Sreeram Kannan: EigenLayer – The Ethereum Restaking Protocol #470

16 Nov 2022 · 1:25:32

EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan explains restaking, the mechanism his protocol uses to let existing Ethereum stakers put their collateral to work securing additional services for extra yield and extra risk. He describes EigenLayer's programmable slashing model, how it differs from ordinary layer 2 designs, and the roadmap for expanding what restaked ETH can secure.

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all right this is epicenter episode 470 with guests sriram cannon from eigenlayer hi sriram uh welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Frederica ANZ and I'm joined by Felix Lodge as my co-host today and we are speaking with SRI Ram Cannon the founder of eigenlayer which is a restaking protocol and what that means we will get to um in just a minute but before we speak with SRI RAM and let me tell you about our sponsor this week Omni is your new favorite multi-chain

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provide you with more functionality than tens of different D5 apps and while it's combined to highlight their transformation they rename from State wallet to Omni the next generation super wallet join thousands of users on this next Generation wallet by downloading it today on iOS or Android at Omni dot app fantastic so three Ram it's a pleasure to have you on um I recently I moderated a panel at Defcon uh where you were a very contentious I guess it was an incredible neutrality it was so contentious that we released it as a special episode in epicenter

um we'll talk about credible neutrality in kind of centralization and looming decentral decentralization um I mean a little bit later in the show but before we kind of kick it off properly tell us how did you get into crypto um thank you so much Frederica I I enjoyed that panel as well and uh you know we could use more Frank candid uh conversations in this space and uh telling a little bit about myself I got into blockchains per se in 2018 or on January but uh my interest in peer-to-peer

system stays far back my PhD thesis was basically in peer-to-peer and wireless networks this is my masters and PhD spanned from 2006 to 2011-12 so I've been thinking about these systems at that time my interest in Wireless was primarily peer-to-peer Wireless and ad hoc mesh networks was mainly thinking through imagining a world where we don't need centralized intermediation to for me to talk to somebody else and we were thinking one of the big use cases for something like this would be Last Mile coverage right like in developing countries where there may not be enough Wireless infrastructure but actually we were pleasantly surprised with the scale of

infrastructure deployment in developing countries around the world where uh the the need for something like that didn't emerge so uh after my PhD um I switched out and was working on computational genomics for several years and where we were mainly working on things like how how do we analyze data coming from DNA RNA sequencing how do genes regulate each other all this kind of stuff totally different from what I do right now but in January 2018 around the time my PhD advisor pramod who is now at the Princeton blockchain

Center so he called me and he said Shri Ram did you hear about this thing called Bitcoin I said I heard about it but I don't know much more and uh is like oh the things that we used to think about a lot you know how to maximize throughput minimize latency in peer-to-peer type systems is what you know Bitcoin is facing there's a whole bunch of problems do you want to come and work on it and uh as interesting as it was technically I had already been burnt once trying to trying to do something in the peer-to-peer space and uh also I had a kind of in intrinsic distrust of financial speculation and uh

I I looked at it at that time and I wanted to see if there is some more fundamental reason for me to commit to work on that for like let's say a 10-year time scale and um initially I was not convinced and it took me three four months of like wandering around and uh one of my like um basic paradigms which is uh comes from like Evolution and you can ask like what is the kind of evolutionary advantage of this species homo sapiens and you know an immediate guess would be something like oh we are intelligent and therefore we can uh we've kind of taken

over this planet but I think a moment's examination would suggest that that's probably not true because if you take one intelligent person and take a gorilla and then give them an island you know who has better survival there um so the thesis this is actually most uh clearly articulated by you will Noah Harari in his book sapiens that the reason humans uh have taken over this planet is because we cooperate flexibly in large numbers because we cooperate flexibly in large numbers I really like this thesis and it's kind of a foundational mental model for me and as I think through the thesis

um and looked at something like Bitcoin it became clear that the ability to cooperate is limited by trust right like I'm going to cooperate with you if I know I can trust you and if I can remove the barriers to trust then I'll the then there'll be more cooperation flexibility in large numbers so I saw this as kind of like upgrading societal infrastructure and even providing basically uh an evolutionary Advantage for for our species in our ability to cooperate flexibility in Los numbers so that became like uh once I saw that Paradigm that essentially

um crypto can play a role in upgrading our cooperation infrastructure I became fascinated with it and over the next you know few months I started diving in deeper and uh so I would say that I've gotten deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole in the last five years so that's how I got into crypto nice so yeah before we talk about iglare the project we're here to talk about I guess one step before that or were you still part of is the kind of University of Washington blockchain lab can you talk a little bit about what your what the goal of this lab is and and what

you've been researching there or you're still researching there until if you are yeah uh other time you know I was uh working on like I was saying computational genomics but I was a professor assistant professor at the University of Washington Seattle and uh what ended up happening was as I got more interested in this I found that there is a bunch of like basic questions which are unanswered right so just looping it back to my thesis cooperate flexibly in large numbers you know Bitcoin already showed us that you know you can do trustless cooperation I would characterize ethereum as having showed us that we can cooperate flexibly you know in Harare uses the word flexibly to differentiate from other

species which only cooperate genetically right like army ants cooperate in large numbers but only genetically and you know uh the way I think about ethereum is it enabled more flexible cooperation because you can programmatize you know applications that can then build on top of this common cross structure and so the thing that I thought was missing at that time is the in large numbers part and in large numbers basically to me meant we need a much more scalable substrate so most of our research ended up being thinking about how do we do scalable blockchains and what are the core features of consensus protocols how do

we get scalability how do we get the game theory around this right and so on so this is this became the agenda and this became big enough you know to start the UW blockchain lab so earlier it was part of my other uh research just one one strand and the goal was basically to understand and create enough Primitives so that we can have scalable blockchains so that was kind of the agenda for the lab and while doing this one of the things that I ran into uh was when you're thinking about how to build new say consensus protocols or scalability or any of these things

there are very few avenues for you to deploy them into production so what do I mean by that you know imagine you had a great idea for a distributed application like a smart contract then you could then take it and run it on top of any major smart contract blockchain say ethereum or any of these other chains that came after that but if you had a great idea for how to improve the consensus protocol or scalability or adding new features like how to build better oracles or how to build better data availability or any of these things there is no place for you to go and deploy any of these Innovations in fact every new innovation requires you having to create yourself a

