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A

Bankless nation. Not every single day is launch day for a protocol. The Eigen layer token details are here. Don't call it an airdrop. This is a stake drop. That's because that's the only thing that you can do with your Eigen layer tokens right out of the gate. Brian, how are you doing today, my man?

B

I'm good.

C

I'm pretty excited about this stake drop we got going on. So what are we in for? What's happening?

A

We're going to cover all of the details. There's been some feedback on Twitter, some people have some questions about how this whole thing works. We're bringing on stream and Robert, Robert, the new director of the Eigen Layer foundation on the show today to answer all these questions and unpack the announcement details. 15% of the total supply of Eigen distributed over multiple seasons. Season one starts today. That's what all the news is about. With 5% of the supply along with one of the most sophisticated sets of smart contracts on chain on Mainnet. Eigen is not your typical ERC 20 token. It's got this feature called intersubjective forking, which is.

C

Wait, what?

A

And we're going to unpack exactly what that is and how this actually increases the scope of what Eigen layer can provide security for. And so, like I said, in addition to the token details getting released, we're also getting the Eigen foundation with a new director, Robert Drost, who we're going to introduce here in just a second. So let's go ahead and get right into the details of season one of the Eigen layer stake drop with Sriram and Robert. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Banging the station. We are here with Sriram can on the co founder of Eigen Layer Sriram. Welcome back to the show.

D

Hey, David. Hi, Ryan. Excited to be here.

A

And joining Sriram today is Robert Drost, the new director of the Eigen Lair Foundation. Robert also, welcome to Banklist.

B

Hey, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

A

So big day today, guys. This is not an airdrop. This is a stake drop. Um, first we have to explain what that is. So what is a straight drop stake drop and why are we getting one? Sreeram, what's the thought behind this?

D

Yeah, the, the Eigen token is designed as a staking token in the Eigen layer ecosystem. And a staking token allows for new functionality that heat staking alone cannot provide. And the tokens designed around this functionality and so that's why we're calling it a stake drop, where, you know, users who participated in the protocol can now actually claim their tokens and then stake it to actually participate in providing security to new services that can then be built on top of this. That's the high level. We'll get into a lot more details.

A

Go for it.

B

Robert, I was just going to add, I mean, because people do talk about staking a lot. The token has this, you know, I think it's, it's a good contribution, but this technical underpinning where it is, you know, it is a token, but it also has this ability that it can be viewed inter subjectivity. Inter subject intersubjectivity.

A

Oh my gosh.

C

Intersubjectively, yeah.

B

Getting ready for the airdrop contribution. Yeah, exactly. So that allows the token to have abilities that are harder to normally do. So it allows there to be social consensus outside, and people can organize and decide about actions that would be hard, basically impossible to tell on chain. So it adds a new element of social consensus embedded right into the protocol.

A

So there's been some just questions about like why is the token, like frozen on chain, right. Is currently the Eigen token is non transferable. And Eigen layer has been in this process of slowly rolling out component after component after component, putting it on Mainnet. Airdrop days or stake drop days are very big days in the communities of protocols. But really from the perspective of the Eigen layer system, this is just one more component that is now live on Mainnet to really complete the engine of the Eigen layer system. And the next phase of the whole Eigen layer system that's going online is the actual staking component of the Eigen layer system. Hence why there's a token out there that can do one thing which is be staked. Is that kind of the philosophy of this?

B

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I think for things like data availability specifically, there are certain kinds of conditions that are really essential that you have this ability to have social consensus that way. It's known that if people are doing certain types of tax, it could be seen. There's a good comparison of like, if you look at something like Ethereum or others, people can determine externally they are able to put on things like hard forks and do changes. It's not entirely based on like, you know, programmatic on chain, because the chains fundamentally can be forked. It's actually very hard to do that with the regular token because you'd have to organize everybody agreeing. There's a new version, what to do, how to upgrade those capabilities are programmatically in the token. And so people are able to kind of cast their decision of, oh, there's a fork happening. I think this one's valid, or I think this one's valid. So it brings this feature that used to just be on layer one into layer two. So it needs a token. It doesn't need it to actually be traded on markets. Of course, at some point that will happen. But for right now, that allows the network to get started and it's important step. I mean, it's a. I think the history of crypto has had a lot of these cases where true believers understand it takes a while to roll out things responsibly and you take the time to do it right.

A

Yeah. This inter subjective forking is a mechanism that I remember Auger invoking way back in the day. And for people who are trying to still wrap their heads on what that is, think of it like a hard fork, but for the app layer. And it's really something that the Eigen token specifically is bringing into the scope of Eigen layer to really expand the roles of what Eigen layer security can really do. We have the interests and needs of the Eigen layer protocol, but then we also have the token receivers on the other end of the system who are also looking for some details about what the whole roadmap of the token is. There are some parameters of this stake drop. I believe 15% of the total eigen supply is going to be stake dropped and we are at season one. This is the details from the announcement that we are at season one of the stake drop in which the first 5% of the total supply of Eigen is being stake dropped in a non transferable way. But that means that there are future seasons. Can we run through some of the high level parameters of how many seasons are there, what percentage of Eigen tokens per season, and just the distribution parameters. If we can just run through that.

B

Yeah, I think similar to a lot of situations, if you were talking about things that are in the public markets, talking about a lot of future things. We are trying to say as much as we can without getting to a situation where we are giving specific details on things. We do have a good plan for how we are thinking about things going forward. I think people are going to be happy with it, you know, in terms of specifics on, is it, you know, three seasons, two seasons, four seasons, there's, you know, there's options on what could be done. We have an idea on what, what would be coming for future. But, you know, I think there's already some good discussion. We'll be giving out more information from people over time, how to be similar to before. You know, restaking was probably the principal thing you could do in the network. Now it's a lot richer. You have not only your e three stake, you also have eigens when you claim next week, starting May 10, and you'll have the option that you can go ahead and put those into staking, you can allocate them to operators. You can run them against ABS's. And so there'll be a lot richer of interactions you can do with the network, and there'll be communication about this is considered good, or how to basically show that you're doing actions that are good for the network, because that's ultimately the goal for early people, is to learn that and get the network up from its wobbly feet into a full programmable network.

A

So the snapshot for season one was March 15. So, of course, what that means is the parameters of season one are closed, but it sounds like the parameters of future seasons is still up in the air. And so we are on like a slow rollout of, like, this eventual full scope of the release of the token.

B

Yeah, by necessity. You know, you can't speak about things until the time's coming up. We have some ideas about what's happening. We have communicated that we're looking for ecosystem participation. We are looking for things after that date. We are going to look at things before that date. It's one of these. I think the best is to just look at what we're publicly saying in the documents, and then that'll give you some ideas, and there'll be more communications in the coming days and weeks.

A

Inside of season one. Again, which is this season, there's phase one and phase two. So I'm hoping we can kind of provide some clarity on these two different phases. Phase one has the bulk of the eigenstake drop inside of it, and then phase two is accounting for these edge cases. Can you walk us through the different phases of season one?

B

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think the first part, to talk about the principle, we originally opened up the app, and people could stake either eth or lsts, restake them. And the goal is very much, we like to look at the end users and people who are actually coming into the system and make sure that we're looking directly at what they've done and feeling like we're understanding what's the right thing to do. There. So we're trying very hard to do that. I think the situation that we just want to make sure that everybody gets into a good place with is there were a couple of protocols and people that built up more complex structures on top of around what we were doing. It's an open innovation platform. So just like the rest of crypto, people like to build up kind of interesting systems, novel systems, and we don't want, we don't want to get into a position where we are looking at what somebody else intended and then figuring out something that they didn't. So the point was we made sure that everybody is treated the same from our perspective. What we would have actually dropped on to users had they not been in these protocols. That's all being reserved and the protocols are the ones who are going to make the decisions. Because the users ultimately went into different protocols. Those protocols had policy, they had people involved in them. I think users need to wait a little bit because those protocols were finding out some of this information necessarily close to the stake drop time. And so they need to go through. I mean, obviously, if a protocol created a system, somebody put some tokens into it, they have an idea about what, you know, what they were going to expect that that protocol would do. And so I think people can look to the protocols to figure out what's the kind of fair allocation from their goals, and that'll be phase two. But it's, you know, it's uniform with as if we could have, if we could have figured out everybody's position in the first one, we would have done it all directly. This is just to make sure that everybody's treated fairly.

A

So, so the base, I think the.

D

Numbers, David, just one thing. The numbers 90% and 10% maybe threw off some people seemed like their own numbers. They were not like hand allocated, they just the outcome of a natural calculation. Yeah, and it's not exactly 90% and 10%. There is some round off the stuff, but the actual numbers are, you know, somewhere in the 90 point experts.

B

Yeah, we can actually. That's right. They came out to roughly those numbers and it's just sort of easy numbers to put out there. The exact ones were calculated down to specific numbers and. Yeah, I guess if people are interested at some point, we can just put it out. You'll see by May 10 or, sorry, after May 10 and phase two, you would actually see the exact numbers. But we can talk about it sooner. But like Sriram is saying, it just happened that the numbers turned out to that. I think people do also need to keep in mind that the way, in general, when people are looking at restake points or other things, they were measured as kind of a integration of. That's great, balloons. Why not? So there's value over time, the exact proportions and things you see right now are very different than looking back over a span of time. So everything is calculated based on impressions that we have from a sustained kind of commitment. And yeah, I think everyone should be happy with the end as they get more analysis.

A

Okay, so let me try and summarize the whole phase one and phase two of season one. Just as I understand it, the 90%, which is phase one, which is what's happening today, is the bulk of base case of restaking inside of eigen layer, which is totally objective eth inside of eigen layer per unit time. And this is a calculus that anyone can run. And that is the bulk of cases. And that's the bulk of tokens. It's 90%. Then there's been a side of Eigen layer that has had these derivative platforms built on top of it inside of the Ethereum app layer. And as you guys said, like a completely open platform, right? And so people started building derivatives on top of Eigen layer. Like speculation on the token, right? So some people could go long the yield, some people could go long the tokens. This was happening in Pendle, but there was a bunch of other app layers around this. And this is coincidentally, this is a ten to 90 ratio, right? They just happened to end up this way with how much people were vanilla re staking. Like me and Eigen lay ours, vanilla re staking wasn't doing any sort of djing, gambling stuff. But then some people chose to do the derivative stuff that happened to the land at 90 ten. And then also, the reason why that second phase isn't included in the first phase is because there's a bunch of complicated math that is opinionated that you guys would prefer the app layer, the app itself, to actually make that calculation themselves, because that's their math, not your guys's mathematic. And so it's up to, and we've seen this actually happen before in other token drops where, like, if you were a solo staker with rocket pool or lido, in order to receive your stake, your airdrop from Starknet, you would have to actually go to Lido or rocket pool to go to get those tokens. And so this is something that you guys, of the people that chose to speculate on the Eigen token in the DeFi world, it's now up to the DeFi layer to actually allocate the actual appropriate calculations, because they are the ones with the calculations. Is that a fair summary?

B

Yeah, that's a fair summary. And you captured a really key point there, which is open innovation means that the protocols, they did all these things not attached, no guidance from us. They had interpretation and just people are free to do what they want. That's the big value of the crypto world, is self determination, self ownership in any agency. And so we ended up in this situation. I think it's all good. People are, like you're saying, used to it, who have been around. Maybe for some people who haven't seen it before, it is something a little bit new. But like you said, for people who just came in and followed the regular restaking and then just holding and staying on the platform, that's all treated, and that was all included in phase one.

