Bankless - $EIGEN Token Announcement With Sreeram Kannan and Robert Drost

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Eigenlayer token details are here! Don’t call it an Airdrop - This is a Stakedrop — because that’s the only thing you can do with your EIGEN tokens out of the gate.  15% of the total Supply of ...Eigen distributed over multiple Seasons, Season 1 starts today with 5% of the supply, and one of the most sophisticated set of smart contracts on Mainnet. EIGEN is not your typical ERC20 token. It’s got this feature called “Intersubjective Forking” that increases the scope of what Eigenlayer can provide security for.  In addition to the token details getting released, we’re also getting the Eigen Foundation, with a new director Robert Drost - who joins Sreeram today to walk us through everything you need to know. Foundation Page: https://eigenfoundation.org/  Claims Page: https://claims.eigenfoundation.org/  ------ 🏹 USE PODCAST24 FOR 10% OFF  https://bankless.cc/Citizen2024  ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player:  https://bankless.cc/Podcast  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🔐 SAFE | USE SAFE, GET REWARDED https://bankless.cc/SafePass_pod  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku    🏙️ CONSENSUS | SAVE 20% WITH CODE BANKLESS https://bankless.cc/4aykesD  ------ TIMESTAMPS  00:00:00 Start 00:03:39 What is a Stakedrop? 00:08:51 Allocation Details 00:15:53 Phase 1 and Phase 2 00:19:38 Locked Token Utility 00:24:30 When Are Tokens Unlocked? 00:31:04 Intersubjective Forking 00:36:30 Building WWIII Resistance 00:42:15 History Behind Their Decision 00:53:03 Eigenlayer Foundation 00:56:38 Future of Points 00:58:38 US Citizens Blocked 01:01:47 Token Allocation Thoughts 01:05:10 What's Next? ------ RESOURCES Foundation Page: https://eigenfoundation.org/  Claims Page: https://claims.eigenfoundation.org/  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:04 Bankless Nation, not every single day is launch day for a protocol. The eigenlayer token details are here. Don't call it an air drop. This is a stake drop. That's because that's the only thing that you can do with your eigenlayer tokens right out of the gate. Brian, how are you doing today, my man? I'm good. I'm pretty excited about this steak drop we got going on.
Starting point is 00:00:21 So what are we in for? What's happening? We're going to cover all of the details. There's been some feedback on Twitter. Some people have some questions about how this whole thing works. We're bringing on Sriram and Robert. Robert, the new director of the if I. Eigenlayer Foundation on the show today to answer all these questions and unpack the announcement
Starting point is 00:00:38 details. Fifteen percent of the total supply of Eigen don't, uh, distributed over multiple seasons. Season one starts today. That's what all the news is about with five percent of the supply, along with one of the most sophisticated sets of smart contracts on chain on main net. Eigen is not your typical ERC 20 token. It's got this feature called intersubjective forking, which is a... Wait, what? And we're going to unpack exactly what that is. and how this actually increases the scope of what eigenlayer can provide security for. And so, like I said, in addition to the token details getting released, we're also getting the Aigen Foundation with a new director, Robert Drost,
Starting point is 00:01:14 who are going to introduce here in just a second. So let's go ahead and get right into the details of season one of the eigenlayer's stake drop with Three Rom and Robert. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Cracken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Cracken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system,
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Starting point is 00:03:25 Now, if you do an initial consultation, Toku will cover the cost of your token valuation, which is what you need for your launch. So don't wait, reach out to the team right now at team at toku.com. That's team at toku.com. Bankless Nation, we're here with Sri Ram, Kanan, the co-founder of Agenlayer. Sri Ram, welcome back to the show. Hey, David. Hi, Ryan. Exeter to be here. And joining Sri Ram today is Robert Drost, the new director of the Aigenlayer Foundation.
Starting point is 00:03:55 Robert, also welcome to Bankless. Hey, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. So big day today, guys, this is not an airdrop. This is a stake drop. First, we have to explain what that is. So what is a strait drop, a stake drop, and why are we getting one? Sri Ram, what's the thought behind this?
