EigenLayer

EigenLayer is a restaking protocol built on Ethereum that allows users who have already staked ETH (either natively or through liquid staking tokens like stETH) to 'restake' those same assets to simultaneously secure additional decentralized services called Actively Validated Services (AVSs). Founded by Sreeram Kannan, a professor at the University of Washington, and launched in 2023, EigenLayer introduced the concept of restaking — one of the most significant innovations in Ethereum's ecosystem since The Merge. The protocol essentially extends Ethereum's security model to any middleware, oracle, bridge, or data availability layer that needs economic security.

The core insight behind EigenLayer is that Ethereum has massive economic security (tens of billions of dollars in staked ETH), but that security is only used to validate Ethereum transactions. Meanwhile, new protocols that need economic security must bootstrap their own validator sets from scratch — an expensive and difficult process. EigenLayer solves this by creating a marketplace where staked ETH can be used as security for multiple services simultaneously. AVSs built on EigenLayer include EigenDA (a data availability layer), oracle networks, keeper networks, bridges, and various middleware services.

The EIGEN token adds an additional dimension called intersubjective staking — it can be slashed for faults that are objectively identifiable by any reasonable observer but not automatically provable on-chain (like data withholding or censorship). This complements ETH restaking, which handles attributable faults. By 2026, EigenLayer has attracted over $15 billion in restaked assets and supports dozens of AVSs, making it one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the Ethereum ecosystem. The protocol has fundamentally changed how new services think about bootstrapping security.