C

Let me try to attempt to summarize where we've gotten this conversation. I want folks to be crystal clear on what's just happened. All right, so there was a token. Now it's called Eigenv. Right? Eigen, that's a token that is now locked. Eigen layer has done a stake drop, not quite an airdrop stake drop. We've talked about the contours of that, and we are in season one of that stake drop, where 5% of the total supply of Eigen is being released. And it's being released in two phases. So there's the phase one that we talked about, and then the phase two, and that's 5% of a total of 15% of the supply that is eventually going to be distributed. Now the tokens are locked, so you can't go on uniswap and do anything like that with it at this point in time. But there is some functionality for the Eigen token, which is in the Eigen ecosystem. That's where we've come so far. Yes.

B

Yes, that's right.

C

Okay, perfect. So, Robert, could you tell us a bit more about what people can do with the Eigen tokenization right now? So it's locked, but what sort of things can folks do with it?

B

So I should clarify one thing, because we did the announcement today, people can go to the claims page and they can check on, making sure that they are there. There's an escalation process, there's discord and others where people go if they think there's errors and other stuff. So we have a team ready to kind of resolve things like that. The actual claim date, when it, you will be doing. The actual claiming will be a week from Friday on May 10.

C

Got it. Claim today. But they can check to see if an address is eligible.

B

Yes, that's right. You can check that your address is eligible. If it's eligible. That means it's in phase one. If you did activity and it was in one of those protocols. If you look through the FAQ, there's a list of contract addresses. And those protocols are going to be included in phase two. So there's information there and we'll update things as we go. But yeah, it's also, I mean, the other part which is just to keep in mind for a lock drop, it's, you know, it's not a rush. It's open for 120 days. You came back in and you looked at it later, you would claim there'd be no difference. The only thing that is good about coming in early and claiming after May 10 is you can go ahead and you can stake and delegate your eigens to operators and AbS's, which is a positive action to take in the system. So to answer your question, you'll get the tokens. If you do nothing with them, which we hope people won't, you can just leave them inside of your wallet. They're non transferable during the claiming process. There's the option in the UX, which were on the normal pathway, which will take you into the allocation, sorry, into the delegating to an operator and the operators list, ABS's and others. You can actually participate in doing security now for the Eigenir system. And you'll have the option to do that as well with your eTh. So those are the main things that are happening. It's sort of the first step into the protocol getting fleshed out. It is functional. So at this point, this is securing eigenda. And this is allowing the first avss that are using eigenda to, you know, have the crypto economic security with them. And then over time, there'll be more features we mentioned in there on like things that we're doing and looking for, which, you know, we want to see as we increase decentralization, of course, is going to be the crypto economic payment slashing system. And, you know, occupying a lot of Sriram's time. I know.

C

Okay, so, Robert, at this point, people can see what they're eligible for. They've addressed, but they can't do a claim yet. After May 10, they will be able to do a claim. And then once they claim, they will be able to actually delegate. Then through the kind of the governance process and the AV's. And they'd stake to different avss at that point in time. Yes. And like when they stake, what does that do? What, like just give us a refresher on what value that provides to the Eigen network. And like, why, why stake? What's the compelling reason to do this?

B

I mean, it's actually the whole reason for Eigen layer to exist. So it's good for people to kind of, and I appreciate you guys have a platform where we can talk about it a little bit. The goal of Eigen layer is to like, more general purpose, allow what used to be you're going to create a new ethereum or filecoin or, you know, some network, and you have to imbue together the idea of the software, get together with people to run the network and then figure out how their, how you can create the crypto economic security to back it. So Eigenlayer is trying to make innovation incredibly easier than it had to be before, where you focus on the parts that really are the innovation, and you're not forced to have to create a new blockchain. You are able to actually implement what you wanted for your software. It's a very general thing that blockchains themselves are just peer to peer networks of nodes that follow some kind of computer protocol, which is an API plus a time communication factor. In Eigen layer, you're able to take the security out of Ethereum and now also the Eigen layer token itself, and you apply them towards somebody else's protocol. And it's very much like a reusable template that we've done this before for things like bitcoin. We've done this when we participated in Ethereum. Now through the Eigen layer, it's a launch board to be able to do this. For every single AV's that comes onto Eigen layer, they have a uniform interface for having what used to be spinning up an entire new chain and ecosystem.

C

Okay, so why are the token, like, when do the tokens become unlocked? So they're locked right now, but is there, is there a date by which at some point in the future they come unlocked?

B

Three things that we're looking for, and we're going to want to try to get through them quickly, like one of them. On the community side, it's really important. We dropped an intersubjective work token and we're actually taking people back to basics. Inter subjectivity. Oh God, I said it that time and social consensus. These ideas have always been part of the core of the layer one on blockchains. I think sometimes you have competitors to like, for instance, Ethereum, that they look kind of like a blockchain, but at its core it's a bunch of like completely permissioned people who own the network, and they might as well be like Amazon web services or something. It's very centralized. That's not social consensus. That's actually a centralized entity that's controlling things. Things like Ethereum and bitcoin have always had this property that the social consensus was this is the valid chain. We've had attacks on chains like bitcoin, ethereum, where you have eth, classic, or ETHW or BCH, and they branch off. But people say, well, that's not actually the biggest one, this is the big one. And so the social consensus has been there before. And allowing this to now be inside of what in the past would have been an ERC 20 token that was just fungible, adding this capability to it, there's, I think, a lot of value for people to have some time to absorb it. You can read, there's going to be a lot of people who talk about what this means. It's going to get enhanced. Everybody has people that they trust a lot. You guys have a lot of viewers and readers who kind of look to you to explain to them what does this really mean to bring forkability into a token rather than be part of the blockchain. And so it's good for people to understand that because ultimately, when the token goes fully unlocked, at that point, there's a lot on stake for people, and they should really understand what this means. It shouldn't be something that like, hey, this thing is out there. It's unlocked. Hopefully you'll figure it out. We want there to be a period of learning and just acclimation and everybody to kind of understand, you know, if this is right for them.

C

So, Robert, are you saying right now there's not an unlock date per se? Some ideas have to propagate, or like back to the people who are wondering at what date. Is there a concrete date by which this unlocks, or is there some kind of an estimate?

