Introducing the Eigen Foundation, EIGEN token and Season 1 stakedrop

This blog post introduces the Eigen Foundation, EIGEN token, and the Season 1 “Stakedrop”. The Stakedrop is an airdrop designed for EIGEN staking.

Eigen Foundation

• 9 min read
Introducing the Eigen Foundation, EIGEN token and Season 1 stakedrop

This blog post introduces the Eigen Foundation, EIGEN token, and the Season 1 “stakedrop”. The stakedrop is an airdrop designed for EIGEN staking. In Season 1, EIGEN will be initially non-transferable, aiming to cultivate social consensus and resilience around its novel staking and forking features. The EIGEN token represents a new coordination mechanism that accelerates EigenLayer and Ethereum toward a shared mission of maximizing open innovation. 

Summary: EIGEN stakedrop

EIGEN

  • Enhanced security complementing ETH restaking: EIGEN's innovative design implements "intersubjective forking" for expanded security and unlocks new possibilities for Actively Validated Services (“AVSs”). Learn more in the whitepaper: eigen.eigenlayer.xyz
  • Multiple seasons: 15% allocated, starting with Season 1 now.
  • Building a strong foundation: The EIGEN token will have an initial non-transferable period. This allows time for further product development and decentralization with community feedback. It also allows the community time to build a shared understanding for the novel EIGEN design during the “setup period”.
  • Staking options: At launch, users will be able to stake EIGEN to secure EigenDA, with more AVSs expected soon.

Season 1

  • 5% of initial EIGEN supply allocated to restakers.
  • Snapshot date: March 15.
  • 90% of Season 1 happens in Phase 1 (now).
  • 10% of Season 1 happens in Phase 2 (in ~1 month).

How to Claim

Future Seasons

  • Total allocation of 15% of EIGEN supply.
  • Subsequent seasons consider ecosystem participation before and after the March 15 snapshot.

EIGEN claims are NOT live. Please exercise extreme caution when interacting with anyone purporting to have knowledge of or access to the EIGEN token. Official news will come directly and solely from www.eigenfoundation.org and the @eigenfoundation X account.

Introducing the Eigen Foundation

The Eigen Foundation is an independent, shareholder-less entity dedicated to accelerating the growth of the EigenLayer ecosystem. 

EigenLayer is an engine for maximizing open innovation. Its core invention of restaking enables staked ETH to be used as cryptoeconomic security for protocols other than Ethereum. This provides developers with access to an immense reservoir of programmable trust via Ethereum and creates the “Shared Security Commons”. 

At its core, the Eigen Foundation’s mission is to steward development and adoption of these commons. The Foundation will do so by supporting research and development of the EigenLayer protocol, funding grants programs, providing third-party evaluations, and stewarding continued progress toward greater decentralization.

Introducing the EIGEN Token

The Eigen Foundation is excited to launch the EIGEN token, based on research by Eigen Labs.

EIGEN is designed from first principles to empower the EigenLayer ecosystem in a complementary role to ETH restaking. ETH restaking offers a mechanism for penalizing objectively attributable faults, extending Ethereum security to other protocols. The new EIGEN token introduces a complementary mechanism that is designed to specifically address “intersubjective” faults – faults that are not possible to address via ETH restaking alone. Intersubjective faults are instances of misbehavior that cannot be objectively identified onchain, yet any two reasonable observers would agree that a penalty is deserved. 

EIGEN achieves this property by providing a mechanism in which the token itself can be forked without forking Ethereum mainnet consensus. If there is a perceived intersubjective fault, a fork can be proposed, and users opt into the version they view as valid. This process, called intersubjective forking, occurs entirely within EigenLayer on the Ethereum blockchain, without relying on Ethereum's social consensus. Furthermore, the protocol provides a mechanism for applications and users to utilize the token without needing to keep track of forks. Intersubjective forking is the key innovation behind the EIGEN token.

Intersubjective forking is designed to happen very rarely. To create a fork, a significant fraction of EIGEN tokens must be committed by a challenger. If social consensus validates the fork, the EIGEN tokens belonging to malicious actors will be penalized in the genuine fork, and the challenger will recoup their commitment within the fork and earn a challenger reward. However, if social consensus rejects the fork, the challenger's commitment is burned. This system creates a powerful disincentive for malicious behavior, as a valid fork would result in significant financial loss for bad actors.

