally, the primary risks I’m concerned about are slashing and operational risk, which can be primarily attributed to maintaining uptime across all the various AVS they support. When looking at which operators are servicing on the EigenLayer testnet, you’ll see some familiar names such as: Figment, Blockdeamon, Chorus One, P2P, Google Cloud, Kiln, etc. These are large institutional validators which operate in an incredibly competitive environment, where uptime is usually around 99.99% because there is such little room for error when handling large delegations.
On the other hand you have some smaller, less known operators (again, similar to the Cosmos ecosystem). These smaller operators will likely attempt to differentiate themselves by supporting as many AVS as possible, thus driving up their potential restaking rewards to delegates, while the institutional validators may lag behind as they have strict requirements such as having one dev ops engineer for every two protocols or AVS, as a standard. While the latter is likely a more sustainable model, individual and smaller operators within the EigenLayer ecosystem are essential to maintaining a robust and decentralized ethos. This is a very important risk to consider as EigenLayer goes live. If a user is unfamiliar with who to delegate to, then they may just end up choosing whichever operator is offering the highest projected rewards rate. Realistically, if a user is re-staking their ETH, they are probably already quite comfortable with taking risk, so this would further validate the idea they would choose where to delegate based on highest APY, but it is important to remember that higher reward infers higher associated risk.
Risk on Slashing
Slashing risk is something that often arises when discussing risks related to LSTs, and is mentioned a lot when folks discuss EigenLayer as well. But, how real is this risk versus the perception of it?
Let’s first examine how often slashing events have taken place on the beacon chain. Since the beacon chain produced its first block back on Dec 1st, 2020, we have only had 408 slashing events. 408 slashing events across 260k epochs, not bad at all.
Of all those slashing events, 387 were due to "Attestation Rule Offense" (double signing, etc). And 18 were due to "Proposer Rule Offense" (multiple block proposal in same slot, proposing block with invalid txns).
Also, its important to note that downtime for a validator (i.e. a power/internet outage does not indicate a slashing event). If you want to go deeper down that rabbit hole then I recommend these resources here.
In general, as long as Ethereum consensus client’s continue to function as they should, you likely won’t see large slashing events. However, slashing events differ on EigenLayer. Each AVS that deploys on EigenLayer will be allowed to implement their own custom slashing mechanisms. This means that restakers, operators, and LRT protocols should hopefully be aware of whatever slashing conditions may exist before supporting various AVS’.
What Services Will be Built on EigenLayer & What are they?
EigenDA
EigenDA is a decentralized data availability (DA) service built on Ethereum using EigenLayer restaking. EigenDA, developed by EigenLabs, will be the first actively validated service (AVS) on EigenLayer. DA has previously been just a part of the monolithic stack that projects inherited when building a protocol on whatever chain they choose to; Aave on Ethereum inherits Ethereum’s DA, and Jito on Solana inherits Solana’s DA. However, with Ethereum’s rollup centric roadmap now becoming a reality, there is now a relatively sizable market for DA. Today there are roughly 30-some odd rollups, but it’s not insane to think we will see thousands pop up in the next few years, especially as the cost and tools to deploy one continually become more economical.
This matters because today many L2s use Ethereum as their preferred DA layer due to its crypto-economic security guarantees. This has lead to extremely high and volatile costs, as rollups compete with all other Ethereum users for limited blockspace based on congestion pricing. For example, both Arbitrum and Optimism have spent tens of millions of dollars on calldata (data availability) costs on Ethereum year-to-date, with no consistency month-to-month. One of the primary value propositions of alternative DA providers is to dramatically lower these costs and give rollups greater predictability in their cost structure.
Additionally, EigenDA will bring some competition to Celestia, a recently launched modular blockchain who’s core product is providing DA services to rollups. Despite relatively lack luster fundamentals relative to valuation for Celestia, market participants have taken quite a liking to the new project.
Espresso
Total Raised: $33m
Espresso is developing a shared sequencer solution, utilizing restaking through EigenLayer, to foster rollup decentralization, enhance interoperability, and establish a robust, highly scalable data availability layer. This approach aims to optimize node utilization and capital efficiency, ensuring credible neutrality, security, and swift pre-confirmation in transaction validation. The restaking mechanism facilitates alignment between Layer-1 validators and the Layer-2 ecosystems they support. In a centralized sequencer, the majority of rollup value, such as fees and MEV, tends to be captured by the sequencer, posing potential centralization/security risks. Decentralizing the sequencer and involving Layer-1 validators in its operations addresses these concerns, significantly mitigating security risks associated with the potential malicious actions of Layer-1.