B

Yeah, I mean, they're non boundary like that first one, there's going to be a wave. You're never like this. You know, we want there to be some time, but it's not going to be waiting around for years and anywhere close to that. The second factor is probably an important one, which is payments and slashing. So having the token crypto economics happening programmatically on chain that's very important. People would like to actually see how the system works. Right now, you can imagine, what does it look like for an AV's to be paying for security? How does an operator process those? How do the restakers get the value from it? And so, in principle, you see how it works. But the actual system is important to have live and working. We've seen this before, like, for instance, the flashbots ecosystem. You know, it takes a little while to figure out what are the roles of people who are builders and relayers and proposers. And, you know, these, these roles have a different place in our case, because we're actually not like, we're not doing block building, but actually doing security building for a protocol. So there's a component of making sure that people know what they're getting. So if you're actually in our ecosystem and the token is unlocked, you would like to have people have that information accessible. They're not waiting and saying, oh, I hope it comes out the way I'd like it to be, to be able to just read and see that it's done.

C

Okay. And I think I heard in this, maybe months, not years, would be sort of an estimate of when unlock.

B

Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of work on it already. We can't say for sure exactly when people that we're working with. Of course, there's a lot of really good, robust incentive type researchers around. Ethereum Eigen layer is like, barring a lot of, you know, a lot of the best ideas that we can get from it. But, you know, we'll have, we'll have more updates as we're getting closer. We have a forum up, and the inter subjective work token is already there. There's more work that we can do now. The foundation, it's been around for a while behind the scenes, but now we're actually going to be public and out there as well. So if you're following us, you'll start getting a better feeling for how the progress is coming along.

A

Okay, so it sounds like the answer here is just like, there's some actual technical infrastructure that needs to get built in order for the actual token to get unlocked. And then also there needs to be some sort of just like community understanding. There needs to be more conversations about what an inter subjective work token actually is. And then who are the players in the game? And so one part in the hands of the community, one part in the hands of like, actual infrastructure devs on the Eigen side, right?

B

Yep, yep. And then the third part that's important is, you know, we so Sriram and the team, you know, made the decision, this is going in the path of progressive decentralization. So the foundation was formed a while back. We were doing work in order to get ourselves ready for this point. And so we were able to launch the token. Token is launched out of the foundation. The stake drop is also out of the foundation. And so over time we're going to get more and more aggressively decentralized. So we know what that means. The community is going to get more involved. They're going to have more input already over, I'd say the next month there's going to be opportunities for people who are more technical or more on the business side or others things to get involved. It's been, I'd say, very thankful and appreciative that there's been a lot of interest in people who believe and understand that restaking is the pay for the capability of blockchains, and especially ethereum to scale out and very novel ways. And yeah, going forward we'll have a lot more opportunities for people to participate in the discussion. Beyond that, you know, important but simpler thing in the beginning, which was us getting the initial TVL into the system.

A

Trivam, I want to bring you in here as the information theory expert here about inter subjective forking. Can you talk about just like increased scope of what the contract system around the Eigen token, what this whole system of inter subjective forking, what this unlocks for Eigen layer? What does Eigen layer do? It provides security to avss. What new frontier has the Eigen token unlocked for the Eigen layer system?

D

Yeah, really the rest of the things are really supporting this particular thing, which is that how do we enable more people to build new actively validated services on top of Eigen layer? So you start from there, and as you know, some of you know, here we are building ourselves Eigen Labs is building ourselves the first AV's on top of Eigen layer. Eigen da. It's a very useful example to think about and understand how and why we had to come up with the inter subjective approach. Forking token in for, you know, what is the data availability system? You need a bunch of nodes to download and serve data to any participant who is actually interested in downloading the data. So this is what a data availability system is intending to provide. And as we were designing the Eigen DA system, one thing that became very clear is there are certain kinds of faults which are the provable on Ethereum, on the blockchain and certain kinds of faults which are not provable on the Ethereum blockchain. Like for example, we had this idea which is building on the Ethereum researchers Dankrad and Justin Drake on proof of custody, which is a mechanism which you can prove on chain that you're storing the data because you have knowledge of your private secret, but also knowledge of that particular block. So it's a kind of like a zero knowledge proof that you are actually holding the person who has knowledge of the private key also has knowledge of the block. So this can be proven. But what cannot be proven is that the person is serving this data to the users who really want it. Imagine an optimistic roll up. An optimistic roll up only works if any challenger, potential challenger, can get access to the data that the roll up is publishing. And it is possible that all the eigenvalue nodes collude and never serve data to anybody. This is not a fault that can be observed on the Ethereum blockchain, but from the so you take the Ethereum's point of view and you sit there inside Ethereum and you look at, hey, can I, do I know what is, has data been withheld? And you can't know because Ethereum does not know whether the eigenvalue nodes are serving the data to Ryan, David and Robert. But from the outside, no user. If all the eigenvalues colluded and said that this block has been published, but never release the data to anybody, no RPC node will be able to serve it. If you run a full node, you will not be able to download the block. If you run a light node, you will not be able to get the few chunks that you are asking for. All of these give race to inter subjective agreement. From the outside, any two individuals can agree that the data has been withheld, even though Ethereum as a blockchain cannot know that data has been withheld. Data withholding is a great example of an inter subjective fault where Ethereum as a blockchain cannot know whether data has been served and propagated to everybody in the world, whereas from the outside observers know very well that hey, I'm trying to access the peer to peer network, I can't get it. I go to RPC notes, I can't get it. Running a full node, I can't get it. I'm running a light node, I can't get it. Therefore I know that the data is not available.

C

So srivram, really quick, I'm with you so far, right? And I can understand why this is a bad thing. Eigen layer nodes withholding data is not fulfilling their duty of an Eigen layer node. Just a quick side quest, though, is like, why would they do that? Like, we would call that, like, corruption. Like, what sort of things? Like, I can't. I'm having a hard time off the top of my head imagining a scenario. Why, like, why would they do that? Don't they, like, Eigen network? It's like, is there some sort of reason that that comes to mind of why corrupt evil in this way?