Starting point is 00:04:13 Yeah. The eigen token is designed as a staking token in the eigenlayered ecosystem. And a staking token allows for new functionality that each staking alone cannot provide. And the tokens designed around this functionality. So that's why we're calling it a stake drop, where users who participated in the protocol can now actually claim their tokens
Starting point is 00:04:47 and then stake it to actually participate in providing security to new services that can then be built on top of this. that's the high long idea we'll get into a lot more details. Yeah. Oh, go for it, Robert. I was just going to add, I mean, because people do talk about staking a lot. The token has this, you know, I think it's a good contribution, but this technical underpinning,
Starting point is 00:05:12 where it is, you know, it is a token, but it also has this ability that it can be viewed intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity. Oh, my gosh. How I can say it. Intersubjectively. Yeah. It's night getting ready for the airdroft.
Starting point is 00:05:28 My contribution. Yeah, exactly. So that allows the token to have abilities that are harder to normally do. So it allows there to be social consensus outside, and people can organize and decide about actions that would be hard, basically impossible to tell on-chain. So it adds a new element of social consensus embedded right into the protocol. So there's been some just questions about like why is. is the token like frozen on chain, right? Is currently the eigen token is non-transferable.
Starting point is 00:06:01 And eigenlayer has been in this process of slowly rolling out component after component after component putting it on main net. And so like, you know, air drop days or stake drop days or very big days in the communities of protocols. But really from the perspective of the eigenlayer system, this is just one more component that is now live on main net to really like complete the engine of the eigenlayer system. And the next phase of the whole eigenlayer system that's going online is the actual staking component of the eigenlayer system, hence why there's a token out there that can do one thing, which is be staked.
Starting point is 00:06:37 Is that kind of the philosophy of this? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I think for things like data availability specifically, there's certain kinds of conditions that are really essential that you have this ability to have social consensus. that way it's known that if people are doing certain types of attacks, it could be seen. There's a good comparison of like if you look at something like Ethereum or others, people can determine externally they are able to put on things like hard forks and do changes. It's not entirely based on like, you know, programmatic on chain because the chains fundamentally can be forked. It's actually very hard to do that with the regular token because you'd have to organize everybody agreeing there's a new version,
Starting point is 00:07:21 what to do, how to upgrade. those capabilities are programmatically in the token. And so people are able to kind of cast their decision of, oh, there's a fork happening. I think this one's valid or I think this one's valid. So it brings this feature that used to just be on layer one into layer two. So it needs a token. It doesn't need it to actually be traded on markets. Of course, at some point that will happen.
Starting point is 00:07:44 But for right now, that allows the network to get started. And it's important step. I mean, I think the history of crypto has had a lot of these cases, where true believers kind of understand. It takes a while to roll out things responsibly and you take the time to do it right. Yeah, this intersubjective forking is a mechanism that I remember,
Starting point is 00:08:05 Auger invoking way back in the day. And for people who are trying to still wrap their heads on what that is, think of it like a hard fork, but for the app layer. And it's really something that the eigen token specifically is bringing into the scope of eigen layer to really expand the roles of what eigenlayer security can really do. And so we have like the interests and like needs of the eigenlayer protocol. But then we also have the the token receivers on the other end of the system
Starting point is 00:08:32 who are also looking for some details about like what the whole roadmap of the token is. So there are some like parameters of this stake drop. I believe 15% of the total eigen supply is going to be stake dropped. And we are at season one. This is the details from the announcement. that we are at season one of the stake drop in which the first 5% of the total supply of eigen is being stake dropped in a non-transferable way. But that means that there are future seasons, right? And so can we kind of run through some of the high-level parameters of like how many seasons are there, what percentage of eigen tokens per season, and just like the distribution parameters,
Starting point is 00:09:14 if we can kind of just run through that? Yeah, I think, you know, similar to a lot of situations, if you were talking about things, that are in the public markets. You know, talking about a lot of future things, we are trying to say as much as we can without getting to a situation where, you know, we're giving specific details on things. You know, we do have a good plan
Starting point is 00:09:37 for how we're thinking about things going forward. I think people are going to be happy with it. But, you know, in terms of specifics on, is it, you know, three seasons, two seasons, four seasons, there's options on what could be done. We have an idea on what would be coming future, but I think there's already some good discussion. We'll be giving out more information from people over time,
Starting point is 00:10:02 how to be similar to before. Restaking was probably the principal thing you could do in the network. Now it's a lot richer. You have not only your E3 stake, you also have Igens when you claim. next week starting May 10th. And you'll have the option that you can go ahead and put those into staking. You can allocate them to operators.
Starting point is 00:10:27 You can run them against AVS's. And so there'll be a lot richer of interactions you can do with the network. And there'll be communication about this is considered good or, you know, how to basically show that you're doing actions that are good for the network. Because that's ultimately the goal for early people is to kind of learn. learn that and get the network up from its wobbly feet into a full programable network. So the snapshot for season one was March 15th. So of course, what that means is the parameters of season one are closed.
