Eigenlayer's mainnet launch enables developers to utilize Ethereum's security through AVS leasing, and early AVS-related projects demonstrate their technological innovation potential.
Author: NAIROLF AND THOR
Translation: Blockchain in Plain Language
On April 9th, one of the most anticipated events of the year occurred: Eigenlayer announced its mainnet launch, with eigenDA as the first official Active Verification Service (AVS). While traders and the cryptocurrency community immediately began looking for new stories in the market, let's take a step back and understand the importance of this headline news.
If you are completely unfamiliar with EigenLayer, it is a project that introduces the concept of "restaking." In simple terms, it allows anyone to leverage the trust and security of Ethereum without having to build their own system from scratch. In practice, EigenLayer's users restake their ETH. In doing so, they agree to provide security for another system outside of Ethereum, adding some penalty conditions to their staked ETH. Even if they correctly protect the Ethereum chain, if they fail to ensure the security of this system, their stake will be reduced or lost. EigenLayer's main goal is to lease Ethereum's security to other projects and become the first market for decentralized trust.
An efficient market requires the mutual development of sellers and buyers. In this context, sellers are EigenLayer users who restake through operators, and operators are entities that provide various services to buyers. Buyers are Active Verification Services (AVSs). In formal terms, it is defined as any system that requires its own distributed verification semantics for verification. In simpler terms, they are projects that use EigenLayer to enhance the overall security and functionality of their networks. AVSs essentially consume decentralized trust.
For new projects, launching security has always been a barrier that limits innovative development. EigenLayer promises to change this situation. Over the next few months, we expect to see a large number of AVSs launched, ushering in a new era of innovation in our beloved cryptocurrency field. Let's explore some of the most anticipated AVSs.
1. EigenDA
EigenDA is EigenLayer's data availability solution and the first AVS to be officially launched. Similar to other alternative data availability layers such as Celestia or NearDA, EigenDA utilizes Rollup technology to achieve significantly reduced transaction costs and higher throughput. EigenDA, with scalability, security, and decentralization as its main pillars, provides a design that can offer a write throughput of 10 MB per second. For reference, Ethereum currently only provides a throughput of 83.33 KB per second and plans to increase it to 1.3 MB/s through DankSharding. EigenDA has attracted the attention of numerous projects, including Mantle, Polymer, LayerN, and Movement Labs. In addition, RaaS projects such as Caldera and AltLayer have seamlessly integrated EigenDA into their technical stack, allowing developers to deploy Rollup technology using EigenDA with just one click.
2. AltLayer
AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to jointly develop innovative restaking Rollup technology. These Rollup technologies utilize EigenLayer's restaking mechanism to enhance decentralization, security, interoperability, and efficiency. The restaking Rollup technology includes three different AVSs: VITAL for decentralized verification, MACH for fast transaction finality, and SQUAD for decentralized ordering. These features can be integrated on demand and even into existing Rollup technologies. Xterio Games became the first to utilize MACH in restaking Rollup technology, providing almost instant transaction confirmation, which is essential for projects like Xterio focused on AI games. Through MACH, Xterio will be able to ensure transaction finality in less than 10 seconds without compromising security.
3. Omni
Omni is a blockchain that securely connects all Rollup technologies through the restaking mechanism. With the emergence of hundreds of different Rollup technologies, Ethereum users and their funds are increasingly dispersed across isolated ecosystems. This dispersion leads to a suboptimal state and poor user experience. Omni's goal is to unify all these Rollup technologies. With Omni, developers can program across multiple Ethereum Rollup technologies as if they were working within a single state machine. Applications built using Omni EVM can default to exist in all Ethereum Rollup technologies, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate all of Ethereum's liquidity and user base into their applications without restrictions. Omni's use of Eigenlayer is particularly interesting: it not only relies on the OMNI governance token to protect the security of the Omni network, but also incorporates restaked ETH to enhance its network's security. We expect that in the near future, double (or even multi-asset) restaking will become increasingly popular.
4. Lagrange
Lagrange is building a modular zero-knowledge (ZK) coprocessor, providing trustless off-chain computation. When developers perform heavy on-chain computations, such as querying the number of Pudgy Penguins held by a specific address, they encounter a problem: high fees. Through Lagrange's ZK coprocessor, this data becomes more accessible and cheaper. In practice, queries are moved off-chain, undergo zero-knowledge proofs, and are verified in contracts. This ultimately makes it possible to develop more complex and data-rich applications, such as games. Because Lagrange is designed to be chain-agnostic, it plays an important role in cross-chain interoperability, and its integration with EigenLayer strengthens the security of these interactions.