decentralized trust Network and the way I think about decentralized trust is it's like a unicorn it's so rough and it you know it barely exists and so it is completely untenable to ask like a good distributed systems engineer to also create decentralized trust along with each of their Innovations this appears rather insane to me that this is the expectation that we have that like each person who has a good idea for a consensus protocol a good idea for a virtual machine also go and create a social Revolution to create decentralized trust it's just simply untenable so I you know as I was initially I didn't understand all of this my initial

thinking was hey we have these school ideas for how to improve consensus protocols maybe somebody will take up and use it and what I saw was there is a lot of governance bottleneck and pressure in big systems which which rightfully should exist to you know the next upgrade needs to be made sure that you know it's it's really really accurate correct and safe and it's a long process to get there and there is no place to do rapid experimentation so saw that and I was a little bit frustrated with this this state of the ecosystem that basically the idea that smart contract developers had a variety of options for experimentation whereas infrastructure Builders which which I

thought was the core bottleneck which was uh limiting the scope of blockchains did not have the same playground for innovation and so this became a little bit of an obsession trying to figure out how do we borrow existing large trust networks to then go and create and let anybody innovate on top of a common substrate and I would say that was kind of the uh seeds for what became eigenlayer later is this Obsession in trying to figure out how do we leverage existing trust networks to do new things that it was not designed to do so that's that's a little bit of Prelude on uh on what we were doing before and

how it led to this project lets you piggyback of an existing decentralized trust Network um it does that through a mechanism called restaking can you explain to us what that is yeah absolutely Frederica um the core idea is we when you ask this question how can we leverage an existing trust Network to do other things it it begs the following you know secondary question which is what is the root of trust of these existing networks and we can take ethereum as as an example or

Bitcoin as another example so what is the root of trust of Bitcoin the root of trust of Bitcoin is the proof of work which Powers you know security for this network and similarly what is the root of trust for ethereum is the proof of stake that powers the security for this network what do we mean by proof of stake Powers the security for this network people are taking that stake they have eat and then locking it in a contract and then saying that I am abiding by the conditions of block production of this network of ethereum and if I deviate from it if if I follow it give me rewards if I deviate from it I have liability that I may lose my eat and this constrains the set of possible

behaviors that participants in the block production system can exert they have to make valid blocks so they make invalid blocks or double sign blocks and so on they are liable to lose their weight so this is the root of trust so the root of trust of ethereum is people putting down eat and committing to both positive and negative incentives for actually making this block in comparison to say Bitcoin prove a work where people are buying and investing like mining equipment and using that to mine uh Bitcoin blocks and the uh the space of there is a positive incentive for them the positive

incentive is that if you continue mining on the longest chain you'll get rewards and there is a negative incentive which is that if you know you don't uh you try to attack the system or whatever the there's no programmatic negative incentive but there's a subjective negative incentive which is that the Bitcoin to USD price may go down and that adversely impacts the value of your investment which is this mining equipment so that's the economics underpinning the root of trust in Bitcoin and say the root of trust in ethereum what we found was the ethereum root of trust or in general proof of stakehold of trust is much more programmable

and what do I mean by that is you can take the same stake and opt in to additional conditions additional positive incentives and negative incentives because it's stake and stake is programmatically controlled by the blockchain whereas you cannot do the same thing on bitcoin you cannot take Bitcoin root of trust and then say that I can also opt into additional negative incentives because any additional negative incentives are have to translate to bitcoin to USD price movements and that's not possible for us to modulate so we found that and and it is more fundamental than that because you know the core idea is you cannot the Bitcoin

blockchain cannot go and burn your mining equipment if you do something wrong and that's because that's just there is a digital to analog translation barrier whereas you know your eat is stored in a contract and you can basically you know burn loose transfer whatever those that eat so now having gotten to the root of trust of proof of stake we can ask how can we leverage the same e to to then also secure other things imagine a world where all stakers opt-in restake which is basically put their stake at commit their state to additional Services they say that hey I'm going to

also run this other data storage Network this Oracle or this new chain any of these other things and they say that if I do not behave correctly on any of these Services I'm liable to lose my eat and if it turns out that all of them all the hundred percent of each stakers opt in then you have kind of gotten the same route of trust that that is underpinning the ethereum blockchain to also opt-in to your service so you can think of once you have like everybody opted and everybody restaked then it's almost as if the ethereum protocol upgraded itself to make sure

you are basically this other service is being run by everybody who's also running the ethereum staking and you can think of like two different ways in which trust transfers one is trust arising due to decentralization each sake is widely distributed and and state so that is one dimension so to just access that Dimension it is sufficient if the same set of heat stakers also go and run these other serves but to transfer the economic incentives we need the stake to be committed programmatically to additional slashing conditions relevant to each of these services so eigen layer allows basically is a platform that lets

stakers opt-in both there like decentralized trust and economic security to opt in to validating all of these other services to give a bit of context on the name eigen layer eigen in German for your own it's we we envision a world where anybody can come and build any new service without having to go find or build their own decentralized trust Network they can leverage this existing massive trust network of ethereum and then uh and then build this on top we find the timing to be uh this is the right time to build something like eigen layer because we just went through the merge and we are in a fully proof of stake world right now in the ethereum uh

landscape as also the layer 2 landscape having um uh significantly driven technology forward for example by having sophisticated fraud proofs and validity proofs and these may be needed for services to exert slashing so if a service for example if I'm running a chain and in that chain if you double signed a block or if you signed an invalid block it should be transparent on the ethereum blockchain whether that was correct or not and to do that you need to have either fraud Pros or validity proofs and the the averages of the layer 2 actually helps us in in basically writing these flashing conditions sharply so that's a kind of

quick overview of uh there's tons to unpack here maybe kind of let's roll up historically a little bit before we kind of dive into the weeds here um there used to be um the concept of merge mining I mean the concept is still around it just doesn't really get talked about anymore and so basically the idea behind merge mining was that if you um improve of work obtain the right to build a block um you would be conceded to build um the block on a different chain as well so basically so so that basically several chains can use the same proof of

work is this the proof of stake equivalent to merge mining yeah absolutely I think this is uh so the restaking another way of thinking about restaking is is just merge staking right and I think this is probably one of the reasons why nobody else came up with it and we came up with it is because you know all the ogs who've been around in in crypto like you all here uh have looked at this Paradigm of merge Mining and merge mining is the idea like Frederica just explained that basically if you mine a block in Bitcoin you also kind of mine a block in this altcoin or

this new ecosystem and merge mining had very limited crypto economic transfer so what do I mean by that is if you merge mine Bitcoin and some other chain in some other altcoin in parallel firstly you need a lot of Bitcoin miners to opt into this other system in order to have any security transfer because even if you had a majority honest in Bitcoin if only five percent is much mining your other coin then basically you you don't have any measurable security because we know 51 of Bitcoin miners are on us but doesn't mean 51 or five percent of Bitcoin miners are

honest so you need every all the Bitcoin miners to obtain so that's number one but even if every Bitcoin miner opts into this other system there is still a massive limitation and the limitation is that even if 100 of Bitcoin miners are mining this altcoin if they all coordinated to attack this altcoin what happens is the altcoin system doesn't work but that does not translate into any kind of like a meaningful loss for them in in the Bitcoin because you know they can continue to use their Bitcoin mining equipment to mine Bitcoins so the at the end of the day the transfer of Economic Security from