D

That's a great question. When we're building these blockchain systems, we want to protect against all kinds of nuclear events. And a nuclear event here that one would be worried about is all the Eigen layer validators coming together and saying, hey, let's just attack the system. Why would they attack the system by withholding data? Because there may be an optimistic roll up, let's say they're involved in. And if in this optimistic roll up, I actually make a invalid claim on ethereum by publishing data to eigenda and then getting my fraudulent state passed because nobody can challenge, because nobody knows what the heck is going on, and I can now steal money. So we are obviously always worried about the absolute worst case. So this requires a heavy amount of collusion. All the operators have to be in cahoots because a small fraction of operators can still serve the data, but they are all colluding. They're colluding with the roll up sequencer. They're all, like, in it together to actually steal money from a roll up. And that would be an example of why they do it.

C

Okay, so if that happens, basically your validator set, you're kind of like, node set turns evil. They get corrupt for a lot of chains, a lot of consensus systems. That's kind of like game over. It's like reset time. Like, oh, the system's dead. It's corrupted. Right. It no longer works. But I think where you're getting to is inner subjective. Forking means that there's still a path even in that failure mode situation. Yes, that is correct.

D

Exactly. So this, again comes from deep in the Ethereum research culture that we want to build for world War three, as we call it in Ethereum. But the idea being that what kind of systems can withstand all these complex attacks? And, you know, people, you know, some people might say, oh, why are you worried about such adversarial scenarios? Because when we think about blockchains, we don't think about blockchains as, like, you know, toys that we are playing with for today it is the kind of rails on which, you know, human coordination can be built. And if you want to build a system to that grid, you need to make sure that it can withstand these kinds of faults. And in this case, what will happen is because a majority of the eigenstakers have colluded and done this malicious thing of withholding data, the token can be forked. And somebody can raise a challenge and say that hey, this is not the right token because these Eigen stakers did something bad and create another version of the token where those particular stakers, their stake is removed and the new token now just removes those guys stake and then everybody else still has their stake. And what this does is this creates a concrete penalty for these mafia from actually like, you know, going and taking their gains and running away. Instead, you have this alternative token that from the outside we can all agree that the alternative token is the right token, because everybody knows that an attack has happened. And because of that we all know, everybody now coheres onto the second forked token, because now we all agree on this forked token, that token is what is imbued with value. So when we think about what is an inter subjective agreement, I think the simplest thing to think about is all value is inter subjective. Like why is bitcoin valuable? Why is this token valuable? A particular meme coin valuable, but a fork of that meme coin is not valuable. All of this comes from inter subjective agreement. We all look at it and say, oh yeah, this is the right one, let's invest. And it is a sum total of all individual free choice that creates value in one token versus the other token. And similarly here, what's happening is the Eigen token system can create this fork, and by creating a challenger can create this fork. And by creating this fork, they're actually saying, throwing the gauntlet to everybody saying, hey, this is the right token. Now all of you shift your reference to this token. The normal problem with just doing it on a regular ERC 20 token is the original token is now being traded. It is now in locked in exchanges, Dexs, all these places you suddenly go and rub the guys and say that other token is valuable. What happened to the guys who are trading this token? What happened to the exchanges? Its chaos and mealy if you just do it on a random ERC 20 token. The Eigen system not only pre anticipates this as a behavior, it sets it up that this is the correct expected behavior. When people collude and create malicious actions, they need to be held to task, they need to be actually punished. And the system itself is designed. So that's why we have this two token model where one token can be used in a way that is fork unaware. Like you don't need to know anything about. Oh my God, this eigen token is too complicated. There are forks and all this stuff. You don't need to do any of that. You just like hey, this is an Eigen token, just use it like any other token. What it does is there's another token which can fork. It's a different frame of reference and we call it B Eigen backing Eigen. So the one that's actually backing it real value and that can fork. And if you hold this like other token, you should be able to claim one each in each of these fork. So you are protected against forking. If you are not staking and being malicious, you are protected. So thats the kind of high level idea.

C

I get it. Thats very cool. So the net gain is it makes Eigen layer and kind of like the validator node set of Eigen layer nodes more corruption resistant, right. Because there can always be this fork that happens and thats all embedded in the protocol. So it's like one example of something that wasn't intersubjective fork was like Ethereum, classic branching from Ethereum. And for people who remember back then, how messy was that? Consensus had to be reformed. There was wars and tribes and all of this messiness. Eigen layer just kind of handles a revolt against the validator set in protocol. And relatively seamlessly, any kind of dictator or cabal comes to power. Like there's a revolution sort of like baked into the protocol. So you could just kind of, kind of fork out. And even having that mechanism there will make it probably less. I mean, you're the game theory guy. That would make it less likely for such a cabal and corruption to form in the first place.