What I personally look forward to is how adoption for shared sequencer services plays out. The cost of operating a centralized sequencer for a chain like Arbitrum or Optimism seems to be fixed, but DA costs, computational power requirements, etc, continue to cheapen. The centralized sequencer is also a chief area for value accrual. Shared sequencer adoption for services like Espresso seem unlikely unless the larger rollups can still keep their value accrual internally, rather than have it leak elsewhere. Staking gov tokens to “secure” a “shared sequencer” and then receiving pro-rata rewards seems possible as well, and would bring more utility to otherwise “useless” L2 gov tokens. I imagine you could also see many smaller, nascent rollups leveraging Espresso and then perhaps larger L2’s would be pushed to “further decentralize” and adopt services like Espresso. Only time will tell here, but this is one of the most interesting areas to keep an eye on in my opinion.
Hyperlane
Total Raised: $18.5m
Hyperlane is developing a permissionless interoperability layer that aims to enable interchain composability, including native rollup bridges, inter-rollup communication, and multi-chain application architecture. It is bringing modular security derived through restaking via EigenLayer to enable permissionless, chain-agnostic application deployment to any environment.
So, what exactly does this mean it can do? The three main pre-built examples of what Hyperlane is capable of:
1) Warp Routes: allows for native, ERC20, and ERC721 tokens to move seamlessly across chains
2) Leverage interchain accounts (largely popularized by Stride) to make smart contract calls on remote chains. An interchain account is essentially opening up an account on another chain (i.e. opening up an Osmosis account while you are on Stride, or vice versa)
3) Interchain Queries: not terribly different from 2, but allows an account on one chain to make, or view calls on remote chains
LaGrange
Total Raised: $4m
Lagrange is building infrastructure for zk-based cross-chain state and storage proofs, introducing super-linear security facilitated by restaking through EigenLayer. This approach offers a robust primitive for dynamically scaling the underlying security of state proof generation, effectively overcoming the inherent security challenges that bridges encounter at scale. Lagrange State Committees, composed of EigenLayer restaked validators, validate the finality of proposed block state transitions submitted by optimistic rollups’ sequencers to Ethereum. These validated blocks are subsequently utilized to produce zero-knowledge state proofs using Lagrange's ZK MapReduce proof system, and messaging or bridging protocols can leverage these proofs to establish a shared and permissionless zone of security for cross-chain state.
Alt Layer
Total Raised: $7.2m
AltLayer is developing Rollups-as-a-Service tools designed to efficiently scale execution at a significantly reduced cost. The platform introduces a flash rollup approach by utilizing EigenLayer validators, enabling swift and permissionless verification of state transitions.
I tried it out for myself and was pretty shocked at how easy it was to launch a rollapp. It literally took me less than 1 min to launch a generic rollup. Alt Layer also lets you select the transaction ordering format, Gas limit, block time, Native currency, etc. Of course, launching is the easy part, getting users is the hard part. Still, I think we can count of this process to get easier and easier, which is net-beneficial for a plethora of reasons.
Ethos
Total Raised: $N/A
Twitter | Website | Docs (N/A)
Ethos is the self described “ETH restake Hub for the Cosmos”. While there is very little known about this project given limited public information, my personal interpretation is that they will offer the same model as ATOM’s replicated security, otherwise known as interchain security. Realistically, the security as a service market has a massive TAM. This is because DeFi protocols built as app-chains need to provide a reasonably sufficient amount of crypto-economic security so they don’t run into scaling issues. Additionally, ATOM has had some early success stories with chains like Stride, Noble, and Neutron all leveraging replicated security from the Cosmos Hub. At the time of writing, the Cosmos Hub provides $2.52bn of crypto economic security; for perspective Ethereum offers approximately 29x more security than the Cosmos Hub. In fact, it would take roughly 1 million ETH to match ATOM’s crypto-economic security levels. This isn’t a far-fetched idea to think that Ethos could be very successful in capturing Cosmos SDK based app chains and allowing them to leverage EigenLayer’s security, if that is their intended goal. Using current levels, EigenLayer would only need to 1.5x it’s TVL to match ATOM’s staked security level (unrealistically assuming price levels stay constant). Also, it’s important to mention that EigenLayer deposits are currently capped at 200k per each LST, with the total LST supply north of $24bn and growing, this is completely reasonable to think Ethos could find success. In my opinion, the main hurdle or barrier to entry would come down to “alignment”, the tribal tendency to lean towards unity, coherence, or agreement among the members of an existing community, even if it may outweigh economic or other objectively rational logic. Only time will truly tell.
