The Eigen Era
Eigen: Empowering Ethereum's Future with Trustless Innovation and Eth ownership
Eigen is Dutch for “What a hell of a damn thing this is”. Just kidding, but only a little. Eigen is actually German but it is German for *your own*. True to Ethereum’s ethos, Eigen’s team wants you to *own* a piece of the network and contract with other entities that need your staked eth to make Ethereum better. So, I'm thrilled to share how Eigen will shape the future of our revolutionary platform with you, let’s dive into the Eigen Era!
The Eigen grand narrative The Ethereum network was built on a simple yet powerful idea – providing a shared, accessible, and programmable computing environment for all. This concept quickly gained traction, as it has the potential to revolutionize trust, value, censorship resistance, money, and speech. So, let's first briefly delve into the eras that have shaped Ethereum thus far and explore how Eigen fits in Ethereum’s story, and how it will play a pivotal role in eth’s evolution.
The First Era: Establishing Ethereum's Foundations During its initial phase, Ethereum focused on gaining traction and validating its core concepts. These core concepts were similar to bitcoin but added modularity to blockchain design, allowing for dApps to be built permissionlessly. As Ethereum grew in popularity, it encountered growing pains such as high gas fees due to high demand. However, the core developers responded with improvement protocols and hard forks that made Ethereum more cost-effective, faster, and efficient. These advancements culminated in the Layer 2 (L2) modular era.
The Layer 2 Era: Scaling Ethereum's Capabilities In Layer 2 roll ups, we have optimistic roll-ups and zero-knowledge roll-ups, each with its own unique approach. Both solutions took computation off the main chain by conducting validation functions off the L1 and posting the data in batches. This significantly expanded the realm of capabilities and possibilities on the Ethereum network. While L2s allow some protocol changes on their own layer, they preserve Ethereum's base layer finality and trust assumptions – the "constitutional" part of Ethereum's protocol. However, if developers want to build a new chain with different rules or introduce new middleware, they face a gargatuan task in creating their own L1 network with trusted nodes, economic incentives, the ever intangible Lindy effect that comes with years of operations, and more. This is where the Eigen Era begins.
The Eigen Era: Unlocking Infinite Possibilities on Ethereum Eigen empowers developers to build new chains, data availability layers, middleware, and more, without the need for entirely new L1 networks all while leveraging Ethereum's multi-billion dollar trust network. A groundbreaking feature called "re-staking" allows users to adopt a new protocol "constitution" by accepting the associated slashing conditions. In return for this added risk, users receive an annual percentage yield (APY) from their re-staked ETH, along with other potential rewards based on the specific protocol like airdrops. Eigen enables developers to create anything from oracles to entirely new virtual machines that require new nodes and customized rule sets, while benefiting from Ethereum's unrivaled trust network. By eliminating the need to establish a new L1 network to iterate on Ethereum’s protocol, developers can tap into Ethereum's massive network and embark on a wide array of innovative projects to build new bridges, oracles, sequencers, and all sorts of middle wares or L1s.
The Power of Blockchains Unleashed by Eigen One of the most underappreciated powers of blockchains lies in their ability to separate innovation and trust. Ethereum's L1 era set the stage by allowing any DApp developer to innovate, even anonymously, while users could trust the DApp to function as coded if not always as intended, bugs and hacks being inevitable. This principle forms the foundation of the pseudo-anonymous economy we witness in NFTs, gaming, online content generation, AI, and more. Eigen builds upon this, extending the benefits of the Ethereum's L1 era revolution to new L1 chains, oracles, bridges, and beyond.
Embrace the Opportunity: 💵Be Your Own VC with Eigen So enough high minded era talk, the best revolutions capture the hearts and minds of regular people who choose to participate. By becoming a re-staker or operating a validator node, you can seize the opportunity to shape the future of Web3 on Ethereum with Eigen. Re-stakers can sign up for Actively Validated Services (AVS) offered by reputable companies and receive attractive APY rewards in Ethereum and possibly other tokens. While assuming the risk of slashing conditions, re-stakers gain access to an open and transparent risk market, similar to the world of venture capital. Eigen essentially levels the playing field and enables like-minded individuals to evaluate businesses leveraging Eigen Layer and become venture capitalists through their eth ownership. Now any eth is empowered to make their own risk/reward calculation to determine where to make bets and how to profit.
Future Perspectives and Opportunities Let's imagine a future Ethereum bull run where Eigen Layer achieves product-market fit as described above, attracting tens of thousands of re-stakers and 1,000s of eth to the platform. During this critical phase, companies will seek re-stakers, but they won't need an infinite amount of staking from ETH holders or an overwhelming number of operators. AVSs will have the opportunity to carefully select the re-stakers they wish to work with. They may filter by geographic location, home stakers, eth amount staked etc. Additionally, most re-stakers may not possess the technical expertise to run their own node on the ETH beacon chain and redirect it to Eigen. This presents an exciting opportunity for Eigen node operators to act as intermediaries between companies and the capital pool of re-stakers while being incentivized by a small operator fee. This is what we want to be at Eigen Hub, we aspire to be your trusted node operator, AVS evaluator, and go to source of information for the Eigen ecosystem. Serving as a hub for all your Eigen needs upon Eigen’s full launch in early 2024.
I hope this article got your creative juices flowing and thinking about how Eigen can help you match your goals in web3. The Hub will have some technical articles up soon to talk about re-staking and links to some other good writers out there but I hope you can come back here to get some wind in your sails on still days if you are in the Eigen Ecosystem. Cheers! 🍻
Scruffy