Bitcoin to any of these are all coins which are merge mine is very weak and because it's very weak these systems did not did not evolve to the extent that people anticipated early on and these once these flaws were identified people kind of gave up on this Paradigm and I think this is the reason why nobody really Revisited this Paradigm with the new lens of staking and what we did you know as kind of not having lived through all that experience and we said oh yeah okay staking means that it's slashing and what this means is if you had like you know a 20 billion dollar state in ethereum but even if five percent of it

like one billion dollar gets staked in your alternative network if you misbehave if you can lose all your eat right the one billion dollar of it that is a concrete negative penalty so the transfer of Economic Security is nearly perfect in merge staking whereas the transfer of Economic Security in merge mining is very limited or non-existent so once we kind of grogged around this uh and this really needs two things it needs proof of stake it also needs a powerful general purpose programming because otherwise you cannot have strong programmatic conditions which slash the money when you're misbehaving in all

these protocols so and both of them were kind of nicely getting well developed in ethereum so that's the context for why I think many others who may have come up with it missed it because of the the trajectory of merge mining which basically didn't work and I think mud stacking works perfectly yeah I think I've seen you describe also eye glare as this programmable slashing protocol right and I I think one thing's interesting I guess to some degree if you if you think about sharding too right like I guess if you double sign on one another Shard you kind of also slashed on the main chart which essentially is similar just that in this

case maybe in eigen layer you somehow basically have like shards that do like different tasks it's permissionless sharding basically if you want to think about it yeah so it's it's very interesting concept for sure I I have this this one question that I definitely want to ask why we're already on the kind of meat of it with the slashing which is you know uh essentially on ethereum right now if you are a big enough like Staker you have this concept of correlated slashing right that if like 33 of the network double sign at certain point you can have 100 slashing um now I guess I'm wondering since of course if you add more risks or more services on

top that can be slashed more conditions um and and this case might be one of them you you might potentially go like above 100 slashing is is that how do you like deal with that is there some kind of systemic risk there that the system generates and and how if there is or like if how do you think about it and how do you limit that uh this this happens which obviously yeah we don't like to see no no we don't like to see that at all and we try to minimize the chances for something like that but um let's zoom out a little bit and see what we envision the main use case of eigen layer to be that we envision eigen layer to play the

biggest role is build services for the ethereum ecosystem so if you look at uh if you look at what an application like adapt today needs it it is paying ethereum for you know decentralized trust on block building right like on block making and block validation but there is a whole domain of other things that are all needed in order to make this application usable this could be things like I need oracles I need Bridges I need Mev management I need data availability I need you know faster settlement whatever the set of other services you know in a modular world

that you may want in order to actually have the application be trustless and if you look at this and when we talk about systemic risk I think there is a kind of natural thing that people freak out when they see like oh you're leveraging trust it's going to be like trigger systemic risk but actually I think eigenlayer significantly reduce the systemic risk and I'm going to kind of make a case for that and why why do I say that so what is the systemic risk that we see today if you're an application and you consume you know trust services from ethereum but you also consume Trust Services from

oracles from Bridges from you know other things that you all depend on and in some sense trust is naturally based on the minimum bottleneck right like whichever is the bottleneck trust that determines like how much loss you're getting so you have you know ecosystem service from ethereum that basically makes blocks but you also need all these other things so imagine if you had like 20 billion dollars taked in eat on L1 but you have like one billion dollars staked in your Oracle one billion dollar in your bridge and one billion dollar in your data availability and other other things now the trust that you're getting as an application what is the cost of

attacking all these applications find the least trusted one and take over that thing that is all that is needed to actually attack the whole system of applications and okay now imagine in an eigen layer world you are fully over leveraged okay which is what we are kind of worried about what does over leverage mean like every stake is doing everything okay every Staker is participating in the Oracle every Staker is participating in the bridge every Staker is participating in the data available in fact I'm going to argue that this is the best possible world we can build why is this because now to attack any one of the applications you have to attack either the core L1 or one of these services and if you attacked any

one of these Services you're gonna slash 51 of that service so that's the mental model for building on eigenveer is you should have if the safety of that service failed like then you should be able to slash a majority of the stickers so if you take this metal model then essentially what you can do is to now attack any one of these Services you need to attack like this 20 billion dollar State you cannot attack one billion dollar State and take over the system so the cost of corrupting the ecosystem actually increases under perfectly staking if you're research so does the reward no so does the reward the reward doesn't

increase actually why because you could have already taken that gain by just attacking the L1 so the the reason the reward doesn't increase is the same set of daps so the there is a set of dabs already living on ethereum they trust the ethereum L1 right and now they were dependent on all these external non-ecosystem Services right like oracles Bridges which were not done by the L1 they were dependent on all of these and by attacking L1 anyway you could have attacked these tabs but because because it is trust is the men of many things if I trust you and Felix and somebody else and anyway I'm trusting let's say Frederica with my life I might as well trust her with my

bag and like other things and instead of like giving those other things to other people then you know my trust exposure actually increases but the cost of corruption doesn't Inc the profit from corruption doesn't increase because Frederica could have already taken my life and she if she doesn't it's the same thing is happening with the L1 is basically already the dapps are trusting the L1 for Block production if you double sign if you do any basic issue at the L1 you could have taken away kind of like value from the taps I I'm I'm with you part of the argument so um I mean obviously if you have a um system that is composed out of individual components the weakest link

is what you need to break in order to break the system totally with you on this um but if you have different chains or different applications you know secured by the same stake to me that's not the same thing so basically if you have say the Oracle that would have been Incorporated anyway yeah that's kind of that's still the same system so if I look at ethereum now say ethereum the is you know ether is with with I'm making this up now 150 billion give or take but the East ecosystem is worth um 500 billion or 800 billion whatever I haven't done the maths but probably boy