Heimdall Labs (now known as Aethos)
Total Raised: N/A
Twitter | Website | Docs (N/A) | Demo Day Video
Described as a “decentralized protocol for crypto projects to implement compliance policies on chain”. There is very little public information about this project, but I think their goal is self explanatory and virtuous.
Near
What? Yeah, Near. No, they aren’t pivoting, but they are building a fast finality layer to Ethereum rollups, in hopes of boosting their efficiency and scalability via improved liquidity and composability. This is one of the more interesting partnerships in my opinion, especially given its an already well-known participant in the entire crypto ecosystem that has chosen to build an AVS, while the rest are relatively new projects.
Omni
Total Raised: $18m
Omni aims to be the unification infrastructure for Ethereum's rollup ecosystem. Omni is creating interoperability infrastructure to act as a unification layer for all rollups that enables the transmission of data from one to another. It is building on EigenLayer to derive security for future use cases including cross-rollup stablecoins and primitives that can aggregate liquidity and facilitate rapid and cheap communication between rollups.
Drosera Network
Total Raised: N/A
Twitter | Website | Docs (N/A)
Dorsia? Nobody goes there anymore. Jokes aside, Drosera is the first and only decentralized incident response protocol that leverages hidden security intents to contain and mitigate exploits. They will host a security marketplace where protocols can set a Trap that determines whether an emergency response should be triggered. The Trap is a smart contract which defines emergency conditions but never deployed on-chain. Drosera hides a protocol's security intents. Drosera Operators monitor protocols by evaluating a Trap's emergency conditions for every new block. When emergency conditions are met, Operators execute a protocol's on-chain emergency response upon consensus. Nothing seems to be live yet and full docs are not yet available to the public, but this seems like an interesting project to be built as an AVS, but it’s not entirely clear why this needs to be an AVS.
Witness Chain
Total Raised: N/A
Witness Chain is building a watchtower for optimistic rollups: a credibly neutral node set watching out for whether rollup state commitments are correct and triggered fault alerts. This network, serving as the first line of defense for rollups, derives cryptoeconomic security from Eigenlayer. Optimistic rollups, a key component of L2 scalability on Ethereum, operate by conducting the majority of transactions off-chain and settling them on the Ethereum mainnet when necessary, under the optimistic assumption of transaction validity. The Witness Chain Watchtower network enhances this process by providing an independent, decentralized layer of security. It ensures the integrity of off-chain transactions by utilizing nodes that do not require trust to raise alarms in case of potential discrepancies. These watchtowers operate based on Proof of Diligence, are decentralized through Proof of Location, and are programmable, allowing applications to be built on top through transaction tracers. Deployed on Eigenlayer and backed by Ethereum, these watchtowers ensure trustless and reward-driven security. In essence, the decentralized watchtower network enhances the safety of rollups, marking a new era of Blockchain Trust.
The Rise of Liquid Staking Tokens (LRTs)
With the rise of all these AVS, and likely plenty more to come in the future, the demand for re-staking will be driven even higher as yields continue to naturally climb. However, there is one obvious drawback when someone chooses to restake their ETH in EigenLayer; opportunity cost of capital.
Enter Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRT). You may not like the idea of LRTs, but they are inevitable. We know there is demand for LSTs, and it is likely the same exact product will find demand in the form of an LRT. People will want to be able to have the best of both worlds once again; receive yield and use their staked capital elsewhere in DeFi.
To date there are many different teams working on launching an LRT
Swell - rswETH
Kelp DAO (Stader Labs) - rsETH
Puffer Finance - pufETH
Inception - instETH
Genesis - genETH
Rio - reETH
Renzo - ezETH
Restake Finance DAO - rstETH
EtherFi - eETH
Let’s dive into what each is attempting to do in more depth to better understand the potential differentiation.
Swell
Website | Twitter | Docs
Swell will work by depositing EigenLayer whitelisted LSTs to Swell’s platform (stETH, rETH, cbETH, etc) and you will then be able to mint Swell’s Liquid Restaking Token, rswETH.
