EigenLayer

• EigenLayer lets Ethereum stakers reuse their staked ETH to secure additional services, a mechanism called restaking.

• Services that would otherwise need their own validator set can rent security from Ethereum's existing stake.

• EIGEN is used for governance and for a forkable slashing mechanism covering faults that cannot be proven on-chain.

• Total supply of roughly 1.67 billion with allocations to investors, the team and community distribution.

• The token was non-transferable at launch and became tradeable later.

• Investor and team unlocks extend over several years.

Pros:

• Solved a genuine bootstrapping problem for services that cannot attract their own validators.

• Attracted very large deposits, establishing restaking as a category.

• The forkable token design addresses faults that objective slashing cannot detect.

Cons:

• Restaking layers correlated risk onto Ethereum's security budget, a concern raised repeatedly including by Ethereum researchers.

• Slashing conditions across many services are hard for a staker to assess individually.

• Large investor allocations relative to community distribution.

• Exposure to the restaking category through the protocol that defined it.

• Deposits are substantial and the design has been widely copied.

• Weigh the systemic concern that restaking concentrates rather than distributes risk.

• Reusing Ethereum's existing validator stake to secure unrelated services, rather than each service bootstrapping its own.

• A new network needs a large staked base to be secure, but cannot attract one before it is useful.

• Renting security from an existing validator set removes the cold-start requirement.

• Founded by Sreeram Kannan, previously a professor at the University of Washington.

• Developed by Eigen Labs with substantial venture backing.

• No public sale. EIGEN was allocated through private rounds and a staged community distribution.

• Correlated slashing across services could affect Ethereum's validator set more broadly than a single-protocol failure.

• Stakers may not understand the aggregate slashing conditions they accept.

• Ongoing unlocks to investors and team.

• Restaking yields depend on services actually paying for security, which is still being tested.

The EigenLayer whitepaper frames the problem as one of duplicated security spend: every new network with its own validator set must independently attract enough stake to be secure, capital that is already committed elsewhere. Restaking allows Ethereum validators to opt into additional slashing conditions for other services, extending existing stake instead of demanding new stake. The paper is careful about the tradeoff it introduces, discussing at length the risk that correlated slashing conditions across many services could cascade back into Ethereum's own security, and proposing caps and attributable-fault design as mitigations rather than claiming the risk is eliminated.