eigenlayer

EigenLayer AMA with @sreeramkannan starts at 10:00AM PST. Post your questions below 👇

1/ of many curious Qs: EigenLayers makes a lot of sense but back when there was no Eigenlayer, it was hard to think of this 0 to 1 innovation. How did you come up with it and did you consider PoW for this instead of PoS?

views are my own, protocol @ eigen labs; prev working on decentralization @ gitcoin, llama, stanford medicine.

We had to explore around quite a bit before we came to the particular idea that having a common pool of stake across multiple services is the right architecture. (...contd below)

We started with the existing idea of merge mining - in PoW - the idea is that mining power is shared from Bitcoin to other chains. However, if a merge miner attacks the merge mined chain, there is no way to punish them. (..contd below)

In PoS systems, there is the ability to slash, and with fully programmable systems like Ethereum, you can slash based on arbitrary violations, thus the full cryptoeconomic trust can extend to any on-chain observable violation. This was the core idea behind "restaking." (..contd below)

The word "restaking" is not fully accurate - it should really be called "generalized programmable staking" (GPS) - as it is the ability to stake any asset and then create a system of services with onchain configurable slashing conditions.