Kelp DAO
Restakers stake their LST to mint rsETH tokens, signifying fractional ownership of the underlying assets. The rsETH contracts then distribute the deposited tokens among different Node Operators within the Kelp DAO. Rewards accrue from various services to the rsETH contracts, and the price of the rsETH token reflects the underlying prices of these rewards and staked tokens. Restakers have the option to swap their rsETH tokens for other assets on AMMs, ensuring instant liquidity, or redeem underlying assets through the rsETH contracts. Additionally, restakers can further leverage their rsETH tokens in DeFi for expanded opportunities.
Kelp DAO was one of the first players to announce their plans for an LRT, back in late summer of 2023, and that early foresight allowed them to go-to-market before most of their competition, amassing an impressive TVL of $150m (65k ETH), making them the 70th largest DeFi protocol by TVL. Going from $0-$150m in less than a month tells you everything you need to know about how much capital there will be restaked through LSTs. Also, the TVL would likely be even higher if the stETH cap of 200k set by EigenLayer wasn’t already hit.
We’ve seen with past LST projects, that being first to market can be crucial, but we are still in the very early innings.
Puffer Finance
Objectively, Puffer Finance probably has the greatest ambitions out of all the other LRT projects. Puffer Finance is aiming to make validating on the Ethereum network more accessible and profitable for individuals running nodes at home. It contributes to the security and decentralization of Ethereum by providing a native liquid staking protocol built on EigenLayer. The Puffer Protocol allows node operators to be allocated Ethereum (ETH) to launch a proof-of-stake validator and the opportunity to restake to operate various web3 infrastructure services on top of EigenLayer. Participants, called Puffers, stake ETH to receive pufETH, a liquid staking token that accrues value from validator and restaking rewards. Governance of the protocol is conducted through the Puffer DAO, which utilizes the PUFI token for voting.
Given Puffer Finance also exists as an EigenLayer operator due to its structure, they have the opportunity to make the protocol robust from a first principals perspective. We know slashing can be an issue, especially with Puffer’s unique design, relying on the L1 validator to not be slashed, and then the EigenLayer operators to not be slashed either, Puffer has proposed a unique solution to avoid slashing. Puffer Finance leverages “secure-signer”, a remote-signing tool that manages validator keys on behalf of the consensus client. To prevent slashing events via double-signing, the secure-signer generates and safeguards all BLS validator keys in its encrypted and tamper-proof memory. Additionally, whenever the consensus client passes secure-signer blocks or attestations, the following must hold true:
proposal check:
slot > previous slotattestation check:
source epoch ≥ previous source epochattestation check:
target epoch > previous target epoch
It’s a simple improvement that can make a big difference.
Inception (instETH)
InceptionLRT aims to support LST tokens supported by EigenLayer. These tokens provide a gateway for restaking and unlocking their full potential on Layer 2 chains, boosting liquidity and enabling participation in the DeFi ecosystem. There will also be token (ING) that appears will be used for incentivizing liquidity, which roughly 50% of the supply is carved out for.
Rio Restaking (reETH)
Website | Twitter | Docs
While not much is publicly available with regards to how Rio will structurally work, they do note their LRT will have the ticker reETH. From the current set up, it appears Rio will support deposits of ETH, stETH, rETH, and cbETH - similar to all their other competitors.
While little is known about the intricacies of how their LRT will function, it seems they have already locked in support from a few key institutional grade operators: Chorus One, Hashkey Cloud, Unit 410, Figment, and Kiln.
Renzo (ezETH)
Renzo seems to have a reasonable amount of product differentiation with regards to their LRT. While many LRTs seem to take a more simple approach of just re-staking in general, Renzo aims to optimize yield for their LRT through different strategies. Strategies will vary depending on which AVS’s make the most economic sense to secure.
Renzo also differentiates themselves with a few key partnerships with :
Figment - a sizable node operator on the Ethereum network, making up 320k ETH (2.21% of all staked ETH), 6th largest operator by stake amount
Gauntlet - a blockchain services company known for DAO Risk Management
Halborn - a reputable auditor in the industry. Halborn’s audit of Renzo can be found here.
Immunefi - a platform for bug bounties. Renzo’s bug bounty program can be found here.
