Mike Silagadze - The first natively integrated LST with EigenLayer

Transcript

well thank you all for staying with us uh this late into the agenda this will be our last talk here I'm very pleased to um introduce onto the stage Mike sagaz who is the CEO of ethery Mike hi everyone uh I've got ack thing going on so if uh I cough up a lung periodically uh don't don't mind me uh okay so thanks uh for for those of you that are here uh uh for coming to

the talk I I'll try to keep it brief and kind of conversational if you have any questions or whatever just shout it out uh uh you know uh just to make it more more interactive um uh so yeah so I'm I'm the founder and CEO of ethery uh ethery is a new the newest liquid staking protocol uh there's two things that make ethery interesting uh the first is it's the only protocol where the stakers get to control their keys uh specifically both the validator key and the withdrawal credentials uh that's a really big deal because I you know we believe that that's essential for making the protocol truly non-custodial uh the second thing that's uh you know particularly interesting in the current kind of uh you know uh excitement around reaking is that ether is the first

liquid reaking token uh so it's natively uh restak uh on igen Lair and with plans to integrate other restating protocols so we're pretty excited uh about that uh we just raised our seed round of financing a $5 million round with some uh great investors uh those was about six months ago uh and then we actually just went to mainnet uh on Friday so that's very exciting um currently it's white list only but uh actually everybody who's on the white list is going to be off the white list and able to stake uh tomorrow so very very exciting times uh okay so I'm going to talk a little bit about the mechanics of uh reaking uh and uh why native reaking is particularly

interesting I assume just given the audience and where we are uh that uh you guys know about staking but I'll give a quick blurb about what reaking is and why uh Native reaking is particularly interesting versus uh let's say non native reaking uh okay so reaking uh again I imagine most people here have heard about it uh but the basic idea of it is you know you stake your eth and that gives you the right to run validator on ethereum and get a share of the you know the revenue that ethereum produces various sort of slices of of Revenue uh the idea is you know 32 eth is a lot of eth um what if you could reuse that same Stak eth as effectively collateral to run uh validators for other services so

other services might include other blockchains might include um uh data availability layers Oracle networks or or a variety of other uh Services what you're really doing with reaking is you're kind of expanding uh the ethereum trust layer to Encompass other stuff outside ethereum uh lots of risks associated with this have been discussed and they're they're totally valid uh but the upside is is pretty significant you know if you can imagine a lot of other stuff kind of getting plugged into and utilizing the ethereum security layer uh a lot of value then starts occurring to to eth you know it's hard to place a a number on that value but it's it's not hard to imagine that actually ending up being pretty uh pretty large uh and as far as let's say a node operator a

Staker it's not hard to imagine that eclipsing in fact the value of sort of basic staking um if only because you know it obviously will lead to more eth being staked uh and therefore you know lower uh staking rewards and they you know basic staking rewards for everybody but lots and lots of hopefully reaking reward so it's a very exciting uh uh frawood risk but uh very exciting opportunity there's one major player in the reaking world and that's igen lay again I imagine most of you guys have heard of them uh but there's others that are starting so there's restak and cloud from blck SWAP which is really interesting takes a different approach uh and there's you know lots of other teams that are working on uh different aspects of this uh with ethery our hope is to become kind of like the reaking

router uh that's like your One-Stop shop for uh for staking that's natively integrated into reaking that's where we're trying to do uh okay so let's talk about very basic you know normal organic fresh locally farmed staking uh you know the the way you stake is you've got your keys so you got your validator key you've got you know whatever you're using as your withdrawal uh credentials uh you call a function on the beacon chain deposit contract send a 32 eth uh and then uh when you want to unstake you do a voluntary exit on your validator and then the eth magically shows up back uh to to wherever you want it to be uh withdrawn very simple kind of this closed loop uh

process uh with Native reaking so let's say you want to inject igen lay or some other reaking solution into this uh you do the same thing you you know deposit your 32 eth into the bechain deposit contract but you point your withdrawal credentials to an igen pod smart contract so instead of pointing it to your own wallet or some other you know Nosa save or some other smart contract uh you point into an igen pod withdrawal contract igen pod is you know has all kinds of igen layer magic associated with it uh that is basically providing the capacity for programmable slashing so if you're running a validator that then that validator is also running uh other reaking services like let's say