Park correct um and that's probably fine so basically but if you have if you were to secure like the entire global economy with 150 billion this will probably not be fine right so basically to me the question is is there a way to mathematically deduce how much you can actually secure economically with um the stake that we're talking about here namely the 150 billion of each yes uh so we have to so first point I think you know what what you're saying is

well if there were applications that already existed on ethereum today and only they are being served by these additional Services then yes the profit from corrupting doesn't increase because they're already there but if it does increase the economy significantly because of like oh actually the same money is now securing a much bigger economy then you know you you'd be under serious trouble but let me make a contrapositive to this uh the imagine we are four years back okay and you know somebody comes and tells me eat is worth uh whatever 100 million 200 million today and you know there's no way that heat can secure like a 500

billion dollar worth of an ecosystem and uh that didn't turn out to be the case it is now securing a 500 billion dollar worth of ecosystem and you can ask why is that because it grew in value relative to the ecosystem securing it it is securing and and this is for the good right because actually you know the value flow from the fees actually sustains enough value to actually make sure that heat is valuable enough and one could make the same argument that by making what the ethereum secures a little bit more meta by making is not only what is run on the ethereum virtual

machine it's basically anything that the ethereum trust Network can secure you're actually just you know increasing the scope of applications what would what could be built as applications on evm this is what could be built those applications which are natively you know new distributed systems that can then be programmed on top and you could make this argument that basically it will grow because you're receiving fees from not only you know block making but also from all these other services Acro back to ethereum but I think there is a the there's a separate part to your question which is a more mathematical kind of a question and the question is what are like exact equations that like calculate and understand this over

leveraging so to do that we have to actually look at what's happening in the ecosystem today already and you look at it you have 20 billion dollars you said ethereum's worth 150 billion yes that's true but each stake this worth maybe less than 20 billion today but it is securing this 500 billion dollar ecosystem why are we not worried about this over leverage what is going on right like what's the underpinnings of not worrying about this over Leverage and I think there are two things two ways to look at it one is a practical way and then I'll go to the mathematical way the practical way is you look at it and you say oh you know you have 20

billion dollars to it and if you're an attacker firstly you have to acquire 20 billion or whatever two thirds of 20 billion dollars and because there is a slashing protocol at work you're going guaranteed to lose that six billion seven billion 13 billion whatever depending on what type of attack you're falling off so you're guaranteed to lose a whole bunch of money whether you are able to make a way with a whole bunch of money is anybody's question right like whether you are you will be able to run away with more than 10 billion dollars from this ecosystem is and is questionable because because of what because you don't have exchange

liquidity at that scale you don't have you know exit points and there is frictions and Society will Fork you out and all these other things that essentially constrain the profit from corruption so the cost of corruption the cost to the attacker is guaranteed that they have to they have to take you know this six billion dollars or 13 billion dollar risk and the profit that they can make is potentially limited and these two together constrain the system enough that practically we don't see these attacks but you're asking my question right so basically because I'm asking what's the upper bound and you say no no no but it's lower than the upper bound which I am sure it is I mean so basically I totally concede that say you

break ethereum the maker token is probably uh with a crash I mean totally with you on that um but I mean yeah I mean it's a way to calculate numbers yeah that's the next part to the question so I just answered the practical way we can also actually understand these more mathematically and to do this actually you need to redesign ethereum a little bit and uh so for example what you need is okay how do we mathematically understand like what is the limits of Leverage and why are we not over leveraged today on ethereum right before we extend leverage even more to other things that I'm talking about we have to understand why

we are not all of us today um so the first part was a practical argument arguing that there is a kind of hardening of security at a certain scale and that's that's the argument but the second part is a more mathematical argument and what you can do is you can say that the total amount of transact so whenever there is some kind of an event there is either a social response or other response which happens within a certain time and if you can bound the total value flow within that amount of time so if you can bond that you know you will not be able to move more than whatever you know 6 billion or 7 billion or something within that time which is the incidence

response time the incidence response time may be like time to detect a double double signed block and then shut down like further transfers it may be the time for like a community to Fork out an obvious like you know a fraudulent Fork so the essentially what you want to do is you want to bound the total volume that of transactions within the Event Horizon right like so there's an event horizon and then there is a total volume that total transaction volume and right now there is no nice way to do it because we don't know how much binance transferred we don't know how much crack and transfer we don't know how much some other like Mom and Pop exchange transferred we don't know how

much somebody sold a Mercedes-Benz for and so on right like there's all this activity happening outside and there is no protocol level monitoring and why am I focusing on only exit exit paths is because you can kind of categorize transactions into two types one is transactions that are internally Atomic I'm selling my eat and getting a um and a board date right like I'm selling my Ethan getting a board day this is an atomic transfer inside the blockchain if it reverts both reward right I either have the eat or I have the have the board date and I'm kind of fine both ways but there are transactions which are not Atomic inside the blockchain right one leg of the transaction is happening on the

blockchain and another leg is happening in the real world right these are the ones that that get screwed if you actually have like you know blockchain reversals and reorgs and things like that and what you can start doing is if you can bound the total value of non-atomic transactions per unit time then you can actually start saying that actually 20 billion dollar is not a bound on whatever is the amount stake does not abound on the total value at risk it is only a bound on the total volume transacted within the Event Horizon so that is you can actually okay so this is a whole other discussion

I have a full design for it uh how to actually modulate the ethereum protocol where the slashed funds are used as insurance against reacts so you can actually start selling insurance bonds against the slash funds or at least a portion of the slash funds even if half of the funds are burned the other half is used for insurance and anybody who's transacting you know and wants protection against you know these bad events actually takes out an insurance from the ethereum protocol and by doing this what happens is the ethereum protocol has creates common information on the total volume transacted within within a unit time because you you wouldn't transact

huge volume without having commensurate insurance so anyway this is a whole other like uh Rabbit Hole I'm happy to talk more about but I think you need more sophisticated systems to actually have mathematically bound the over leverage on on ethereum today and we are building some of these into part of our protocol uh at least the roadmap of our protocol but we do need more native support from ethereum how what kind of heuristics are you using for the event horizon and the volume I mean how how would you define the Event Horizon how long do you think that is on these two the uh

the okay so the The Event Horizon depends on the type of bad event you're worried about and I think one important kind of bad event we should be worried about is short-term reorganics I claim a block is finalized right and I make a lot of transactions and then like I go and create another as a stakers they create another like fork with another finalized block right which should not happen and it's slashed by the slashing protocol but it it you know if there is more money to be made it could happen and but with with with these two that's much more difficult no I mean so basically re-orging I mean you can miss a block and you can kind of you can you can