Sommelier - a vault strategy, yield optimization, Cosmos SDK chain.
and Balancer, Seven Seas Capital, and Wormhole
Restake Finance (rstETH)
Restake Finance describe themselves as “The first modular restaking platform”, and they will have a similar product to the others described above. One of their differentiating aspects is that they will allow users to select which AVS they wish to support. They will offer either support between 1 and all of them. They also mentioned they will have the RSTK token, which will be able to govern the protocol, boost their yields, and share the protocol’s rewards. While protocol mechanisms are a bit unclear at this time, this still appears to be an interesting attempt to differentiate themselves via their token.
Ether Fi (rstETH)
Ether.fi is a unique platform for Ethereum staking, offering a service where users can stake ETH and receive eETH in return. This eETH is a liquid staking token that can be used in DeFi applications and earns staking rewards. Ether.fi emphasizes the decentralization of Ethereum through its Operation Solo Staker and allows stakers to maintain control over their keys, reducing counterparty risk. The platform collaborates with EigenLayer to enable additional rewards through re-staking and has partnerships with various DeFi protocols. Ether.fi also provides opportunities for users to run their own validator nodes.
Concluding Thoughts on LRTs
When looking forward, the future seems bright for EigenLayer. However, it’s not without its challenges. While there is ample demand for increased yield from restakers, it's not entirely clear that people will continue to choose building an AVS instead of taking other routes (i.e. building a rollup, appchain, or just deploying directly onto mainnet Ethereum). This could be potentially mitigated by builders being lured to EigenLayer as they know there is abundant attention from users. However, its important to note that the initial batch of AVS launching are mainly service oriented and their overall go-to-market and token strategies are yet to be fully explored. It is reasonable to think that if one AVS can crack the code on how to properly launch and retain users, then many more would follow suit.
As for liquid restaking tokens, they seem poised to drive a wealth of restaking capital to AVS’s, but as mentioned above, there may be a mismatch between the amount of restaked capital seeking yield and the amount of AVS paying rent back to Eigenlayer for their security. Additionally, there is very little product differentiation amongst the roughly 10 players that will be fighting for market share simultaneously when the EigenLayer deposit caps are lifted again, or when the mainnet goes live. It is likely that at the beginning it will come down to a few key things that may set winners apart from losers:
1) Liquidity Incentives
LRT’s will likely emit their governance token to people who choose to restake with them. This is the kind of thing that needs to work at launch, and ensure users and their staked capital sticks around. Otherwise, they may have difficulty getting off the ground if their governance token is helplessly farmed into oblivion, many such cases.
2) Perceived Trust in Brand & Team via Marketing
Many people are likely to still be unaware of the nuances associated with all the different LRT projects. It’s my hope this article has been helpful in understanding the initial, planned differences amongst the multitude of LRTs that will be hitting the market at the same time.
3) Perceived Trust in Brand & Team via Deposits
Liquidity is one hell of a moat. What matters most for an LST is how liquid it is. What this means in practice: how well can the LRT be used in the rest of DeFi. This entails: liquidity depth in dexes, how many people are maintaining the peg and trading away discounts or premiums via arbitrage, how many lending protocols it is used in, and how many other miscellaneous DeFi use cases are there.
Rollups Reshaped
Along with the launch of EigenDA, there will be a plethora of rollups adopting the new data availability solution, drastically lowering costs when compared to Ethereum’s. An in-depth review of all these rollups is outside the scope of this article, but I will provide a brief overview of each with some links to learn more.
Caldera
Total Raised: $9m
Caldera functions as a platform for deploying rollups, allowing the creation of high-performance, customizable, application-specific rollups using the Arbitrum Nitro and Optimism Bedrock frameworks.
Each Caldera rollup is equipped with efficient RPC nodes, a block explorer, a data indexer, and a bridge interface to the settlement chain. Furthermore, Caldera rollups have integrations with over 40 Web3 infrastructure providers.
Celo
Total Raised: $65m (last raise in 2021)
Celo, formally a general purpose Layer 1 blockchain has now pivoted to a rollup model, and will leverage EigenDA for data availability. A lot of change is being undertaken, and I would recommend starting here to understand all the changes taking place.
Layer N
Total Raised: $5m + Undisclosed amount in strategic round
Layer N is a newly introduced Layer 2 solution tailored for financial applications on the Ethereum network, positioned to compete with established traditional financial networks. It functions as a network of rollup instances meticulously crafted to provide exceptional performance, facilitate native inter-rollup shared liquidity and communication, and enhance the overall user and developer experience. On Layer N, developers have the flexibility to construct applications within a customized execution environment or on the public Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) instance, benefitting from significantly reduced execution latencies, increased throughput, negligible transaction fees, and the ability to seamlessly compose between different rollups.