Starting point is 00:11:00 But it sounds like the parameters of future seasons is still up in the air. And so we are on like a slow rollout of like this eventual full scope of the release of the token. Yeah, by necessity, you know, you can't speak about things until the time's coming up. We have some ideas about what's happening. We have communicated that we're looking for ecosystem participation. We are looking for things after that date. We are going to look at things before that date. It's one of these.
Starting point is 00:11:26 I think the best is to just look at what we're publicly saying in the documents. And then that'll give you some ideas. And there'll be more communications in the coming days and weeks. Inside of season one, again, which is this season, there's phase one and phase two. So I'm hoping we can kind of provide some clarity on these two different phases. Phase one has the bulk of the eigenstake drop inside of it, and then phase two is accounting for, like, kind of these edge cases. Can you walk us through the different phases of season? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the first part to talk about the principle, you know, we originally opened up the app and people could stake either, you know, eat or LSTs, restake them. And the goal is very much, you know, we like to look at the end users and, you know, people who are actually coming into the system. and making sure that we're looking directly at what they've done and, you know,
Starting point is 00:12:22 feeling like we're understanding, you know, what's the right thing to do there. So we're trying very hard to do that. I think the situation that we just want to make sure that everybody gets into a good place with is there were a couple of protocols and people that built up more complex structures on top of, you know, around what we were doing. You know, it's an open innovation platform. So just like the rest of crypto, people like to build up kind of interesting systems, novel systems. And we don't want to get into a position where we are looking at what somebody else intended and then figuring out something that they didn't.
Starting point is 00:13:04 So the point was, you know, we made sure that everybody is treated the same from our perspective. What we would have actually dropped onto users had they not been in these. protocols, that's all being reserved, and the protocols are the ones who were going to make the decisions because the users ultimately went into different protocols. Those protocols have policy. They have people involved in them. I think users need to wait a little bit because those protocols were finding out some of this information necessarily close to the state drop time. And so they need to go through, I mean, obviously if a protocol created a system, somebody put some tokens into it, they have an idea about what, you know, what they were going to expect that
Starting point is 00:13:47 that protocol would do. And so I think people can, you know, look to the protocols to figure out what's the kind of fair allocation from their, from their goals. And that'll be phase two. But it's, you know, it's, it's uniform with as if we could have, if we could have figured out everybody's position in the first one, we would have done it all directly. This is just to make or that everybody's treated fairly. So the base came in the numbers, David, just one thing. The numbers, 90% and 10%
Starting point is 00:14:16 maybe threw off some people, it seemed like their own numbers. They were not like hand allocated. They just, it was the outcome of a natural calculation. Yeah. And it's not exactly 90% and 10%. There's some roundoff and all this stuff.
Starting point is 00:14:30 But the actual numbers are, you know, somewhere in the nine point experts. Yeah, we could actually... That's right. They came out to, roughly those numbers. And, you know, it's just sort of easy numbers to put out there. The exact ones were calculated down to specific numbers. And yeah, I guess if people are interested at some point, we can just put it out, you'll see, you know, by May 10th, you'll like, or sorry,
Starting point is 00:14:54 after May 10th in Phase 2, you would actually see the exact numbers. But we can talk about it sooner. But like Sharia, I'm saying, it just happened that the numbers turned out to that. I think, you know, people do also need to keep in mind that the way in general, when People are looking at restate points or other things. They were measured as kind of a integration of, oh, that's good. That's great. Balloons, why not?
Starting point is 00:15:23 So, you know, there's value over time. And so the exact proportions and things you see right now are very different than looking back over a span of time. So, you know, everything is calculated based on, you know, know, impressions that we have from a sustained kind of commitment. And yeah, I think everyone should be happy with the end as they get more analysis. Okay, so let me try and summarize the whole phase one and phase two of season one, just as I understand it. The 90% which is phase one, which is what's happening today, is like the bulk of base case of restaking inside of eigenlayer,
Starting point is 00:16:05 which is like totally objective, eth inside of eigenlayer per unit time. And this is like a calculus that anyone can run. And that is the bulk of cases, and that's the bulk of tokens, it's 90%. And then there's been like a side of eigenlayer that has had these derivative platforms built on top of it inside of the Ethereum app layer.
