EigenLayer will have severe impact on the Ethereum network and wider crypto ecosystem at large.
11 takeaways from my conversation with brilliant Sreeram Kannan, Founder of EigenLayer 👇
EigenLayer extends Ethereum's crypto economic security beyond the narrow borders of EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), leveraging the existing trust network of Ethereum through ‘Restaking’.
Restaking is a new primitive in the Ethereum stack that creates additional reasons to get slashed on the same collateral.
EigenLayer enables an open market for network security where protocols (demand) and validators (supply) can self-determine how much pooled security to consume and provide.
Cashflow: Non-EVM apps/protocols can pay for their ETH security in their native token, and DApps can pay in arbitrary tokens.
EigenLayer consolidates fragmented, expensive capital pools back to Ethereum base layer to increase overall network (attack) security.
The pooling of assets could lead to further professionalization of validators and stakers, making validation services cheaper for the whole network, and reducing the infrastructure cost for a blockchain, which can sustain more applications that previously weren't economically feasible.
EigenLayer makes innovation easier and cheaper, b/c builders can focus on building instead of bootstrapping security over and over again (i.e. duplicated effort).
Before EigenLayer, operative efficiency gains DID NOT MATTER, b/c protocols are constrained by capital costs for security, not operational costs.