Introducing Community Initiatives and Grants

The Eigen Foundation’s mandate is to grow the EigenLayer ecosystem and steward a network of open innovation. With this goal in mind, 15% of the total initial EIGEN supply has been allocated toward EigenLayer community initiatives such as incentive programs and grants for users, developers, and community contributors. Starting this year, the Eigen Foundation will steward the effective, intentional, and responsible deployment of these grants for the EigenLayer community.

Stewarding Grants

Coordinating token grants within protocol ecosystems has historically been a challenge due to the difficulty in aligning a diverse group of tokenholders on strategic growth needs while ensuring accountability for grant teams. In practice, grants are best distributed by small, independent teams with high strategic context, allowing them to move fast and adapt quickly. The key is ensuring these grant teams allocate funds responsibly and in alignment with the needs of the protocol and its ecosystem.

To ensure the intentional allocation of these funds, the Eigen Foundation will allocate Community Initiative grants in Seasons, using top-level directional priorities to align EigenLayer’s ecosystem strategy with its vision. Each season is six months long and reviewed retroactively to ensure community feedback and sentiment are taken into account before moving on to the next season.

These priorities serve as the “compass” for the ecosystem, guiding the Foundation’s Grants Team and the community as funds are deployed. The Grants Team deploys funds into these Seasons through grant Initiatives, which outline where funds will be distributed. Initiatives and Budgets are set annually, and the Grants Team will allocate grants in Seasons.

In addition to Initiatives, the Eigen Foundation is committing to a Budget, a max annual spending cap for these Initiatives, to ensure the sustainable deployment of funds in the near term. At the end of the Season, we will also generate a Transparency Report, setting a baseline to increase transparency in how funds are deployed.

2025 Grants Initiatives

For 2025, the Eigen Foundation will commit to a spending cap of 40M EIGEN, to be distributed across two Grant Initiatives: Open Innovation Grants and Strategic Grants.

Open Innovation Grants are smaller allocations to developers and founders who drive early-stage ecosystem development. These Grants are designed to:

• Foster developer engagement and community growth
• Encourage early-stage teams to build on experimental and innovative products and technologies in the EigenLayer ecosystem
• Support the gradual onboarding of broader engineering participation in EigenLayer core development

Strategic Grants are larger, targeted allocations to high-caliber teams who drive long-term value and adoption. These Grants are designed to:

• Increase use cases and economy of EigenLayer, including AVSs utilizing restaking, EigenDA, and any additional primitives
• Enable token-related initiatives, including liquidity and governance operations

For teams interested in learning more about these Community Initiative Grants, the grants portal will be launching soon. 

Introducing the Grants Oversight Council

To ensure the responsible deployment of funds into these Initiatives, the Foundation has formed the Grants Oversight Council. At the end of each season, the Foundation’s Grants Team will develop a Transparency Report, and this Council will verify the contents of the report to ensure all grant-making is aligned with annual Initiatives and deployed responsibly and diligently.

More details on the grant process and the Grants Oversight Council, alongside its Charter, are available in the council announcement post.

Where We’re Going

To ensure a resilient and credibly neutral ecosystem, it is essential for ecosystem stakeholders to ensure the Eigen Foundation, Grants Oversight Council, and Grants Team deploy grants in alignment with EigenLayer needs. Over this inaugural season and as EigenGov matures, we’re excited to reconvene at the season’s reflection.