produce a network split by um submitting a block deliberately late but you you kind of eliminate most of the uh of the rework mess that we had with ethereum one no I mean eliminate to the extent that it creates an economic damage to the attacker but if the economic profit to the attacker is 500 billion okay that's it so that's that's the thing that absolutely right like proof of State created slashing and slashing creates an economic damage but I may take the economic damage because my economic profit is higher than economic damage and so I think that's the thing that

because you know producing invalid blocks is not a valid attack on full nodes which can validate the blocks so really the only major safety attack is reorgan finalized blocks right and you can reorganize blocks if you have majority stake and you're willing to lose it and so the question is like suppose somebody reorgs uh it to block right and at what time scale so if they reorg a block which is 10 days old likely we will all even if we slash it we'll continue with the other Fort right like the fork in which you know which was not 10 days old

but if it was 12 minutes old which one will we continue with I don't know right and so the Event Horizon is basically you know the time to detect a reorg attack or the time within which you can effectively make a reorg attack which will not be rejected and so that's roughly what I would say I mean it's in the order of basically minutes or hours rather than in the order of like months or weeks right so that's the and so essentially you have to just bound the economic volume traded within that period And I think that's why ethereum is safe today because of these reasons and we can imbue something like eigen layer with the exact same set of

conditions but we can even make it more programmatic because we are building it we can say that you can not transact more than a certain value per unit time and so on and that's enough to basically make it very difficult to execute these attacks right yeah thanks for this excursion and we would love to see the the design of the insurance thing that actually sounded super cool I hope uh we'll we'll learn more about that soon I I wanted to take it back obviously about the topic we also want to talk about like layer itself right a little bit head of the economics the participants we were talking a little bit about the validators basically opting into these other services probably you could also

see maybe like liquid staking protocols forcing their validators essentially to opt into certain services and then on the other hand you have uh people paying for the these these eigen layer services that are being provided that's is that correct and then I guess how or who pays first of all uh is it the applications how do they pay for that what are kind of like models and and then who then receives the I guess that's the validators again but maybe you could talk a little bit just about like how yes so the economy that is underpinning this so one way we think about uh the economy underlying eigen layer is to start with

first principles and the first principle is the core value proposition of blockchain is decentralized Trust and what how we think of eigen layer is a Marketplace for decentralized trust if decentralized trust is such an important thing in this this blockchain economy we need a marketplace where recent Life Trust is bought and sold and people have recognized this in other ways and one way of thinking about it was block space as a kind of like a unit of decentralized trust but we think that's not the right level of abstraction decentralized for Block space is not the right level of abstraction for the generic nature of decentralized trust you may want to run a new distributed

system you may want to run like a secure multi-party computation whatever that was not natively in the protocol right so the right unit is oh you have this decentralized trust Network and you are basically committing to do additional validation and the question is how much uh value are you willing to uh take for it right and so to elucidate this economy a bit so there are two sides to this Market one side is stakers who are then offering their decentralized Trust Services to others right and the other side of the market is uh we think of them as middle webs but they could be generic distributed systems right

services that are built on top of this these services are you know just to make make it concrete let's think of it think of the data availability service that we're building you can think of it just simply as a data storage service it's not a data storage it's data availability but just for Simplicity let's think of it as hey I'm going to take some blob and throw it into this network and they have to store this blob for this amount of time and now um you want to do this um who is paying for this so somebody creates this service let's say you know Frederica and Felix wrote the service they want to create a data storage

service they wrote it and then they are tired of like pumping and Shilling a new token so they say no I'm not going to do it I'm just going to run it on eigen layer just throw it on this distributed Network and they do it and they say oh you know there's a Frederick and Felix wallet right like so you have a wallet and you say that anybody who's paying so and you also create an economy around it you say anybody who wants to store data on this distributed Network needs to pay one dollar per byte or one eat per byte or whatever right one eight per gigabyte okay so yeah there's one each per gigabyte and now somebody else who wants to use this service they come and they have some interfaces they store the data on this like decentralized Network and

they pay that one eat per gigabyte to store that data and you know when Frederick and Felix created it they also created a distribution economy which said that yeah we will take uh 30 percent of this like one each per gigabyte and the remaining 70 goes to the validators and the validators look at it and they say does this make sense for me or not and they opt in if it makes sense if that economy makes sense for them and so every time when somebody comes and stores data they collect that one eat and that one eight point three it goes into your wallet and then the remaining 0.70 gets redistributed among all the stakers so this is the so there

is really a third party like there was originally a service and then there was the stakers then there is service users of that service which could be Roll-Ups which could be applications like distributed applications which should be end users who just want like a Dropbox type thing uh to be built on a blockchain so that's the economy the economy is basically the creator of the service decides how value is apportioned between the Creator the innovator and the service providers the stickers right so how this economy is distributed and once they set forth the set of these conditions what they actually do is you know a service Creator so to delve into

this a little bit more the service creator also uh creates a like a container which you can the Staker should be able to download and run which does this particular service downloading and and storing the data for this amount of period if fee has been paid and they also create a smart contract the service or middleware creates a smart contract which talks to the eigenlayer smart contracts uh and establishes who can participate in the system each takers with whatever you know at least so much state or do you allow stake deth holders what is the entry condition to participate in your particular service that's the first part the second part is what is the payment

condition or it is actually one each per gigabyte and 0.3 goes to the creators and 0.7 goes to the stickers that's the payment conditions are encoded in the smart contract and finally negative incentives like slashing are also encoded in the smart contract it says oh if there is a recall game and then I say that randomly I'm going to recall some bytes and you have to produce it and if you don't produce it you'll get slashed so some kind of like a negative incentives those are encoded into the smart contract now if you're a Staker you and you're participating in eigen layer you can go and express your preference whether you want to opt into this particular service or not and you go in and like you know sign a thing and say that yes I want to opt

into this particular service then you're registered for that service which means you're supposed to be providing it and if you violate some conditions stated in the smart contract then you will get slashed but if you don't violate any of those things you will continue to receive payments at the encoder direct so that's the core economy of eigen layer so to build an eigen layer service you have to write an off-chain container that stakers can download and run it can be in arbitrary language as of now and the there is a non-chain slashing contract or on-chain contract Service contract you have to write which controls gating who participates uh positive incentives and negative incentives these are all encoded into

