Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

In the early morning of April 30th, Beijing time, EigenLayer, the core project of the re-staking track, officially announced the coin issuance and airdrop plan — it is planned to officially start the token EIGEN airdrop application on May 10th.

In fact, even before EigenLayer's official announcement, community members had discovered some clues about the airdrop. First, several community users had opened a foundation account, Eigen Foundation, on the X platform. Multiple official accounts including Eigen Labs and EigenLayer, as well as founder Sreeram Kannan, have followed this account. The homepage introduction of this account includes the "eigenfoundation.org" domain name. Another community user found that Sub Domain Finder information shows that three subdomains have been created under the main domain "eigenfoundation.org," including "claims.eigenfoundation.org," which has a fairly obvious airdrop direction.

Perhaps due to the rapid fermentation of the above information, EigenLayer simply "didn't hide" and directly released the official announcement.

EIGEN Token Utility

According to the white paper published by Eigenlayer on GitHub, unlike common governance tokens, EIGEN is positioned as a general and verifiable "work token." The so-called "work token" refers to practical tokens that can be staked by participants to perform certain tasks (such as blockchain verification). If participants violate specific work commitments, the staked "work token" may be subject to confiscation (slash) penalties.

In the context of EIGEN, EIGEN staking is intended to complement ETH staking. It introduces a new mechanism to handle "subjective" errors that cannot be identified on the chain but still need to be penalized. In other words, Eigenlayer will support a complementary staking model between ETH and EIGEN. ETH staking is mainly used to solve objective consensus issues (roughly understood as whether nodes are doing something wrong), while EIGEN staking is mainly used to solve subjective economic benefit-related issues (roughly understood as whether nodes' actions are reasonable).

Through EIGEN staking, EigenLayer can ensure comprehensive verification capabilities to maintain the Ethereum mainnet consensus without forking. It is expected to unlock a series of powerful economically secure and previously impossible active verification services (AVS), activating new innovations in various areas such as oracles, decentralized applications, databases, AI, game virtual machines, intent and order matching, MEV engines, and prediction markets.

Token Supply and Distribution Mechanism

According to The Block, the total supply of EIGEN tokens at genesis will be 1.67 billion, with the specific allocation as follows.

45% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to the community, which will be further subdivided into airdrops (15%, which will be discussed in detail later), community plans (15%), and ecosystem development (15%).

29.5% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to investors, and 25% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to early contributors. The shares of investors and early contributors will be unlocked over three years, with the first year fully locked, followed by a gradual release at a rate of 4% per month over the next two years.

Airdrop Mechanism Detailed Explanation

For ordinary users, the most concerning issue at present is the airdrop situation. Eigenlayer has now opened the query page for the first phase of the first season's airdrop quota, and users can directly check their airdrop shares.

As mentioned above, Eigenlayer will distribute 15% of EIGEN tokens in the form of airdrops, and the first season's airdrop plan, which has been officially announced, will distribute 5% of EIGEN tokens. The snapshot time for the first season's airdrop plan is March 15, 2024, and the airdrop application period is from May 10 to September 7.

The first season's airdrop (Season 1) will be conducted in two phases, where the first phase (Phase 1) will distribute 90%, and the airdrop will be given to users who have directly restaked through EigenLayer or have restaked through a more complex interaction with EigenLayer (such as Pendle, Equilibrium). The second phase (Phase 2) will distribute 10% and will be given to users who have interacted with EigenLayer in a more complex manner. The second phase of the airdrop is expected to start one month later.

As for the subsequent second season and potential airdrop plans, Eigenlayer only mentioned that the second season is in progress, and users need to pay attention to official channels for specific information to be announced in the future.

EIGEN Circulation Issue

It is worth emphasizing that EigenLayer clearly stated in the white paper that in order to achieve full decentralization, EIGEN tokens will be in a non-transferable state in the initial stage of application.

According to official documents, it is expected that this non-transferable state will last for several months, until "community discussions on the complementary staking mechanism of EIGEN," "activation of payment and confiscation mechanisms for AVS," and "widespread token distribution" are completed before activating the transfer function.

How is EIGEN Valued?

As a core and underlying project in the re-staking track, EIGEN's valuation obviously has a very broad imagination, especially in the case where upper-layer LRT protocols have tens of billions of dollars in FDV.

Currently, Aevo has listed EIGEN for pre-market trading at $10.3 at the time of writing, which may serve as a potential reference.

Currently, due to the limited trading hours of this trading market on Aevo and the relatively low trading volume of pre-market trading, this value cannot accurately represent the true performance of EIGEN before it is listed and the transfer function is unlocked. Perhaps all the answers will only be revealed in a few months.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。