Author: nairolf, crypto researcher; Thor, blockchain analyst; Translation: Jinse Finance xiaozou
On April 9, one of the most anticipated events of the year took place: EigenLayer announced the launch of the mainnet, and EigenDA was the first official active verification service (AVS). While everyone can't wait to pay attention to the new market narrative, let's take a step back and really understand the importance of this event.
Introduction
If you are completely unfamiliar with EigenLayer, then you need to know that it was this project that introduced the "restaking" re-staking mechanism. In short, it allows anyone to take advantage of the trust and security of Ethereum without having to build their own trust and security from scratch. In practice, users of EigenLayer stake their ETH for the second time. At the bottom layer, they agree to protect another system outside of Ethereum, thereby adding several penalty conditions to their staked ETH. If they fail to secure this system, even if they secure the Ethereum chain correctly, their stake will be slashed — or even wiped out. EigenLayer is focused on renting out Ethereum’s security to other projects, establishing itself as the first decentralized trust marketplace.
An effective market thrives on buyers and sellers. In this case, sellers are EigenLayer users who re-stake their ETH through Operators, entities that provide various services to buyers. Buyers, on the other hand, are AVS (Active Validation Services). In formal terms, AVS are defined as any system that requires its own distributed validation semantics for validation. More simply, they are projects that use EigenLayer to enhance their overall network security and functionality. AVS inherently rely on decentralized trust.
Booting security has long been a barrier for new projects, limiting innovation. EigenLayer promises to change that narrative. In the coming months, we expect to see a surge in AVS launches, ushering in a new era of innovation for our beloved world of crypto. Let's explore some of the most anticipated AVS.
1. EigenDA
EigenDA is EigenLayer's data availability solution and the first AVS ever put into use. Just like other optional data availability layers (such as Celestia or NearDA), rollups using EigenDA will benefit from significantly reduced transaction costs and higher throughput. With scalability, security, and decentralization as its main pillars, EigenDA has a design that can achieve 10 MB/s write throughput. To put this in perspective, Ethereum currently provides a write throughput of only 83.33 KB/s, which will be able to increase to 1.3 MB/s through DankSharding. Currently, EigenDA has attracted the attention of many projects, including Mantle, Polymer, LayerN, and Movement Labs. In addition, RaaS projects like Caldera and AltLayer have seamlessly integrated EigenDA, allowing developers to deploy rollups using EigenDA with just one click.
2. AltLayer
AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to develop their innovative re-staking rollups. These rollups leverage EigenLayer's re-staking mechanism to enhance decentralization, security, interoperability, and efficiency. There are three different AVS for re-staking rollups: VITAL for decentralized verification, MACH for fast transaction confirmation, and SQUAD for decentralized sorting. These features can be integrated on demand or even into existing rollups. Xterio Games is the first re-staking rollup to use MACH, providing near-instant transaction confirmations - an indispensable feature for AI-focused gaming projects like Xterio. With MACH, Xterio will be able to ensure final confirmation in less than 10 seconds without any sacrifice or compromise.
3. Omni
Omni is a blockchain designed to securely connect all rollups by using re-staking. With hundreds of different rollups, Ethereum users and their capital are fragmented into increasingly isolated ecosystems. This fragmentation leads to suboptimal states and poor user experience. Omni aims to unify all rollups. With Omni, developers can program across multiple Ethereum rollups as if they were working on a single state machine. By default, applications built with Omni EVM can span all Ethereum rollups, enabling developers to integrate the full liquidity and user base of Ethereum into their applications without any restrictions. The way Omni utilizes EigenLayer is particularly interesting: it not only uses the Omni governance token to secure the Omni network, but also combines re-staking ETH to strengthen its network security. We expect that dual (or even multi-asset) investments will become increasingly popular in the near future.
4. Lagrange
Lagrange is building a modular ZK coprocessor that provides trustless off-chain computing. When developers perform heavy on-chain calculations, such as querying the number of Pudgy Penguins held by an address, they encounter a problem that the fees are too high. With the Lagrange ZK coprocessor, this data becomes more accessible and less expensive. In practice, queries are moved off-chain, executed, then zk-proven, and then verified in the contract. This ultimately makes it possible to develop more complex and data-rich applications, such as games. Because Lagrange is designed to be chain-independent, it plays an important role in cross-chain interoperability, and integration with EigenLayer strengthens the security of these interactions.
5. Aligned Layer
Aligned Layer is the first Ethereum general verification layer built on top of EigenLayer. In practice, rollups send their proofs to Aligned Layer instead of Ethereum. Aligned Layer verifies multiple proofs and aggregates them into one, which is then sent to Ethereum. It is important to know that it is not the proof that is stored on Ethereum, but the verification result performed by Aligned Layer. This approach has several advantages: lower cost, improved interoperability, and most importantly, it allows developers to use any proof system, even if it is not compatible with Ethereum. By accepting a variety of proof systems, developers can now choose the system that best suits their needs in terms of speed, proof size, ease of development, and security considerations, without having to worry about Ethereum compatibility or cost. When the verification result is published to Ethereum, the real proof is published to a DA layer such as Celestia or EigenDA. Regarding Aligned Layer's use of EigenLayer, they will use re-staking to secure the entire verification process through a dual staking model of re-staking ETH and future governance tokens.
6. Hyperlane
Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer that supports permissionless connection with any blockchain. Its main competitive advantage lies in its permissionless nature. Instead of lobbying for your chain/rollup to be supported by cross-chain messaging protocols like Wormhole, Hyperlane allows you to use its services in a permissionless manner. Specifically, this means that you only need to deploy some smart contracts to connect your chain with other chains using Hyperlane. Hyperlane announced plans to develop EigenLayer AVS as early as February 2023, allowing cross-chain application developers to securely send messages from Ethereum to other chains supported by Hyperlane.
7. Witness Chain
Witness Chain defines itself as a DePIN coordination layer that unifies the loosely isolated DePIN economy. In practice, Witness Chain enables DePIN projects to convert unverified physical properties (such as physical addresses, network capacity, etc.) into verified digital proofs. These proofs can later be proved/challenged by different apps or DePIN chains and used to build new products and services. This will eventually allow DePINs to connect with each other and build an end-to-end supply chain for decentralized infrastructure. More than 20 DePIN projects have become part of the coordination layer, and Witness Chain ensures their state verification process through EigenLayer operators.
8. Eoracle
Eoracle is a modular programmable oracle network. You may already be familiar with what an oracle network is, but here's a little tip: it brings off-chain data to the chain. Whether it’s NBA scores, weather data, or stock prices, without a reliable oracle, the blockchain cannot access this data. Eoracle uses EigenLayer to build an oracle network, or a network of people who view data, agree on its accuracy, and record it on-chain. Instead of building a network of people (or nodes, if you prefer nodes), Eoracle will utilize EigenLayer operators to perform this task. It will be interesting to see how this Ethereum native solution competes with Chainlink.
9. Drosera
Drosera is an incident response protocol that uses hidden security intent to contain and mitigate vulnerability attacks. Simply put, Drosera is a security market where DeFi protocols can set a Trap trap, or set a security threshold, to determine whether an emergency response should be triggered. When the emergency conditions are met, the operator will execute the protocol's on-chain emergency response with consensus. For example, Nomad could set up a Drosera trap capable of detecting 30% TVL outflow within 1 block and stop the continued loss of the Nomad pool during their $190 million vulnerability attack.
10. Ethos
Ethos provides a one-stop solution for Cosmos chains to seamlessly leverage the security of re-staked ETH. Building a new Cosmos chain is costly and requires building a validator network. Projects must convince validators and users to hold and stake native tokens. To overcome this obstacle, Ethos built the GuardiansChain. It is a Layer 1 verified by EigenLayer operators that acts as a security coordination layer. Projects seeking to bootstrap a validator set for their own L1 can employ these Guardians as virtual validators, benefiting from the security of Ethereum. You can think of this process as a runoff: Ethereum secures Ethos through EigenLayer, and Ethos secures any Cosmos L1 that does not want to bootstrap its own validator set.
Conclusion: EigenLayer AVS offers endless possibilities. This article is just the tip of the iceberg, and there will be more innovations in the future.
JinseFinance