it's running an oracle it's running a data availability thing uh then if that validator misbehaves uh the IG L contracts will slash your eth so when you go to stake it you instead of getting your 32 e back you're going to get some uh fraction of that back and you can stack you know as many services and the as many servic as you want on top of that obviously again lots of risks etc etc but also you can also increase your staking uh revenues that way that's the basic idea the key thing is your withdrawal your withdrawal credentials are now pointing to an igen pod that has programable slashing baked into it so this is native uh reaking uh non-native restak is kind of

a a weird kind of interesting thing uh with uh and I'm talking specifically about igen layer because they're they're doing it uh where you take uh a liquid staking token like let's say Ste but really it could be any token could be maker it could be WRA Bitcoin it could could be whatever it could be shib Pepe whatever coin you want you put it into an Igan layer contract kind of sits there uh and then the igen pods are able to programmably slash some other validator that has nothing to do with the tokens that you just deposited um uh so really non-native reaking is uh it's not staking uh it's

also not reaking it it actually has nothing to do with either uh really what it is it's a way to build tvl like which is totally good solid strategy on on the part of IG lay makes makes a lot of sense um but um if you wanted to actually build a staking you know like ABS as services on top of this you need to have the validators then put up a separate Bond otherwise they have no economic incentive to not misbehave right they you need to either have them put up a separate Bond or you only work with trusted node operators who have a reputational risk associated with it uh um but again it's like what then what do you like what does this have to do with reaking it's not you know so uh my

position is the only kind of reaking that actually makes sense as native reaking uh for that reason you know that that's why with ethery the way our protocol is designed is when eth goes into our protocol uh we we do this uh we in other words we actually spin up uh validators uh that are natively restake that point to igen pods and then when we need when you go to redeem your eth uh we we have a mechanism I briefly mentioned that stakers hold their keys we have an economic mechanism that incentivizes uh uh Bond holders to exit the uh the validator and then the eth comes back whether it's slashed or not but then you can actually sort of address directly a particular validator uh that may or may not need misbehaving that's uh that's actually running the uh

the additional service they say Oracle Network or whatever it happens to to be so uh we think that makes sense and we we have the luxury being sort of late in the staken game to have built our protocol this way you know obviously like Lio and Rocket pool which are you know great protocols um uh you know reaking wasn't a thing back then so the protocols are designed in such a way that you know they need to be substantially redesigned to support this this kind of thing um so so that's pretty exciting uh uh where are we at now I think I mentioned we raised round of financing October 11th uh we did our test net uh launch uh went well we finished our audits uh a few weeks back we're also I think still

running uh an audit contest with Hats Finance uh so if you want to win some money come and uh you know submit some bugs um uh and then we launched on uh on mainnet and then this uh uh tomorrow we're actually uh you know uh turning off the white list and uh uh allowing anybody to uh to stake so come check it out uh give us some feedback join our Discord all that good stuff uh and uh thanks for [Applause] listening are there any questions from the audience so if I would like to participate as a

Staker in your um protocol then which avss uh I could choose to put my staked eth on uh yeah so there's uh multiple ways to participate in ethery if all you want to do is stake eth uh then you would just mint e eth or liquid taking token and then all the work is sort of handled by the protocol uh we currently don't have a governance uh uh Dow uh we probably will have one in the future and that's how the avss that we support will be determined and the particular allocation uh to those ah but then you use the easy button is the just stake e eth and that's it but then you also use

a liquid staking token so you don't use the native uh reaking approach uh the liquid staking token is backed by native restak eth so it goes into a pool the that eth in the pool gets natively restak the liquid staking token uh can then be Redeemed by let's say exiting validators or or using the buffer in the pool uh however if you want to run a validator for us you can do that one of two ways uh you can either Bond two eth so it's it's a two e Bond requirement um and then run a validator and then you can decide do you want to restake do you not want to restake which abss you want to run you basically do whatever you want because you're running the validator uh or we actually have a program we've been running called

operation solo Staker uh and uh that actually allows people to um uh run a validator without providing a bond but it's it's a permission thing so we vet everybody that does that and we use DVT to uh distribute a valid technology to kind of you know make it low lower risk for the protocol to stake with the those validators uh so if you go to ethery you can apply to be a you know a solo Staker excellent any any other questions for Mike all right well thank you very much for an excellent presentation