EigenLayr: Permissionless Feature Addition to Ethereum

EigenLayr is a set of smart-contracts on Ethereum that allows consensus layer stakers to grant smart-contracts the ability to impose additional slashing conditions on their staked ETH allowing the extension of cryptoeconomic security to new services. By opting-in to EigenLayr, stakers can provide validation services for new systems like data availability services, fair-ordering services, bridges, and sidechains. In this talk, Sreeram Kannan (University of Washington, Seattle) introduces the technology. Instead of fragmenting security across different middleware, EigenLayr aggregates security across all of the middleware in the ETH ecosystem, significantly increasing the security of dapps that rely on these services. Finally, EigenLayr enables a new era of permissionless innovation, where innovators don’t need to build their own trust networks to implement new distributed validation services. Instead, they can rely on the security and decentralization provided by ETH re-stakers in EigenLayr.