EigenLayer Secures $70 Million Investment and Announces EigenCloud

EigenLayer elevates the security of Ethereum staking to a new level, making it accessible for any kind of project. The platform is popular among investors—and now consolidates its services with the EigenCloud.

Complexity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes it difficult to grasp tricky concepts. On the other, it flatters the egos of those who manage to understand it, leading them to project this mastery onto the subject itself—as if complexity alone were a quality marker.

EigenLayer is currently one of the most complex blockchain projects out there. It is a „Layer 0“ protocol that recycles the security of Ethereum’s Proof of Stake consensus. EigenLayer offers stakers the ability to use their already locked stakes to verify other projects and apps. It is somewhat comparable to merged mining in Proof of Work, but EigenLayer allows for „restaking“ LSTs—liquid staking tokens—so their security can be transferred to EigenLayer. This way, EigenLayer already forms a network of restaking pools that undertake a variety of tasks.

For most people, EigenLayer is just as difficult to comprehend at first glance as on the second or third. Those who do understand it, however, are usually enthusiastic. Yet, EigenLayer’s real-world success lags well behind this enthusiasm. There are only a handful of projects utilizing the concept, and so far, not much is happening; most of the yields generated through staking or restaking on EigenLayer come from the EIGEN token itself, not from real economic success.

Nevertheless, EigenLayer not only secured $100 million in funding last year—now the investors club a16z is doubling down and investing a whopping $70 million in EIGEN tokens. This makes EigenLayer one of the best-funded crypto projects at the moment. The Eigen team has „over the past few years unlocked an entirely new paradigm for building apps that are verifiable and demonstrably neutral,“ Ali Yahya from a16z praises.

„The Holy Grail of Uniting Onchain and Offchain Paradigms“

Verifiability is also the focus of the team’s new creation, which was publicly announced around the same time as the investment: the EigenCloud—“a developer platform to usher in the era of crypto apps,“ as described in its own words in the launch post.

The Ethereum community is excited. „This is the Holy Grail of merging onchain and offchain paradigms into a coherent whole,“ gushes Viktor Bunin, for example.

According to EigenLayer, EigenCloud „extends the core benefits of blockchain—trust and verifiability—to any app, whether on- or offchain.“ EigenCloud is built on top of EigenLayer and powered by the EIGEN token. It connects EigenLayer’s „third-party autonomous verifiable services“ with EigenDA for data, and EigenVerify and EigenCompute to create a comprehensive cloud platform.

The EigenCloud achieves what smart contracts do on Ethereum—but without Ethereum, smart contracts, or even a blockchain. It brings Web3 paradigms to the Web2 space by „transforming verifiability into a cloud service“ that allows developers „to prove what happened, why it happened, and that it happened,“ across domains where trust and correctness matter most: „LLMs (Large Language Models), AI agents, prediction markets, medical records, traditional data, social media,“ and more.

With EigenCloud, developers can „create sophisticated applications that would be difficult or impossible to fully implement onchain,“ while retaining „the cryptoeconomic security guarantees that make every crypto app so trustworthy.“

I don’t think you need to understand all the details. What matters is that EigenLayer allows extracting the security—verifiability and trustworthiness—of a blockchain and transferring it onto any application. This enables a host of new possibilities that were previously unattainable, either because the application lacked blockchain-like trust or was too constrained in its programmability. Examples include API calls that directly interact with blockchain tokens, sovereign AI agents holding on-chain assets, on-chain insurance, and much more. Some of these are infrastructure solutions—like verifiable DeFi vaults or oracles—while others are practical end-user applications.

Whether and how this concept will catch on remains to be seen when it goes live in the third quarter of this year. However, it could be an exciting addition to the Web3 ecosystem, especially for those who want to build non-monetary blockchain applications but have so far been put off by the sluggishness of blockchain technology.