D

That is correct. So, you know, so this core idea, I think David mentioned earlier that this was from Augur and actually from some of Vitalik's blog posts, and even earlier from an idea called Truth Coin, which was a forking version of Futarchy. There's a kind of like a history to this, you know, in the blockchain space. But the, a few things had to be resolved to actually make our, you know, version of this universal intersubjective work token. I'd say there are four major things we have to solve to actually get it, get it to the point where it's usable in this way number one is universality. Universality is that it is usable across not just one particular application. Like Auger was designed for one particular application. And because it's designed for one particular application, it uses application specific semantics. For example, Auger measures how many bets are outstanding. And then you know that that's the crypto economic surface area that is open. And it uses that to create an economic mechanism that makes sure that the system works. And when you're doing it universally, you don't know what is happening. Like somebody is using an Eigen oracle in a betting market. They're using it here and there and God knows where else. So when we want to make it universal, we need to have a solicitation mechanism, which is universal, which is that it somehow needs to understand what is the total crypto economic risk without being application specific. So that's a big, big thing we had to do to actually make eigen work. There is another aspect to universality, which is we think of these inter subjective systems as happening in two phases. We call it a setup phase and an execution phase. And the reason I think it's important to mention this is when our people think social consensus, they think of if you all get into a discard or hash it out in the, in a room. But that's really not what we mean by disobjective forking. What we mean by it is there is a setup phase where the conditions of what needs to happen are pre specified. For example, this token forks for, you know, faults in Eigen da. Let's say, let's, let's say that's the setup phase. Or in the auger case, this token will fork for errors in the prediction market. That is the setup phase. Now, in the execution phase, anybody can self evaluate whether they need the fork. One is the right thing or the other one is the right thing. It's kind of like having a fork choice rule built into a protocol. Like in bitcoin. You say the longest chain is the right chain. Somebody can create a fork block, but if it's not part of the longest chain, you're going to reject it. You don't need to call anybody else to know that I need to reject that other block. The longest chain rule already tells you that you go with the longest chain, and anybody else who's going with the longest chain is already in sync, in consensus. And so this segregation into the setup phase and the execution phase. So Eigen token itself has a setup phase, which is basically creating the shelling point that it is a universal intersubjective work token. So it will fork for intersubjective faults that stakers make on the when you stake Eigen and Eigen layer. And this is very important because like we said, all value is intersubjective. It comes from our agreement. And if already the pre agreement is that if you stake and do this wrong thing, then you will get slashed and the token will fork. We call this slashing by forking. And so if you already know this, then like Ryan said, there's maybe no incentive for you to actually go and do this. But that's the first one, universality. We want to make this universal. It's usable across all these systems. You need to have a mechanism to know how much value is at risk. You also need to be able to fork for all these false. The second one we call isolation, which is that a DeFi user should not have to know all these details about forking. And all the DeFi should be able to work nominally, because otherwise DeFi has to keep track of is this the original token or the fork token, or how do we handle this split? So that becomes very messy. So the protocol has isolation, which is, that's why it maintains two tokens. One token, which will never, which doesn't need to fork on the other token, which can fork in the background. The third property we call metering, which is that, what is the cost to create a fork? Because, you know, you're inducing a social cost whenever you create a fork. Like imagine we were callous about how we build the system. It's a everybody now, like for a meme reason, you create a fork and somebody else creates a fork, and, you know, it just goes unbounded complexity. And we want to keep forking rare and serious. How do we do that? We have a metering, which is that to create a fork, you need to burn a bunch of the Eigen token. Otherwise you can't create a fork because you're serious. And why would you risk your Eigen token to create a fork? You burn the Eigen token in the original fork, but you don't burn your own token in the created fork, because you believe that that's correct. And that's where everybody will converge. They're not really losing anything. You will lose it only if you were wrong. So we call this commitment. So you have a binding commitment to actually go to another fork. And you need to have enough binding commitment to move to another fork. And this basically compensates for the cost of social consensus. You can think of the eigen token as providing social consensus as a service. And so you need to have like a cost, otherwise, you know, people will abuse, you know, by spam and various ways. Now there's just lots of like meme tokens. And then like, who knows what is happening. Forking is considered to be a serious event, and it will happen only if somebody is willing enough to create the fork that they're willing to bet their life for certain fraction of the token that the other fork is the one that's going to survive. As a third property we call metering, then the fourth property, which is actually really, I think, a striking property in crypto economics we call compensation. Compensation is imagine I use an oracle as a DeFi protocol, a learning protocol that relies on an oracle. If that oracle goes wrong due to the behavior of the stakers, then normally you're like, tough luck, move on that bad things happen, let's just move on and figure out what to do with it. But with the eigen token, one of the things you do is you can have a mechanism to compensate an AV's for misbehavior. Because we are taking the bad guys tokens and burning it. Instead of burning all of it, a portion of it can be redistributed to the AV's. And there is a mechanism to redistribute tokens. So these are all the new dimensions that are opened up with the Eigen token. And that's why, you know, we are like, okay, now we are ready to actually talk about this universal.

C

I'm laughing because people came for the airdrop and we're finishing this episode with a masterclass on crypto economics. And that was both geeky and incredibly cool and incredibly ambitious, I would say. And I think shows a lot of foresight into the seriousness of how you guys are designing Eigen layer to sort of plan for complete corruption of the node set and still have a failover strategy for that too. So very cool. Is there a whole white paper on that Sriram, if people are interested in exploring how you set up the inter subjective forking functionality?

D

Absolutely. The white paper is published on the Eigen layer webpage. Its link is, you know, we'll give you a link at the end of the end of the chat. There is also a blog post. You know, the paper is pretty dense and long. You know, it's a 40 plus page paper, but there is a five page blog post which is, you know, a somewhat simplified version of what is going on in the white paper. Yeah. So we are looking forward to, and I know Robert mentioned, you know, the few dimensions we were waiting for before transfer restrictions could be removed. And one of the first ones is community discussion. And one of the aspects of community discussion is some of the parameters. What fraction of Eigen should be burnt in order to consider a fork?

A

Right.

D

So there are some core parameters like this. How do you define a new AV's now inherits the forkability. Like, you know, it's like a constitution, and like, you know, edits to the constitution. What is the mechanism? Is it enough that you just take an eigen layer? Is the, does it have to be returned somewhere? What are the mechanisms to modulate intersubjective forking? Are these are the few dimensions which we want to nail before we open the token to both forkability and transferability?

B

Yeah, and it's really important. It would be, I mean, it would be possible to make some guesses at what are the right thing to do. But as we've seen with Ethereum and others, look at how, look at how much effort is put into the design parameters on 1559, or in thinking about going from 32 ETH validators to 1000 plus ETH validators. And before that, there was like 1000 shards and 64 shards, then one shard with roll ups. These are, you need a lot of great minds. And even Vitalik and Ethereum has had many times, they go down a path and they work for a while, and then they have to figure out something else. So, you know, this is important enough to get a lot of people's input towards.