5. Aligned Layer
Aligned Layer is the first general verification layer for Ethereum built on EigenLayer. In practice, Rollup technologies send their proofs to Aligned Layer instead of Ethereum. Aligned Layer verifies these proofs, aggregates them into one proof, and then sends it to Ethereum. It is important to emphasize that what is stored on Ethereum is not the proof itself, but the verification results executed by Aligned Layer. This approach brings several advantages: it is cheaper, increases interoperability, and most importantly, it allows developers to use any proof system, even if it is not compatible with Ethereum. By accepting various proof systems, developers can now choose the system that best suits their needs, whether in terms of speed, proof size, development difficulty, or security, without worrying about compatibility with Ethereum or cost. Although verification results are published on Ethereum, the actual proofs are published to DA layers (data availability layers) such as Celestia or EigenDA. Regarding Aligned Layer's use of EigenLayer, they will adopt the restaking mechanism to ensure the security of the entire verification process through restaked ETH and future governance tokens.
6. Hyperlane
Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer that enables permissionless connections with any blockchain. Its main competitive advantage lies in its permissionless nature. Unlike needing to seek support for your chain/rollup through cross-chain messaging protocols like Wormhole, Hyperlane allows you to use its services without permission. Specifically, this means that you only need to deploy a few smart contracts to connect your chain to other chains using Hyperlane. In February 2023, Hyperlane announced plans to develop EigenLayer AVS to enable cross-chain application developers to securely send messages from Ethereum to other chains supported by Hyperlane.
Witness Chain Witness Chain claims to be a unified DePIN coordination layer for isolating the DePIN economy. In practice, Witness Chain enables DePIN projects to transform unverified physical attributes, such as physical location and network capabilities, into verified digital proofs. These proofs can then be verified/challenged and used by different applications or the DePIN chain itself to build new products and services. This ultimately allows mutual connections between DePINs, establishing an end-to-end decentralized infrastructure supply chain. Witness Chain has had over 20 DePIN projects become part of the coordination layer and ensures its state verification process through EigenLayer operators.
Eoracle Eoracle is a modular and programmable oracle network. You may already have some understanding of oracle networks, but to briefly remind, an oracle network is a way to bring off-chain data onto the chain. Whether it's NBA scores, weather data, or stock prices, the blockchain cannot access them without reliable oracles. Eoracle utilizes EigenLayer to build an oracle network, or a network of people who view data, reach consensus on its accuracy, and record it on the chain. Instead of building this network of people, or if you prefer, nodes, Eoracle will use EigenLayer's operators to perform this task. It's interesting to see how this Ethereum-native solution competes with Chainlink and others.
Drosera Drosera is an event response protocol that uses hidden security intent to restrict and mitigate attacks. In simple terms, Drosera is a security market where DeFi protocols can set a trap, or if you prefer, a security threshold, to determine whether to trigger an emergency response. When the emergency conditions are met, operators execute the protocol's on-chain emergency response through consensus. For example, Nomad can set a Drosera trap to detect a 30% TVL (Total Value Locked) loss within 1 block and prevent the continued draining of Nomad Pools during a $190 million attack.
Ethos Ethos provides an integrated solution that allows Cosmos chains to seamlessly leverage the security of restaked ETH. Building a new Cosmos chain comes with costs: setting up a validator network. Projects must convince validators and users to hold and stake the native token. To overcome this barrier, Ethos has established the Guardians Chain. It is a Layer 1 verified by EigenLayer's operators, serving as a secure coordination layer. Projects looking to launch validator sets for their L1 can hire these Guardians as virtual validators and benefit from Ethereum's security. You can think of this process as a flow: Ethos provides security from Ethereum through EigenLayer, and Ethos offers security for any Cosmos L1 that wants to avoid the process of launching its own validator set.
Conclusion EigenLayer AVS offers endless possibilities. This article only scratches the surface of what they can achieve, and there will be more innovations in the future. Feel free to share your favorite AVS in the comments below; we look forward to hearing your opinions!
Source: The Eigenlayer AVS Landscape: 10 Protocols
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