EIGEN can be staked to AVSs to provide cryptoeconomic security for intersubjective faults, while ETH will continue to be staked to provide a deep pool of cryptoeconomic security for objective faults. This empowers AVSs to make a much wider range of credible commitments than is possible today, significantly expanding the possibilities of what can be built on EigenLayer. Use cases include transaction ordering, databases, prediction markets, storage services, oracles, artificial intelligence, and more. This marks a major step towards maximizing open innovation.

For more on EIGEN, read the Eigen Labs blog post and the full whitepaper here.

EIGEN Staking

When EIGEN launches, users will be able to stake it in EigenLayer to secure EigenDA (which will use both ETH and EIGEN quorums). Other AVSs will likely follow suit soon. In alignment with EigenLayer’s mission of maximizing open innovation, the protocol empowers AVSs to mix and match different staking modalities: ETH and EIGEN now, plus rollup and AVS native tokens down the road. 

Responsible Rollout: Non-Transferability

In the initial phase, the EIGEN token will be non-transferable and non-forkable. We believe this approach will best support the long-term growth and maturity of the EigenLayer ecosystem. Upon completion of this phase, the full functionality of the token, including forkability and transferability, will be enabled.

We value the trust you've placed in the Eigen Foundation and appreciate the tremendous enthusiasm from the community for EigenLayer and the EIGEN token. We want to reciprocate this trust by being transparent with our goals for what we hope to see accomplished in the coming months before the token can be made transferable and forkable:

  • Community Discussions: Intersubjective forking relies on social consensus – social legitimacy as understood and accepted within a community. Before making the token transferrable, the Foundation seeks feedback on and acceptance of EIGEN’s novel design, parameters, and proposed implementation.
  • Payments and Slashing: In-protocol payments and slashing to improve key features for a sustainable marketplace.
  • Enhanced Decentralization: Token allocation to the community of 15% of the EIGEN supply, and community participation in upcoming protocol governance.

Stakedrop Details

Season 1 of the EIGEN token retroactively allocates 5% of the initial EIGEN supply to restakers based on a snapshot taken on March 15, 2024 at Ethereum block #19437000. 

Due to the complexity of the ecosystem built around EigenLayer, Season 1 unrolls in 2 phases:

  • In Phase 1 (P1), ~90% of Season 1 will be allocated to users that have interacted with the EigenLayer protocol in simpler ways. This includes eligible restakers and eligible holders of liquid restaking tokens (“LRTs”).
  • In Phase 2 (P2), the remaining 10% of Season 1 will be distributed to users who had complex interactions with their LRTs, after feedback from appropriate ecosystem participants (more info below).

For P1, we will be launching a claims site in the coming days where you can check whether you are eligible for an EIGEN allocation. The P1 claims window will open on May 10, 2024, and remain open for 120 days. Any unclaimed tokens at that time will be reallocated to future stakedrop seasons. 

Note – if you used an LRT but do not have an allocation in P1, you may be eligible in P2 (see more details below).

P1 Restaker Allocation Methodology

To determine allocations, the Eigen Foundation partnered with OpenBlock to consider various criteria including:

  • Loyalty: Restakers who participated in the protocol, considering amount, duration (length of time), earliness (when they started restaking) and loyalty (whether they maintained the stake).
  • Direct Native Staking: To support network resilience and decentralization, native restakers were allocated more EIGEN. 
  • Sybil Resistance: EIGEN was allocated linearly in the interest of sybil neutrality. However, in following this principle, we discovered that many restakers would not receive a meaningful amount of EIGEN. Therefore, to express gratitude to all early users, ~1% of the total Season 1 allocation has been dedicated to establish a minimum floor of 10 EIGEN for restakers. In future seasons, there will be no such minimum allocation.
  • Concentration: Ensuring that no single LST, LRT, user, or entity receives more than 33% of the total allocation (see “Balancing Neutrality and Decentralization in EigenLayer”).
  • Community-Focused: Eigen Labs and Eigen Foundation core contributors are ineligible for the stakedrop.

Upcoming P2 Restaker Allocation Methodology

10% of Season 1 could not be readily identified because eligible recipients engaged in complex interactions with contracts that made identifying the appropriate end user challenging or opinionated. See the FAQ for a list of these unresolved contracts.

These interactions mostly involve LRTs, so the Foundation is surveying LRTs teams to better understand these interactions and determine a fair allocation for eligible users with respect to the remaining 10% of Season 1.

How Phase 2 Will Work

  • A portion of EIGEN tokens has been reserved for some LRT protocols.
  • LRT teams will submit a list of addresses and corresponding allocations for how they feel EIGEN would most fairly be allocated.
  • The Eigen Foundation will use these lists to tee up claims for P2.