Starting point is 00:16:26 And as you guys said, like a completely open platform, right? And so people started building derivatives on top of eigenlayer like speculation on the token, right? So some people could go along the yield, some people could go along the tokens. This was happening in Pendle, but there was a bunch of other app layers around this. And this is, and coincidentally, this is a 10 to 90 ratio, right? Then these are just like, they just happened to end up this way, which is how much people were vanilla restaking like me. And Igenly, ours is vanilla resaking wasn't doing any sort of DJ gambling stuff.
Starting point is 00:17:00 But then some people chose to do the derivative stuff that happened to the land at 9010. And then also the reason why that second phase isn't included in the first phase is because there's a bunch of complicated math that is opinionated that you guys would prefer the app layer, the app itself, to actually make that calculation themselves because that's their math, not your guys as math. And so it's up to it. And we've seen this actually happened before in other token drops where like if you were a solo staker with Rocket Pool or Lido in order to receive.
Starting point is 00:17:34 your stake, your airdrop from Starknet, you would have to actually go to Lido or Rocket Pool to go to get those tokens. And so this is something that you guys, of the people that chose to speculate on the eigen token in the DFI world, it's now up to the DFI layer to actually allocate the actual appropriate calculations because they are the ones with the calculations. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, that's a fair summary. And you captured a really key point there, which is, you know, open invasion means that the protocols that did all these things, not attached. no guidance from us.
Starting point is 00:18:06 They had interpretation and just, you know, people are free to do what they want. That's the big value of the crypto world is like self-determination, self-ownership in any agency. And so, you know, we ended up in this situation. I think, you know, I think it's all good. You know, people are, like you're saying, used to it, who have been around, maybe for some people who haven't seen it before, you know, it is something a little bit new. But like you said, for people who just came in and followed, the regular restaking and then just holding and staying on the platform, that's all,
Starting point is 00:18:40 you know, that's all treated and that was all included in phase one. Can I, so just a, let me try to attempt to summarize where we've gotten this conversation. I want folks to be crystal clear on what's just happened. All right. So there is a token now. It's called Eigen, right? E-I-G-E-N that's a token. That is now locked.
Starting point is 00:18:56 Egan layer has done a stake drop, not quite an airdrop, steak drop. We've talked about the contours of that. And we are in season one of that stake drop where 5% of the total supply of eigen is being released. And it's being released in kind of like two phases. So there's the phase one that we talked about and then kind of the phase two. And that's 5% of a total of 15% of the supply that is eventually going to be distributed. Right. And now the tokens are locked.
Starting point is 00:19:25 So you can't sort of go on uniswap and do anything like that with it at this point in time. but there is some functionality for the eigen token, which is in the eigen ecosystem. That's where we've come so far, yes? Yes, that's right. Okay, perfect. So, Robert, could you tell us a bit more about what people can do with the eigen token right now? So it's locked, but what sort of things can folks do with it? So I should clarify one thing, because we did the announcement today.
Starting point is 00:19:55 People can go to the claims page and they can check on, you know, making sure that they are there. There's, you know, an escalation process. There's discord and others where people go if they think there's errors and other stuff. So we have, you know, a team ready to kind of resolve things like that. The actual claim date, when you will be doing, the actual claiming will be a week from Friday on May 10th. Got it. So when that claim today, but they can check to see if an address is eligible.
Starting point is 00:20:27 Yes, that's right. You can check that your address is eligible. If it's eligible, that means it's in phase one. If you did activity and was in one of those protocols, if you look through the FAQ, there's a list of contract addresses. And those protocols are going to be included in phase two. So there's information there and we'll update things as we go. But yeah, it's also, I mean, the other part, which is just to keep in mind for a lock drop, it's, you know, it's not a rush. It's open for 120 days.
Starting point is 00:20:57 If you came back in and you looked at it later, you would claim there would be no difference. The only thing that is good about coming in early and claiming after May 10th is you can go ahead and you can stake and delegate your IGANS to operators and ABSs, which is a positive action to take in the system. So to answer your question, you know, you'll get the tokens. If you do, you know, nothing with them, which we hope people won't, you can just leave them inside of your wallet. They're non-transferable. during the claiming process, there's the option in the UX, which it's on the normal pathway, which will take you into the allocation, sorry, into the delegating to an operator, and the operators list ABSs and others.
