Nearly one yr to the day after Ethereum protocol EigenLayer launched its “restaking” community to unprecedented trade fanfare, the community is lastly including a core characteristic that was, till now, manifestly absent: “slashing.”
Eigen Labs hopes slashing — EigenLayer’s system for protecting “restakers” trustworthy by revoking collateral in the event that they act maliciously — will lastly understand the year-old protocol’s authentic pitch.
“We’re glad to say now that the entire promise has been delivered,” mentioned EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan.
EigenLayer grew to become one of many buzziest protocols in Ethereum historical past when it launched buyers to the idea of restaking, an evolution of “proof-of-stake” on Ethereum.
Ethereum’s “proof-of-stake” system lets customers “stake” ether (ETH) collateral with the chain to assist run and safe it in change for curiosity. EigenLayer lets customers stake ETH on Ethereum after which restake it once more with different protocols for much more curiosity.
Regardless of launching its major community final yr, slashing, a main part of EigenLayer’s shared safety know-how, was lacking till Thursday. This led to criticism that EigenLayer’s bold pitch didn’t match its technical actuality.
As we speak, EigenLayer boasts greater than $7 billion in restaked belongings, making it one of many largest decentralized finance (DeFi) apps. It additionally helps an ecosystem of 39 actively validated companies (AVSs) that use its safety mannequin.
The brand new slashing system will roll out on Thursday, however AVS groups might want to opt-in, which means it could take a while earlier than slashing is reside in any functions. Eigen Labs introduced April 17 because the launch date for slashing earlier this month.
Redesigning for Security
EigenLayer customers restake ether (ETH) and different tokens via third-party “operators” — infrastructure suppliers who delegate their pooled EigenLayer deposits throughout completely different AVSs.
Operators that delegate stake to an AVS assist run it in change for rewards: the extra they stake, the upper the rewards.
In idea, slashing ensures these operators are working AVSs accurately. If operators “are confirmed to be malicious in response to an on-chain Ethereum contract, then they could lose their stake or a portion of their stake,” defined Kannan.
When slashing goes reside on Thursday, AVSs can have the choice to set slashing situations and start penalizing dangerous actors.
“Aside from Ethereum and Cosmos, most proof-of-stake methods, together with Solana, are working reside with none slashing,” mentioned Kannan. “Although it’s the core accountability mechanism, it’s not like each proof of stake system already has this—that’s not true. That’s what we’re constructing.”
As for why EigenLayer acquired a lot blowback in comparison with different incomplete proof-of-stake methods: “We’ve talked quite a bit about slashing, so we’re held to that bar,” mentioned Kannan.
Eradicating leverage
EigenLayer’s slashing system was redesigned final yr to deal with fears that the protocol launched an unsafe type of leverage to the Ethereum ecosystem.
“I feel we utterly cured that drawback with this redesign,” mentioned Kannan.
The whole concept behind EigenLayer is to permit new protocols to instantly faucet into a big safety pool — the overall pool of restaked belongings.
In proof-of-stake methods, the quantity of belongings staked with a protocol roughly corresponds to how safe it’s. Usually, attacking a protocol like Ethereum requires controlling half or extra of the belongings staked, which may run into billions of {dollars}.
EigenLayer’s pooling mannequin has led to fears {that a} poorly constructed slashing system may expose all the protocol to new dangers, the place a single dangerous actor on one AVS may hurt each operator.
The model of EigenLayer going reside Thursday, which has been examined on Ethereum’s developer networks since December, was designed so operators can restrict their publicity to a given AVS, which means dangerous actors on one gained’t essentially affect one other.
“You could have distinctive attributability of stake to a specific AVS,” defined Kannan. “As an AVS, I do know I’ve, like, 10 million of ‘slashable’ stake that’s not double counted — so there isn’t a leverage.”
Moreover, the system has been configured in order that “even when my AVS has a small quantity of slashable stake, it’s nonetheless protected in some sense, by the big quantity of capital,” mentioned Kannan, since there are nonetheless methods in place to make sure the price of attacking a system will increase with the overall worth of the pool of restaked belongings.