A

And while that was kind of a lot, it's actually kind of simple at the same time. Once you've put all the pieces together, really, a lot of this complexity stems from the fact that we want Eigen to be interoperable with DeFi, yet also have to this forking ability. And so, like the base case of Eigen, actually kind of like the first class citizen, the maintainde version of the token is actually the defi version of the token, the token that people are generally familiar with. And then there's this derivative, Firon called it backed Eigen, which is like this forking contract, which spawns two separate universes for people to choose which universe they want to go to, one which is the malicious attack, and one is the non malicious attack. And really, why is this happening? It's actually because Eigen layer is increasing the scope of the things that it can provide security for inside of the, inside of their AV's ecosystem. So it's just a natural byproduct of the nature of what Eigen layer is, and how we can build smart contracts a day. And the fact that also people are also going to want to put their tokens into Defi and do defi things with it. That's my summary with this. There are some other loose ends I think we still actually need to tie off on this conversation. One is the Eigen Layer foundation. So, brand new organization. That's why, Robert, you're here on the show with us today. Because you're the new director of the foundation. So what's the mandate of the foundation? Who is going to the foundation? Is this? Are people from Eigen Labs going to go work for the foundation and leaving Eigen Labs? What's the roadmap for the Eigen foundation? What's kind of the deal? Kind of give us the DNA of the Eigen foundation?

B

Yeah, I mean, the foundation, it's brand new in terms of being public. It's been behind the scenes for a little while now. There's a lot of prep involved in the process of getting up to doing one of these types of transitions. From having, you know, a labs running entire protocol to the labs making the trusted decision to start moving things over into the community. So that started happening from a while back. Now the foundation is basically a new organization. So everything in Eigen layer labs, Eigen Labs is staying in place. There's always a trade off. Sometimes people make an option, they kind of roll a lot over. It's not. It's actually important that for two things. One is the execution. We all want Eigen layer itself to move very quickly. And not disrupting the organization is a very critical step to that. And then the second is, you know, this is a separate new organization. It has a different mandate. Eigen Layer foundation is a shareholder less nonprofit whose objective. And it would be violating its, you know, its constitution, basically, its articles of association, if it was doing anything other than spending all of its efforts to make the Eigen layer protocol more successful. And so theres a set of kind of ideals in it. And its a difference between Eigen layer Labs, which had to necessarily be an investor based company. It had to have something that looks like a regular corporate structure. And then Eigen layer Foundation, which is much more or really compatible with a community focused environment. And a lot of communities form themselves around DAos. There's many different structures. I mean, Ethereum foundation doesn't even have a dao. It doesn't have token voting. Yet still, the foundation has those ideals. So you see different versions of it. Optimism foundation is a great example. Forms is like very much for public good and other things. And our foundation is also public good. With the public good being how can we use social consensus to make blockchain and crypto security applicable to many more use cases other than people creating new layer, one layer, two chains, these types of first things. We want to project crypto security into a lot more of the technology world and business world. The summary is we're building, we are hiring quite a bit on the announcements. There's some links to go to our web pages as well. You know, for the most part, people have been coming in. There's a lot of people who are very interested, been in the space. People are engaged and want to do that. It's a fast growing organization. We've got a lot to cover. So happy to, you know, happy to have that. And we do have a couple of people. We'll be putting out some announcements, really excited about who joined our team as the chief governance officer and some others. So we'll, we'll kind of flesh it out some more and there'll be more community participation even on our side. But yeah, really good question. Thank you. That, you know, it is a whole new organization and it's not, you know, lab shifting over. It's a, you know, it's a separate organization.

C

Okay, so just some straggling questions as we finish this conversation off. So people are probably wondering, points, what does anything happen to Eigen layer points? Is that, is there a points program continuing moving forward? Do you have any comments on this?

B

Yeah. So as far as, like after March 15 was the cutoff date and, you know, everything from that point on is still in the system. It's not part of this season, but it's all tracked and, you know, it is, nothing is, nothing is going away. Nothing is like going to stop being considered going forward. We just had to pick a point in time and commit to it because there was quite a bit for us to do in preparation for getting to the stake drop. So that part is all, you know, set up for the future. The issue around restake points going forward. Fundamentally today, we made, you know, a big difference here because now we know that users who are participating in Eigen layer, the only thing to do has broadened out a lot more. Previously you could put stake in and it was registered as being in the Eigen layer system, but it wasn't actually contributing to the social consensus. Now people understand, you know, what the system is. We started seeing it with the launch a couple weeks ago that the operators, Abs's are coming up now we see it with the Eigen token as well. And so after May 10, there's going to be more attributable things that users can be doing that will signal that they are good ecosystem participants and they are helping the protocol. So we're not ready right now to say what that is, but we're working on getting that out communicated. It'll be available to people before they need to actually take action. Just follow along on eigenfoundation on Twitter eigenfoundation. Eigenlayer will, I'm sure, refer over to them as well. So people who are following that account as well can see it. But yeah, no, there's definitely changes that are going to be coming, but nobody is going to get wiped out for what they've done. Everything is going to be counted as well since March 5.

C

So some of the messaging for this conversation is today, folks can go to the website and go check to see how much their, their address might be eligible for. Except, and this is a subset of bankless listeners, people who live in the US are hit with a block and other certain jurisdictions are hit with a block and also not like I've heard tale on Twitter of VPN blocks as well. Is there anything you can say about that? I mean, we all know bankless listeners know we are living in a difficult, let's say, regulatory regime these days. So I'm not sure to what extent you can comment on this, but it is a concern, it is something top of mind for those folks looking to participate in these networks. Do you have any comments on this?

B

Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult situation. Like you're saying it's not possible to operate in the space without following regulatory guidelines and being responsible to that. And the challenging part is there's not a lot of clarity. And, you know, there is pretty strict guidance around what is possible to be done and not done in places like the us. So I don't think we're doing anything different. I think that's been the majority of tokens that have come out. The foundation itself is a non us entity, and so it's a non us, non us involved action, you know, non us involved procedure. And that, unfortunately, for many other protocols that have come before that, you have to end up having these types of geographic restrictions as well as technology restrictions.