the smart contract and so when somebody is opting into a particular eigen layer service they know exactly what set of things they are operating much due diligence um does this um require from the validators right so basically if I'm a mom-and-pop validator um do I know which things I should be validating on if it's too difficult to discern which ones are good um things to co-validate for um I'm I might be foregoing yield and which might make it um economically unviable to validate myself and I mean

this is something that the network needs right I mean so basically we've we've seen recentralization um you know for other reasons so I mean basically people people just um steak with eggs changes or you know there's you know Lido and you know don't get me started on proposalability separation and math boost whatever so basically I mean we've seen these that does this with this ad to this uh entire situation it adds and it subtracts and uh I'm gonna explain both sides um how much due diligence does a homesteaker need and what we are trying

to do is to create uh audit economy around these eigenlayer Services right so there is going to be just like smart contract audits is how like users trust smart contracts to do the things that they say in the white paper or whatever other things so there is a barrier for a user to use a Smart contract in the same way now there is a barrier for Staker to opt in to new services so there is a attendant audit economy that is needed and we want to absolutely minimize the amount of diligence that somebody has to do and there may be multiple categories of services those that are kind of vetted by us and you know or some other reputed agencies and

so on and you know and stakers may feel more inclined to opt into them and there may be others that basically for so you can imagine a world where a Staker homesteaker says yeah you know give me Frederick's curation of services I only like opt into everything that Frederica says right and that should be possible and if somebody says no no actually I want to be the one who wants to make the decision that's also you know something that is available in this free economy Okay so there is a bit of barrier on auditing wetting like what these services are so that is something that uh but it can be kind of delegated right like just

that ability to say that I'm trusting acts for doing the delegation and I'm just following along uh and in terms of missing out on yield you know I think like everywhere else there will be a power law that will be maybe three services that account for pretty much all of the yield like 90 of the yield in this kind of a platform and it's the same way like we have daps and you know there are thousands of dabs and maybe three accounts for pretty much all of the fees today on ethereum and there'll be a similar thing and where homesteakers just opt into these three services and essentially get all of the Heat and so one of our interests is in making sure that these services are as lightweight as possible that a

homesteaker should be able to opt in and this is a kind of like a guiding principle for us is actually we think something is scaling only if each node needs to do very little but the system can do a lot right like a scalable system basically means that each node does little but the system together does a lot and that's when decentralization and scalability are not in fundamental tension and we think that there is we have you know in general the ecosystem as an ecosystem we have understood enough principles that actually we know how to build systems which scale horizontally for example our data availability service is built in such a way that each

Staker needs like 0.3 megabytes per second in in network bandwidth but together the system bandwidth is 15 megabytes per second so it is not based on everybody needing to have a lot of computational infrastructure it is based on everybody doing a little but data being distributed through this network and thus achieving scaling so one part of the answer is making it easy to do uh Audits and follow along other people's like recommendations another part of the answer is there's only a few Services which will matter and we try to make those Services be home you know be uh easy for homesteakers to participate in and I

think there's a third dimension to this answer which actually I'm most excited about so if you look at the whole Mev and other things going on in ethereum um one thing we'll see is there is a lot of discussion about how to keep uh homesteakers uh decentralized and if you just examine the system objectively there is a gradient or pressure to centralization but there is no gradient or pressure to decentralization system doesn't have it we only enforce it socially or religiously right like there is the system by itself has no pressure there is no advantage in being

decentralized there is some advantage in being centralized so there is a gradient or pressure to become more centralized and all we can do all we are trying to do when we're doing you know Mev boost or PBS or any other like design consideration is how to minimize the gradient to centralization that's all that's being done there is no gradient to decentralization it's not that and because decentralization is not objectively measurable it's not possible to make the protocol recognize and incentivize it even though it's one of the most critical aspects of building the ethereum protocols so we are very excited about the role eigenlayer can play in this what is this so

in eigen layer we don't want the platform to exert subjectivity but we want middlewares or Services consuming you know uh decentralized trust to exert subjectivity what do I mean by that for example imagine Felix is building a service this service is based on you know uh threshold encryption okay so part of threshold encryption is is dividing some secret into many many chunks and each person holds a chunk and if they all don't collude with each other or at least majority of people don't collode with each other the secret remains a secret okay this is an example of something which is not based on economic security this is based purely on decentralization

because people should not be able to collude with each other easily if it's just like so there are certain things certain Services which can absorb trust from economics and there are certain Services which only absorb trust from decentralization and threshold encryption is a great example of something that only absorbs trust from decentralization so Felix may come in and say when building on eigen layer that he doesn't care about who has how much eat but he has some subjective measurement of decentralization maybe he comes in and says I only want rocket pool stickers to participate in a system or he only wants certain homesteakers to participate in his system or he has an oracle feed that he himself creates and it says only

people in this like you know my white list can participate in this ecosystem because he is somehow subjectively vetted that they are actually more decentralized so if this happens then what happens is that you're actually then Felix is paying for decentralization so the decentralized Quorum can potentially earn even more than a centralized Quorum creating a gradient a pressure to decentralization because decentralized trust is so another way of thinking about it is if we all value decentralized trust why are we not paying for it because the rich expressive markets to Value decentralized trust don't exist today and if you if you allow for Rich expressive markets to Value

decentralized trust people will pay more for things to be decentralized in in things that you care about and we don't know how the economics is going to play out but at least there is a possibility to create a gradient for decentralization this is something that I'm super excited about as a possibility for what I connected what kind of services do you see building on top of eigen earlier so basically what are the biggest use cases you see coming um yeah on top of acne so I mean of course we are building the first service ourselves which is a data availability service and the reason we chose to double down on building a data

availability service is of course the ethereum roadmap is uh strongly oriented towards uh um modular ecosystem where roll ups basically write data into ethereum and write commitments and one of the things that uh we want to see is a world where thousands of Roll-Ups can flourish and to do this you need much more data bandwidth than available on ethereum today and even in the foreseeable future including things like done charting we want to provide 100x thousand X more data bandwidth than what is available and the set of techniques already actually have been pioneered in the

ethereum research community and we can build you know much more flexible engineering modules around these basic cryptography like using you know things like kcg polynomial commitments and how they were used in dunk sharding we can take them and engineer like many different kinds of systems around it so data availability is one example of what we are building and which could be a very useful ecosystem service and we are trying to build it in a way that uh stakers or wall shapes and forms can participate in it that's one example another example of what could be built on top of a wagon layer is a whole host of Mev Management Services