P2 claiming is anticipated to begin in approximately one month; expect further details within the next week. Note that liquid restaking protocols are learning some aspects of Phase 2 concurrently. Please give them a few days to use this information to analyze the unresolved contracts. For more details, check out the FAQ.

Important Note

The Foundation believes that the creation and trading of derivatives based on non-transferable EIGEN would be detrimental to the EigenLayer community. Do not engage in any such activities – doing so will impact your eligibility for future stakedrop seasons.

Goerli Testnet Restakers

In recognition of the Goerli testnet shutdown and the associated inconvenience for testnet participants, a small EIGEN token allocation has been made to some testnet users. Future testnets, including Holesky, will not include token allocations. The primary goal of EigenLayer testnets is to facilitate testing and preparation for mainnet participation.

Token Details

The total supply of EIGEN at launch is 1,673,646,668.28466 tokens. This number is the result of encoding the phrase “Open Innovation” onto a classic telephone keypad. The following percentages describe the reserved uses for EIGEN:

  • Community: 45% plus all future inflation
    • Stakedrops: 15%
    • Future community initiatives: 15% plus inflation when activated
    • R&D and ecosystem development: 15% to be distributed by the Eigen Foundation for research and development, grants, operational expenses, and overall ecosystem growth
  • Investors: 29.5%
  • Early Contributors: 25.5%

Investors and early contributors have a total three-year lock period, with a full lock in year one, followed by a linear unlock of 4% of their total allocation each month over the next two years. See the FAQ for more information.

Future Inflation and Emissions

EigenLayer, like Ethereum, will benefit from having a dynamic token supply. While an initial emissions schedule is not yet determined or implemented, in the early years, it is expected that the token supply will be inflationary and allocated via protocol mechanisms that benefit solely the EigenLayer community.

EigenLayer's emissions may differ significantly from typical proof-of-stake emissions. Since EigenLayer is a diverse marketplace with constituents like AVSs, operators, ETH restakers, EIGEN stakers, developers, and community contributors, the emission design will prioritize a balanced ecosystem. This will result in a broader allocation of EIGEN emissions across the EigenLayer ecosystem, unlike other proof-of-stake systems where rewards primarily accrue to existing token holders.

See below for a SAMPLE emissions schedule assuming +5% annual inflation for future community stakedrops, initiatives, and incentives.

Infinite Sum Games

The pace of innovation in the EigenLayer ecosystem has never been higher – and with the introduction of EIGEN, the scope for open innovation has vastly expanded. The spirit of infinite sum games is that the future will be prosperous, and that the community benefits super-additively when there are better mechanisms for coordination. This is the ethos of the Eigen Foundation, and the ethos of EigenLayer!

THIS IS NOT AN OFFER TO SELL OR THE SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO PURCHASE ANY EIGEN, AND IS NOT AN OFFERING, ADVERTISEMENT, SOLICITATION, CONFIRMATION, STATEMENT OR ANY FINANCIAL PROMOTION THAT CAN BE CONSTRUED AS AN INVITATION OR INDUCEMENT TO ENGAGE IN ANY INVESTMENT ACTIVITY OR SIMILAR. YOU SHOULD NOT RELY ON THE CONTENT HEREIN FOR ADVICE OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING LEGAL, INVESTMENT, FINANCIAL, TAX, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL ADVICE, AND SUCH CONTENT IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR ADVICE FROM A QUALIFIED PROFESSIONAL. 

THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS HYPOTHETICAL, FORWARD-LOOKING, AND/OR PROJECTED FIGURES, WHICH ARE NOT GUARANTEED AND ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE; ACTUAL NUMBERS MAY VARY. EIGEN FOUNDATION AND ITS SUBSIDIARIES MAKE NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO THE COMPLETENESS, RELIABILITY, VALIDITY, OR ACCURACY OF THIS INFORMATION. THE CONTENT HEREIN IS NOT ERROR-FREE AND MAY CONTAIN INCORRECT INFORMATION. YOU AGREE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT ANY INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, WHETHER ORAL OR WRITTEN, OBTAINED FROM EIGEN FOUNDATION, WILL BE CONSTRUED TO CREATE ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION NOT EXPRESSLY MADE HEREIN.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, PLEASE REFER TO EIGEN FOUNDATION’S TERMS OF SERVICE, PRIVACY POLICY, AND AIRDROP TERMS OF SERVICE.