Mantle
Total Raised: N/A
Mantle Network is an Ethereum L2 scalability solution designed for financial applications. EVM compatibility ensures easy adoption, and its modular architecture combines optimistic rollups with innovative data availability. Leveraging Ethereum's validator set, Mantle offers advantages like canonical bridging, censorship resistance, and fund recovery. With lower gas fees, reduced latency, and improved throughput, it provides an efficient alternative to Ethereum L1. The platform's modular approach separates execution, consensus, and settlement processes, and features a centralized sequencer with additional modules for correctness and backup. Fraud proofs validate transactions, while data availability is addressed through Mantle DA, offering cost savings. For those starting, support is available from the growth team, and essential information is provided in the documentation and developer tutorials sections.
Movement
Total Raised: 3.4m
Movement Labs is building a modular framework to build and deploy Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. Move builders are currently forced to decide between monolithic, low-liquidity, and centralized chains (Aptos, Sui). Movement Labs enables builders to natively tap into large liquidity providers like BenQi and GMX through Avalanche Warp Messaging. Movement Labs offers services 100% compatible with any existing Aptos Move code (Sui Move coming) which means any Aptos protocol can simultaneously launch on Avalanche and inherit the liquidity and tooling for no extra cost. Move protocols can also expect to have interoperability and tap into the liquidity of traditionally-EVM protocols. Antidotally, ive heard a ton of developers and other more technical folks boast about how nice and friendly the Move language is. However, this hasn’t really been fully integrated into the ecosystems with the most mindshare (Ethereum, Solana, etc). And while Movement isn’t necessarily a rollup per say , they will allow for builders to tap into the DA service of their choice, such as EigenDA.
Polymer Labs
Total Raised: 3.6m
Twitter | Website | Docs: Soon
Polymer is the first modular IBC-based networking protocol. The Polymer chain will enable ZK-IBC connectivity across all integrated chains with a trust-minimized architecture based on light client state proof verification. Polymer believes in a multichain future connected primarily by one open-sourced, community-developed, and maintained industry standard, IBC x Polymer.
Polymer is an awesome team that’s quietly been building throughout the bear market. Their endgame plan is to support any flavor of IBC, on any type of chain. What does this mean in practice? Let’s first define IBC, otherwise as the inter blockchain communication protocol. IBC allows for seamless bridging and messaging between Cosmos SDK chains, and notably IBC-go, the most common implementation, has never been exploited. This is mainly due to the fact the protocol realizes this interoperability by specifying a set of data structures, abstractions, and semantics that can be implemented by any distributed ledger that satisfies a small set of requirements.
IBC has been crucial to the success of the Cosmos ecosystem thus far, having facilitated over a billion dollars in value transferred across Cosmos blockchains in the last 30 days alone. The IBC tech stack is thoroughly battled tested, and arguably one of the best pieces out of the entire crypto tech stack. Now Polymer is bringing that crucial piece of tech to the Ethereum ecosystem, just as it needs it now more than ever.
A rollup-centric future has been well telegraphed, but the worries of liquidity and user fragmentation are continuously being pushed. To exacerbate the problem a bit further, AVS have no canonical interoperability solution at this point in time. Thus, Polymer stands to capitalize on this fragmentation issue by bringing IBC to EigenLayer, Ethereum, and beyond.
Versatus
Total Raised: N/A
Versatus is partnering with EigenDA to bring the world's first stateless rollup to the Ethereum ecosystem. That is about all we know with regards to their EigenLayer partnership at this point. However, if you’re eager to dive deeper into their grand vision you can see their whitepaper here.
Closing Thoughts & Outlook
Overall, Ethereum has an incredible lead amongst other smart contract platforms, and EigenLayer may bolster that lead as they allow for the paradigm shift which is restaking to take place at scale, essentially eliminating the biggest hurdles blockchains face; bootstrapping a validator set. I’m excited to see this all of these projects launch, and who knows what other innovations we’ll see take place following the go-live. EigenLayer stands not merely as a technological leap, but as a beacon heralding the dawn of an uncharted and boundless era in Ethereum’s evolution.
Disclaimer: This Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
Brilliant way to showcase how, in a short time span, there's an entire ecosystem being built around a new concept. I can't recall anything that has attracted this much attention and demonstrated such a clear PMF.
It's a great article with perfect explanation of the EigenLayer and Ethereum ecosystems!