why am I talking about MAV Management Services is if you're staked if you're staking in ethereum but you're also restaked on eigen layer then you can start making credible commitments about your behavior you can say for example I'm selling you a portion of my blog space you're doing an auction but you're not doing an auction where you're selling the entirety of lock space which is what is happening in the Mev boost market today whereas what you could do is you could say yeah I'm selling most of my blog space but I still retain the ability to add stuff at the end of my blog space okay this is something that you could do in fact we we had a design for this we call Mev boost plus plus which is

basically saying you you are auctioning off the rights to fill you know some portion of the block but there's still space at the end of the block where I can add in as a block proposal whatever transactions that I want at the end of the block so you don't have to make a trade-off between expressing my preferences as a block proposal and the economic upside of having to participate in an Mev Market I can do both so this is one example of what you can build on on eigen layer as an Mev service but there's a whole host of other things you can start doing things like multiple block Builders decentralized block building what I do is instead of selling all my blog space to one person I say oh I'm selling the

first 30 of my blog space to Frederica the next 30 percent to Felix and so on right like I can start doing more more of these things and what what does eigenlayer particularly enable in it the idea that if I don't stand by my word if I told Frederica that I'm going to include 30 of her you know transactions in the first portion of the block but I don't then I'm slash I could be slashed on ethereum right so that I could lose my eth and that gives Frederica some trust in me in actually making this transaction possible so the ability to make credible commitments actually opens up the space for How We Do transaction ordering priority even things like I want to build a threshold

encrypted um mempo so I commit to maybe selling the first 30 of my blog space and then I I say that the remaining 30 or the next 30 percent I'm going to use threshold encryption and I agree I send a signature saying I'm going to use the decrypted version of these encrypted transactions and if I don't include them in the Blog then I'll get slashed so it opens up the space for anybody to come in and innovate on Mev Management Services so that's that's one huge category there are also other things there things like I want to do uh event driven activation for example Felix is like hey you know whenever my I'm uh I'm under

collateralized on compound then refill my collateral from my wallet at this address and that's just a kind of standing instruction even driven instruction that he wants to give you can do this today using this category of like middle west called Keepers which you know like gelato and chain link has something and there are others building in and but the problem with those Services is there is a kind of um non-attributability problem whether that node triggered the transaction and but the transaction was not included in the block or that node did not trigger the transaction and therefore it was not included in the block this is not attributable whereas on eigen layer if a

block proposal opts into these event driven conditions if a block proposal act opts into these event driven conditions then it's uniquely attributable because the block proposal of course controls block space so this is another example there's all kinds of other examples like whole block flash loans and you know other like crazy economic objects you can start building because block proposals are staked they can kind of opt into governance on what they cannot break so this is one class of solutions Mev management of questions comments yes let me move away from the financialized use cases a bit so in principle there's lots of things that you would love to have a um trust Network for that are

non-financially non-financialized and um consequently currently crowded out of um the truly credibly neutral uh blockchain which is ethereum um so can you um can you kind of make it viable for them to run on eigenlayer absolutely I think one consequence of like uh high performance data availability is if you have like a huge amount of data availability bandwidth now you know you can start running applications which are simply financially priced out right and one of the ways we think about this is if you look at

the current networks the operational cost of running the network is far lower than the capital cost of staking right like I'm putting 20 billion dollar off staking so I need at least a ten percent or seven percent sum APR so I need at least two billion dollars annually in return right so that's the capital cost of staking and then there is an operational cost of like scaling and providing whatever services that you want and actually the operational cost is not at all dominant right today staking cost is dominant so you can overlay more operations and and still you know not suffer significant cost that's one one part of it the other part of it is actually just by better engineering you can use the same amount of bandwidth much more efficiently and

that's the part I was talking about in our data availability is by actually every node doing a little but together they do a lot and by scaling across nodes you can actually provide a huge amount of bandwidth for applications to consume and this is one of the ways this is one of the reasons we actually built the data availability first is is just like opens up the volume of use cases from use cases where there was high amount of value flowing per bit of data two use cases where you don't need a lot of value flowing per bit and then open up to the long you know use cases where like there is going to be a lot of data needed to be transmitted to to arrive at uh

to still like Leverage The Credible neutral platform like ethereum for that that let me Zoom right out so um I mean if you look at eigenlayer um as a concept it's kind of um a different Paradigm in scaling so I mean So currently in scaling we kind of we have layer twos we have um like the IBC you know style connected layer ones um and now we kind of have this piggybacking mechanism uh that is eigen there um can you talk about [Music]

um how these compare and whether um piggybacking often often existing economic system and has negative externalities for just that system so basically does it do anything does it take away anything from ethereum that you're using this as well as as a um as an economic trust layer uh I think it goes back to mostly The Leverage type questions that we talked about earlier right that's one part so I won't go into the same thing again but what other issues are there one other issue is

um the same stake is committed now for ethereum but for also to do these other validation tasks and the the one thing to understand is ethereum is the primary uh and everything else is the secondary in this market because your state didn't eat and the actual mechanics which I didn't go into earlier is your stake in ethereum and then you set the withdrawal powers to the eigen layer smart contracts and so what happens is ethereum has like first dibs that slashing ethereum has basically so ethereum is the primary loan holder so to say everybody else is a secondary on this platform so so that is so that means actually that

ethereum protocol has the priority on slashing so I don't think it affects the core core properties there's one thing though which you know is just temporary and we hope that it'll get sorted out eventually is the idea that uh when somebody is slashed on eigen layer when does ethereum get to know about it right like if there is a huge delay and like the person has actually completely slashed already they don't have anything remaining and you know ethereum thinks that they have a lot but actually they don't and this problem can be minimized by you know a feature in ethereum called smart contract triggered with Royals if the ethereum if diagonally a smart contract can immediately the way slashing happens is they immediately triggers withdrawal from ethereum then

basically you don't have this principal agent type problem um so that's another another dimension that we've discussed with the EF people and I think in in general something like smart contract triggered withdrawals helps all kinds of uh staking protocols um but other than that I don't see any significant uh other aspects to to to the you would you would always withdraw the entire validator like all 32 years for every slashing I could imagine like some slashings being kind of minor to just kind of discourage you so why not yeah I think one of the principles we're using for eigenlayer uh slashing is

to be as rare as possible and when it happens to be as severe as possible so as severe as possible because we don't slash for things like uptime only slash when there is like a significant safety failure probably malicious action so when there is a probably malicious action we don't need to slash a little so slashing is designed to be very rare and severe when it actually happens but this this you mean is this for your specific service You're Building or because I guess that's kind of customizable for example that's right but that's the recommendation for all these services that we want to uh because you know we don't take slashing eat lightly and I