C

One thing I'll say to bankless listeners from me personally, if you're angry, go contact your Congress representative, go contact your lawmakers. Get involved politically, because that's what it's going to take to sort of change some of these things.

B

Yeah, I'll get on my pedestal for a second as well, which is, I mean, we, you know, we have a government. We actually, you know, it is our government in the United States especially. I assume you're kind of talking more about countries such as the US. And so, yeah, the voting system is, you know, where we really get our voices in. Ultimately, I think a lot of us in the crypto space feel this way. That, you know, for countries to not pay attention to those of us who are in this space and to not adjust, you know, make the laws work for that is just pushing innovation to other places, and it's actually putting countries at a deficit.

C

Yeah, sometimes, Robert, I wish we had an inner subjective fork in the US that we could just kind of route to, but I don't know if that's baked in the constitution. So we're working. We got to work these things out socially.

B

Conference where one of the big. There's a number of senators and others who are trying to push this forward. There are states that are a lot more aggressive about trying to represent the real interest. You know, I think a lot of the laws we have, they were created a time that's very hard for them to anticipate the rapid pace of technology. So we just need to. We need to just keep our voices, you know, loud, speak up, and, you know, we know we can move. We can move things in the right direction.

A

Yeah, we're just tying off some loose ends here. I'm collecting some questions from people in the bankless nation. Discord. There's like, a different, whole different, like, rabbit hole. We could go down on, like, a sizing philosophy for distributing a token to the community. There's, like, linear versus unlinear. There's, like, you do give 8%, 10%, 15%. Eigen layer is given 15%, which, in my opinion, like, check me if I'm wrong, listeners. But, like, 10% is kind of like, what the industry standard has been, like, loosely give or take. Eigen layer has chosen to do 15. But do you guys have any just, like, directional, like, philosophy thoughts about, like, how you guys chose the parameters that you. That you've chosen? Like, I've been trying to solicit, like, feedback from people, but, like, everyone's got different opinions and everyone's is all kind of conflicting with each other. So maybe just like, at a high level question, just like philosophy on the parameters and how they were chosen and why.

B

Yeah, I mean, I think the general parameter that we have is we want to make sure that there's meaningful participation early on from the whole community. And we know in this case we have a lock token. And there's still a lot of more that we are looking at making sure that we're able to get people in and kind of reward people who are paying attention and would be good for future participants in the community. So it's good for us to have a higher number. I mean, obviously there are people who might look and say, oh, we want to go to lower percentages or pick this arbitrary one. I don't think it's zero sum. It's a very positive sum situation when it comes to airdrops. The main goal and what we are hoping over time is it's a very compelling protocol. As people see this token, as people start to understand this idea about creating social consensus as an API that can get attached more readily, it means we're going to increase the velocity. We'll be able to see much faster pace of new, exciting protocols being built in the crypto space. And having airdrops like this, it's an important tool for us to be able to decentralize. I mean, you have to actually get some people into the space through an airdrop who have not invested anything. They're just participating in your ecosystem and, you know, they're the kind of people who would be good to be part of the, you know, the community and helping to do governance and other things. So, yeah, we definitely were trying to be at a number that would allow a lot of people, a lot of people to get in so we'd have freedom. And so, you know, we started off with this first season, but we know there's a lot of things like this season, we were taking a look at particular restakers who were in the earlier phases. There's a lot of other people in the space who are developers who are doing other things in the community. So we need to make sure that we're able to look for activities in other places well in future seasons.

C

Well, congrats to the eigen ecosystem. On the stake drop is definitely another exciting milestone in what we've observed with Eigen layer shipping so much and kind of this whole narrative and idea around restaking has been really excited to go down the rabbit, the rabbit hole. So I have a question for each of you guys as we end. So want the foundation's perspective and then want Eigen Lab's perspective is what's next? What's the most exciting next thing that you guys are looking forward to? Let's get Eigen Labs first. Sriram?

D

Yeah, I think looking forward to some of the unblocking some of the technical infrastructure, like payments and slashing, getting them ready and going on Mainnet, that would be the biggest thing we are looking at from labs.

C

How about you, Robert?

B

Yeah, I think the compliment for that, the foundation, its goal is to serve the larger community, to be able to meaningfully get involved. And so what I'm really excited about is as our foundation is getting our, our feet planted and we are able to communicate more with the community, allow more people to be involved in some of the important research that needs to happen in community building, in getting people to be aware about this new opportunity to interact with crypto in a very different way, where you really think about it much more as like a software developer who understands what you want to get done. But blockchain is something that's a much easier service for you to consume rather than having to actually transition your whole application mindset over. There's a lot of web two moving into web three. I dare say everyone will be like, I'm saying AI, everybody says AI. I'll say it because I know for somebody like me, I know Sriram's in that case also. We've been big AI fans for well over a decade because we saw this coming web two and things that are like the future direction of computing, getting things set around Eigen layer so that we can support that. And I do say that very humbly. Like for foundation, we're going to be assisting the whole community make this happen. And then Eigen layer itself, for everybody who's looking at it, it's the layer of infrastructure, it's a security layer of infrastructure. But there's a massive amount of value that anybody who's bringing applications or services in will be able to get by utilizing it. And it's a marketplace. It's not looking to be extractive, not going to be rent seeking. It's just providing service that is valuable and allows a lot more value to flow into crypto by real world use cases.

C

Exciting times. Robert Sriram, thank you so much for joining us today on bankless.

A

Congrats, guys.

C

Thank you. One thing to leave you with, of course, is be careful of scam links. There could be all sorts of go to the official channels. We will include links in the show notes to those official channels. We can see the announcements and you can see the links and all of those details. Gotta remind you, of course, crypto is risky. You lose what you put in. But we are here, it's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.