Ethereum re-staking solution EigenLayer has secured a major funding round. Furthermore, it could be a major catalyst in bringing Ethereum and layer-2 networks closer to mass adoption.
On March 28, the Ethereum re-staking platform EigenLayer announced that it had secured $50 million in funding. The Series A round was led by crypto venture firm Blockchain Capital.
Other investors in the round include Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Electric Capital, and Finality Capital Partners.
Furthermore, the protocol’s whitepaper was only released in February, promising a new paradigm for Ethereum re-staking. Associate professor at the University of Washington, Sreeram Kannan, founded the EigenLayer collective to solve issues with validator economic incentives.
What Is EigenLayer?
EigenLayer is a revolutionary protocol that facilitates re-staking ETH that is already securing the network. It can be used to secure new crypto-economic networks. Blockchain Capital explained:
“Since the validator’s collateral is denominated in Ether, the capital outlay required to incentivize, attract, and retain a decentralized set of high-quality validators is lowered in turn.”
In addition to reducing the cost of capital for bootstrapping new crypto-economic networks, EigenLayer also makes it easier to decentralize them since Ethereum has more validators than any other network.
Speaking to Fortune, Kannan explained that blockchains do not have the infrastructure yet to support major platforms and apps such as Uber, Amazon, or social media networks. He added:
“Our focus will be exclusively on maximizing the surface of innovation, which is, what new things can you build? Which is going to onboard the next group of application builders, which then onboards the next group of users.”
Bart Stephens, founder and managing partner at Blockchain Capital, commented, “by lowering the cost of trust and capital, EigenLayer opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs to experiment and build while significantly easing the financial barriers that have hindered innovation in the past,”
A New Catalyst For Ethereum Adoption
DeFi analyst “The DeFi Investor” predicted that EigenLayer would be one of the top five Ethereum catalysts in 2023. “EigenLayer is one of the most innovative projects I’ve discovered in a while,” he said before explaining:
“In short, Eigenlayer is building a marketplace where ETH node operators can opt to provide services for additional fees. They will even be able to validate networks such as side chains or even non-EVM networks.”
The team is currently building a “data availability layer” on top of its system. This will provide a faster way to write data onto Ethereum’s blockchain.
Finally, EigenLayer is expected to launch to mainnet in Q3 2023.
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