think it should not be taken lightly by any service either uh especially because of this primary secondary type problem that we talked about and it should only happen when there is a clearly provable malicious action if if I'm slashed do I have a recourse so basically if say if say for instance uh I'm evil and I build a service on top of eigenlayer that uses a malicious contract to slash unsuspect uh unsuspecting stakers um do they have a recourse can they do something against this absolutely so this is something we take very very seriously and no amount of audited audit

and other things is sufficient to guarantee that there's no like Edge case and malicious code base in slashing so I think that is a significant problem and in especially in eigenlayer which couples trust across multiple systems you know it could very well happen that all each stickers opt into frederica's like evil contract and like you know they all get slashed and it could be like an absolute nightmare so the way we deal with this is by requiring or like enabling what we call a slashing veto there is a veto for slashing run by like a reputed committee the only thing this committee can do is basically veto

slashings and you can think of basically slashing needs approval both by the contract and by this Committee in order to actually pass so that's the trust model is basically you're trusting one of these two to work correctly to protect against slashing errors and and if both are malicious then there is a problem okay but that's currently social consensus right so basically it if it's it's it's a pool of known individuals who say like clearly Friedrich is out of her mind this was not a slasher blow fence give back the stake that's correct so this is uh since this system relies on

both neutral objective uh algorithm just you know smart contract plus a social layer so the things that blockchains have natively is a social layer to Fork the chain if something crazy happened sure and we are an overlay layer and we don't have the ability to fork ethereum and some or we don't want to assume the ability to have four ethereum when something bad happens so we are incorporating the social layer into the protocol and that's a necessary and so this layer is not run by like a economic committee we do not think that it's correct to have a token committee or whatever you know run run this thing it should be run by like you know trusted

individuals reputed entities in the in the ecosystem yeah that makes sense um coming back to the second half of my question how does this um compound contrast with um other scaling Solutions basically Loosely meshing eigen layer with um layer twos and you know IBC connected blockchains yeah uh how does it compare and contrast so eigen layer the is designed for a modular world so it is designed for the roll-up world uh so it it doesn't add particularly anything to the to one part of the roller World

which is you know you want to do zero knowledge proofs or other like economic games in which you can actually prove that your execution state is correct I think that is something that uh we like a lot and you know it's completely complementary to what is what eigenlayer is offering um so it does offer something to in terms of our particular Solution on data availability but also for the ability for others to build even better data availability Solutions on top of eigen layer I think that is something that we are quite excited about the fact that you know the area of open Innovation can can be quite large there um in terms of other services other

other kind of like Paradigm so just to add a little bit more there on for things like optimistic rollups you have a layer of Economic Security which is the sequencer is basically making a claim that what they said is correct and then you also have a layer of verification which is that they'll get slashed if if that doesn't happen correctly you know on things like eigen layer you can reuse a lot of stick and provide more Economic Security at you know for for things like optimistic rollups uh so that's something interesting it adds to the optimistic role of ecosystem um on on the ZK roll-up ecosystem I think one thing uh something like eigenlayer adds is you know proof verification on ethereum

is still expensive right and and it is expensive because of some basic fundamental limits you know if you use the ethereum blocks only to do like ZK proof verification maybe you can do like 15 to 30 ZK proof verifications per block so that's the current like block size and gas consumption uh of these things so if you had a world where there are like thousands of different Roll-Ups then they cannot all write ZK approves into ethereum every block so that's not possible but what they can do is if there was a kind of like restaked Quorum of all the ethereum stakers and they all verify but the fact is verifying ZK proofs is very trivial of chain right like you can you can run it in parallel

you can check hundreds of ZK proofs in parallel each of them may take only like tens of milliseconds and so you can actually verify thousands of ZK proofs uh so in in a in a reasonable note so the question is like on on and off chain uh so the The Proposal could be something like you can create a service on top of eigen layer where all the each stickers participate and they verify like thousands of DK proofs in parallel and then they just certify that they have verified all of this on ethereum so this could be an example of a kind of synergy with things like zero knowledge Roll-Ups and the one thing we see in ZK Roblox today is they wait for a long time to batch because of the verification costs and you don't need to

do it and you can have a bridge which which moves data between the roll-up and ethereum every block if if you had a layer like this going to your broader question on things like IBC and the external ecosystem uh eigen layer bars close similarity with what is called interchange security right which is basically one chain providing security to other chains I think there are a couple of important differences interchange security as it is being talked about today is the the provider chain has to have a governance upgrade to to opt-in to serve this other chain and I'm you know just working in this space for enough time anything that has

a governance upgrade I'm like okay that's that's too slow so I like the nature of like what we are doing with eigen layer which is basically validator level opt-in permissionless each validator make a decision and opt-in I think it reduces frictions massively and the second thing is the way we think about what should be built on eigen layer which is more of a subjective opinion but I think it aligns deeply with the ethereum land landscape is to build modules each module being secured by the same stake rather than to build chains which is what interchange security is optimizing for okay to add to your last question about

IBC in particular right IBC is inter blockchain communication is the standard for talking between different blockchains I think we need a powerful IBC port for ethereum and I I'd be very excited to see people build something like that for example on eigenlayer because what you can do is once you have stakers opt-in you can verify signatures from all these IBC connected chains and just make an economic certificate saying that yeah we all know that this is the set of signatures in these other chains uh so that's an example for how um uh what can be built on I can wear thanks for expanding so far into it I

think we're also like been at it for a while I think we can slowly get to kind of wrapping up maybe for a final question we can talk a little bit about where the project is at right now I mean we talked a lot about what is theoretically possible maybe we can hear a bit you know where are you at right now what's on the roadmap and like the immediate future uh yeah yeah um the way we're building eigen layer is initially we are building the first service ourselves and on launch there'll only be the one service the data availability service we are building on top of it and we want to slowly open it up from being uh one service platform to a few

like partnered services to then to be a self-serve platform on which anybody can come and build anything that they want so we'll see the first service launch hopefully mid next year and then we'll have a whole bunch of uh other services on board in the months following um so that's the roadmap right now we are in internal test net we have a you know few Integrations we are testing inside the internal test net so that's that's where we are and we'll hope to have a more public facing test net in the months between now and and launch fantastic we look forward to that it's

been an absolute pleasure to have you on sriram um it's uh I have learned a lot this is such an interesting project um excited to see uh where this takes you thank you so much Frederica I've had you know I really really enjoyed talking to you and Felix on this uh podcast look forward to being in touch in the future quit thank you guys thank you Felix thank you Frederica