Eigen Labs is a crypto firm that is behind the development of EigenLayer, a staking and re-staking protocol that is built on the Ethereum blockchain. EigenLayer is a general-purpose marketplace for decentralized trust that has its core rooted in a re-staking service and EigenDA(Eigen Data Availability) to introduce a mechanism of internalizing modularity by redirecting trust within the Ethereum blockchain. In order to fully leverage the Ethereum trust layer, Eigen Layer modularizes it into three different factions that include decentralized trust, Economic Trust and Ethereum validator commits. The re-staking feature provided by Eigen Labs enables reuse of economic security without incurring any extra cost on the part of the staking entity. The EigenLayer inherits some decentralized trust from some validators like Homebrew and Rocketpool to ensure that collusion of nodes does not occur on a blockchain network. Eigen Labs is run by a remote team in Seattle washington and was founded by Sreeram Kannan, a former professor at the University Of Washington and the current head of the university’s blockchain lab. He also doubles as the firm’s CEO. The firm is on a mission to increase open innovation in the crypto sector especially with regards to the Ethereum blockchain.
Eigen Labs has since raised $50 million in a series A fundraising round led by Blockchain Capital and acquiring participation from investors like Polychain Capital and Coinbase ventures. In February this year, Eigen Labs revealed its plans to raise $50 million at at $250 million post-equity market valuation and a $500 million token valuation. Having closed the fundraising round, the firm has not yet disclosed its valuation terms. The re-staking protocol is still at its beta stage and is yet to launch but has previously raised another $14.5 million in a seed round that was led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures. Having been founded in 2021, the firm aims to enable users to re-stake their ether(ETH) and innovate at the consensus layer without necessitating them to launch a new blockchain altogether.
The firm’s CEO has revealed the motivation behind EigenLayer when he expressed that Eigen Labs wanted to innovate a new model where developers can easily consume trust rather than needing to build trust and developing new powerful systems of assurance to make the crypto ecosystem secure and more efficient. EigenLabs aims to launch the initial iterations of the staking protocol gradually throughout the year. This new innovation is a gamechanger in bootstrapping new crypto-economic ecosystems by increasing security of decentralized services and lowering the cost of trust and capital. When the new protocol is launches, it is set to open up opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs to experiment and build while substantially easing down financial barriers that have hindered innovation on the Ethereum network in the past.
The firm has opened up new hiring roles in an effort to speed up its development operations. The new hiring roles include general council, blockchain security lead, head of developer relations, senior backend engineer and principal engineer. All the roles have been made remote and up for grabs by developers within Seattle. With the filling of the new roles, the firms hopes to give rise to a protocol that enables users to stake ETH across multiple protocols at once while at the same time validating more networks at lower marginal costs.
