For years, blockchain builders have confronted a irritating limitation: their functions might solely confirm what occurred on the blockchain itself.
All the pieces else, from AI computations to real-world knowledge, remained trapped in a belief vacuum. Now, EigenLayer believes it has cracked the code.
The Ethereum restaking protocol introduced on Tuesday that enterprise capital big Andreessen Horowitz has invested an extra $70 million to launch EigenCloud, a platform that extends blockchain’s verification capabilities to any software, whether or not on or off-chain.
“EigenCloud turns that momentum right into a unified platform,” Eigen Labs CEO Sreeram Kannan instructed Decrypt. “Anybody constructing on any blockchain can deploy verifiable functions with no need to be a blockchain professional.”
One of many methods the EigenCloud platform does that is by serving to builders know “how correctness is enforced by programmable slashing, customized settlement modes, and versatile operator choice,” Kannan defined.
The funding from a16z’s Crypto Fund IV follows the agency’s earlier $100 million Sequence B spherical. With over $12 billion in whole worth locked, EigenLayer has turn into Ethereum’s largest restaking protocol since its mainnet launch two years in the past.
The brand new platform addresses a elementary limitation in blockchain improvement: the shortcoming to confirm advanced off-chain computations whereas sustaining blockchain-level belief ensures.
Over time, EigenLayer envisions the platform as one thing that would rework verifiability “right into a programmable, financial primitive” that would function “the place belief and correctness matter most,” it mentioned in a press release.
Breaking boundaries
EigenCloud introduces three core parts: EigenVerify for dispute decision, EigenDA for knowledge availability, and EigenCompute for execution.
The brand new parts permit builders to construct functions that deal with duties exterior the blockchain whereas preserving cryptographic verification.
The platform operates by EigenLayer’s community of Autonomous Verifiable Providers (AVSs), with over 200 companies at present dwell or in improvement.
AVSs are decentralized off-chain modules that leverage EigenLayer’s shared, restaked Ethereum safety to run customized, verifiable duties, similar to oracles, bridges, knowledge availability layers, and middleware.
These companies make the most of the protocol’s roughly $12 billion in restaked property to safe round $2 billion in software worth.
Monetary companies agency Securitize plans to make use of the platform to confirm asset pricing knowledge for BlackRock’s $2 billion BUIDL tokenized fund, marking considered one of EigenCloud’s first enterprise implementations.
Requested about slashing dangers with AVSs, Eigen Labs’ Kannan instructed Decrypt that EigenLayer is “constructed with systemic resilience in thoughts,” whereas acknowledging slashing as a “core enforcement mechanism that economically incentivizes fact.”
On this case, Kannan argues that the implementation of slashing is “remoted” to particular person AVSs.
Slashing refers back to the penalty mechanism the place a portion (or all) of a restaker’s property could be forcibly taken (slashed) if the operator they delegate to acts dishonestly or incorrectly whereas working an AVS.
Such occasions “don’t spill over between AVSs or to the Ethereum base layer. This compartmentalization ensures that failures are localized and containable, moderately than systemic,” Kannan mentioned.
“EigenLayer is surmounting the technical bottlenecks of blockchains to allow a brand new class of functions,” Ali Yahya, who led the funding for a16z, mentioned.
The platform targets use instances throughout AI verification, prediction markets, medical information, and conventional net companies requiring verifiable computation.
By enabling off-chain compute companies backed by EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism, builders can construct functions that had been beforehand inconceivable inside blockchain constraints.
Builders can entry an alpha model beginning Tuesday, that includes efficiency upgrades for EigenDA and restricted entry to EigenVerify companies.
Broader availability is deliberate for later this yr, with extra dispute decision modes and automatic infrastructure administration instruments in improvement.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
