EigenLayer Gets $70M From a16z to Launch Off-Chain Verifiability Platform

For years, blockchain builders have confronted a irritating limitation: their functions might solely confirm what occurred on the blockchain itself. 

The whole lot else, from AI computations to real-world knowledge, remained trapped in a belief vacuum. Now, EigenLayer believes it has cracked the code.

The Ethereum restaking protocol introduced on Tuesday that enterprise capital large Andreessen Horowitz has invested a further $70 million to launch EigenCloud, a platform that extends blockchain’s verification capabilities to any software, whether or not on or off-chain.

“EigenCloud turns that momentum right into a unified platform,” Eigen Labs CEO Sreeram Kannan advised Decrypt. “Anybody constructing on any blockchain can deploy verifiable functions with no need to be a blockchain professional.”

One of many methods the EigenCloud platform does that is by serving to builders know “how correctness is enforced by way of programmable slashing, customized settlement modes, and versatile operator choice,” Kannan defined.

The funding from a16z’s Crypto Fund IV follows the agency’s earlier $100 million Sequence B spherical. With over $12 billion in complete worth locked, EigenLayer has turn into Ethereum’s largest restaking protocol since its mainnet launch two years in the past.

The brand new platform addresses a basic limitation in blockchain growth: the shortcoming to confirm advanced off-chain computations whereas sustaining blockchain-level belief ensures.

Over time, EigenLayer envisions the platform as one thing that would remodel verifiability “right into a programmable, financial primitive” that would function “the place belief and correctness matter most,” it mentioned in a press release.

Breaking obstacles

EigenCloud introduces three core elements: EigenVerify for dispute decision, EigenDA for knowledge availability, and EigenCompute for execution.

The brand new elements permit builders to construct functions that deal with duties exterior the blockchain whereas preserving cryptographic verification.

The platform operates by way of EigenLayer’s community of Autonomous Verifiable Companies (AVSs), with over 200 providers at present stay or in growth. 



AVSs are decentralized off-chain modules that leverage EigenLayer’s shared, restaked Ethereum safety to run customized, verifiable duties, equivalent to oracles, bridges, knowledge availability layers, and middleware.

These providers make the most of the protocol’s roughly $12 billion in restaked property to safe round $2 billion in software worth.

Monetary providers agency Securitize plans to make use of the platform to confirm asset pricing knowledge for BlackRock’s $2 billion BUIDL tokenized fund, marking one in every of EigenCloud’s first enterprise implementations.

Requested about slashing dangers with AVSs, Eigen Labs’ Kannan advised Decrypt that EigenLayer is “constructed with systemic resilience in thoughts,” whereas acknowledging slashing as a “core enforcement mechanism that economically incentivizes reality.”

On this case, Kannan argues that the implementation of slashing is “remoted” to particular person AVSs.

Slashing refers back to the penalty mechanism the place a portion (or all) of a restaker’s property might be forcibly taken (slashed) if the operator they delegate to acts dishonestly or incorrectly whereas working an AVS.

Such occasions “don’t spill over between AVSs or to the Ethereum base layer. This compartmentalization ensures that failures are localized and containable, reasonably than systemic,” Kannan mentioned.

“EigenLayer is surmounting the technical bottlenecks of blockchains to allow a brand new class of functions,” Ali Yahya, who led the funding for a16z, mentioned.

The platform targets use instances throughout AI verification, prediction markets, medical information, and conventional internet providers requiring verifiable computation.

By enabling off-chain compute providers backed by EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism, builders can construct functions that have been beforehand not possible inside blockchain constraints.

Builders can entry an alpha model beginning Tuesday, that includes efficiency upgrades for EigenDA and restricted entry to EigenVerify providers. 

Broader availability is deliberate for later this 12 months, with further dispute decision modes and automatic infrastructure administration instruments in growth.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair