On Tuesday, April 9th, the famous restaking project EigenLayer officially entered the mainnet launching the data availability service EigenDA as the first AVS of the new crypto ecosystem.

From now on, EigenLayer plans to launch a wide range of AVS and offer compensation to stakers who delegate their voting power to these services, but some small technical improvements are still needed: for example, slashing and in-protocol rewards are not yet active.

Meanwhile, airdrop hunters continue to allocate their resources in an effort to farm as many “Restaked Points” as possible and earn a slice of the upcoming crypto EIGEN.

All the details below.

EigenLayer launches EigenDA, the first AVS: many others are expected by the end of the year

Just 10 months ago, the brilliant idea behind the Eigenalyer restaking protocol was presented to the crypto community.

Today we can celebrate the mainnet debut of one of the projects that is set to become a reference point for the cryptographic ecosystem of Ethereum.

EigenLayer, whose main task is to reuse the consent stakes of ETH stakers to expand economic security to an additional range of applications, can now boast a crazy TVL of about 15 billion dollars.

A total of 4.11 million ether have been staked by various users within the protocol, with a market share of 12% compared to the total of 32 million ether allocated within the Beacon chain.

With the inauguration of the mainnet, EigenLayer simultaneously announced the launch of the EigenDA data availability protocol as the first AVS (Actively Validated Service) distributed on the network and powered by the stakes of the restakers.

Until recently, project participants could only deposit their LST or configure their Eigen Pod using “staking only”, now they can also delegate their entire stake to an operator registered on Eigenlayer.

At the moment, in addition to the presence of EigenDA (competitor of Celestia) as the first and only AVS, we see a total of 200 operators who have completed the opt-in and can perform the next distributed services in addition to EigenDA itself.

If you are restaking on EigenLayer, you can delegate your network consensus stake by going to the project dashboard, clicking “Delegate your Stake” and selecting an operator from those available.

In this first phase (until the “slashing” is activated), try to pay attention and choose only entities that are known to you and that already have a noteworthy TVL, as in this first phase there are no economic disincentives for operators who act in bad faith.

We remind you that if you want to change your delegation from one operator to another, you must wait for a period of 7 days.

Slashing, in-protocol voting, and AVS: the next frontier of EigenLayer

At this point, although the crypto protocol EigenLayer has just been launched on mainnet, it has not yet activated many of its main features.

For example, the slashing, which is the function at the core of the security system of the project that penalizes dishonest operators causing losses in the amount of the stake locked, is not yet part of EigenLayer’s reality.

There are still many questions to be raised about this crucial point, as stakers do not know when slashing will be activated and how the slashed tokens will be distributed to the community afterwards.

Furthermore, we do not know if dishonest operators will be punished with the total loss of the stake amount or with a partial slash.

Regarding this topic, Sreeram Kannan, founder and chief architect of EigenLayer, stated the following in a press interview on Tuesday:

“Even though full slashing is not active, we will run this system in beta version and make sure people are able to use it, and maybe have redundant backups and other things”

Another fundamental point to complete for EigenLayer concerns the in-protocol rewards offered by AVS to restakers as additional yield to that already present directly on the crypto protocol.

This represents the beating heart of the project, as well as the greatest economic incentive to use restaking practices: AVS, in fact, in order to obtain the highest possible share of consensus stakes, offer stakers an annualized reward, which is added to the already existing APY for ether staking.

At the moment EigenDA does not offer additional rewards to users who delegate their stake to operators who have opted for its service, but it is expected that by the end of the year this process will be initiated as well as the next AVS.

When the cryptographic application explores new AVS solutions by launching an ecosystem of supported applications, we could witness its true mainstream expansion with users facing a great revenue opportunity.

This delicate transition phase has been explained in the document published with Tuesday’s mainnet launch:

“We are allowing the EigenLayer market to develop and stabilize before introducing in-protocol payments and cutting the main network by the end of the year”

Airdrop Eigenlayer: how to farm as many “Restaked Points” as possible and get the crypto EIGEN

As the data availability service EigenDA is launched and many other AVS are simultaneously preparing to be included in the EigenLayer ecosystem, crypto users are seizing the opportunity to farm one of the most interesting airdrops of 2024.

Among EigenLayer’s plans there is also the launch of a governance token, which will likely be called EIGEN, to be distributed via airdrop to all restakers who have contributed to the growth of the protocol in its initial stages.

Everything, as confirmed by the project itself, will be carried out through a points program where for each sum of ether locked on various EigenLayer providers you get a total of “Restaked Points” that will be converted into EIGEN tokens during the TGE (token generation event).

At the time of writing the article each point is worth about 0.23 dollars on secondary markets like Whales Market.

For more information on the nature of Restaked Points, you can refer to this doc.

There is only one way (to restake) and at the same time a myriad of protocols available to be able to farm EigenLayer points and participate in the crypto airdrop.

Several projects also launch temporary initiatives in which they offer a boost in the score (2X, 3X, 4X) to users who choose to do restaking through their service.

Among the best projects you can use by locking your ETH (or LST tokens) to obtain these infamous points we find:

• Renzo Protocol: also available on various L2s such as Base, Arbitrum, Linea, Blast.
• Etherfi: soon available on L2
• Swell: just launched its L2
• Lido: one of the most reliable and highest TVL platforms in DeFi

Aside from Lido, using the other 3 protocols we will farm in parallel for other airdrops (upcoming governance tokens from Renzo and Swell, and the second season of ETHFI), so we have a double incentive to use them!