Starting point is 00:21:42 You can actually participate in doing security now for the Eidonair system. And you'll have the option to do that as well with your ETH. So those are the main things that are happening. It's sort of the first step into the protocol getting, you know, fleshed out. It's it is functional. So like at this point, this is securing eigenDA and this is allowing the first ABSs that are using IgenDA to, you know, have the crypto economic security with them. And then over time, there'll be more features. We mentioned in there on like things that we're doing and looking for, which, you know, we want to see as we increase decentralization, of
Starting point is 00:22:19 course, is going to be the crypto economic payment slashing system and, you know, occupying. a lot of Sri Ram's time, I know. Okay, so, Robert, at this point, people can see what they're eligible for, the address, but they can't do a claim yet. After May 10th, they will be able to do a claim. And then once they claim, they will be able to actually delegate then through the kind of the governance process and the Aves and they stake to different Aveses at that point in time, yes? And like, when they stake, what does that do? What, like, just give us a refresher on what value that provides to the eigen network.
Starting point is 00:22:53 And like, why state? What's the compelling reason to do this? I mean, it's actually the whole reason for eigenlier to exist. So it's good for people to kind of, and I appreciate you guys have a platform where we can talk about it a little bit. The goal of eigenlayers to like more general purpose allow what used to be you're going to create a new Ethereum or file coin or, you know, some network and you have to imbue together the idea of the software, get together people to run the network and then figure out how they're, how you can create the crypto economic security to back it. So Eigenlayer is trying to make innovation incredibly easier than it had to be before, where you focus on the parts that really are the innovation and you're not forced to have to create a new blockchain. You are able to actually implement what you wanted for your software. It's a very general thing that blockchains themselves are just peer-to-peer networks of nodes that follow some kind of computer protocol, which is an API plus like a time communication factor.
Starting point is 00:23:56 and in eigenlayer, you're able to take the security out of Ethereum and now also the eigenlayer token itself, and you apply them towards somebody else's protocol. And it's very much like a reusable template that we've done this before for things like Bitcoin, we've done this when we participated in Ethereum. And now through the eigenlayer, it's a launchboard to be able to do this for every single AVS that comes on to eigenlayer. They have a uniform interface for having what used to be spinning up an entire new chain and ecosystem. Okay.
Starting point is 00:24:31 So why are the token, like when do the tokens become unlocked? So they're locked right now. But is there, is there a date by which at some point in the future that become unlocked? We have three things that we're looking for and we're going to want to try to get through them quickly. Like one of them on the community side, it's really important. We dropped an intersubjective work token. And we're actually taking people back to basics. intersubjectivity. Oh, God, I said it at that time. And social consensus, these ideas have always
Starting point is 00:25:01 been part of the core of the layer one blockchains. I think sometimes you have competitors to, like, for instance, Ethereum, that they look kind of like a blockchain, but at its core, it's a bunch of, like, completely permissioned people who own the network and they might as well be like Amazon Web Services or something. It's very centralized. That's not social consensus, right? that's actually a centralized entity that's controlling things. Things like Ethereum and Bitcoin have always had this property that the social consensus was this is the valid chain. We've had, you know, attacks on chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum where you have
Starting point is 00:25:36 Heath Classic or ETH or, you know, BCH, and they branch off, but people say, well, that's not actually the biggest one. This is the big one. And so the social consensus has been there before. And, you know, allowing this to now be inside of what in the the past would have been an ERC20 token that was just fungible, adding this capability to it. There's, I think, a lot of value for people to have some time to absorb it. You can read, there's going to be a lot of people who talk about what this means.
Starting point is 00:26:05 It's going to get enhanced. You know, everybody has people that they trust a lot. You guys have a lot of viewers and readers who, you know, kind of look to you to explain to them what does this really mean to bring forkability into a token rather than be part of the blockchain. And so it's good for people to understand that because it's ultimately. when the token goes fully unlocked, you know, at that point, there's,
Starting point is 00:26:27 there's a lot on stake for people, and they should really understand what this means. It shouldn't be something that like, hey, this thing's out there, it's unlocked. Hopefully you'll figure it out. We want there to be a period of like learning and just acclamation and everybody to kind of understand, you know, if this is right for them.
Starting point is 00:26:45 So, Robert, are you saying right now there's not an unlocked date per se? Some ideas have to propagate, or like back to the people who are wondering at what date, is there a concrete date by which this unlocks or is there some kind of an estimate? Yeah, I mean, they're non-boundary. Like that first one, there's going to be a wave. You're never like this, you know, we want there to be some time, but it's not going to be waiting around for years and anywhere close to that. The second factor is probably an important one, which is payments and slashing. So having the token crypto-economics
Starting point is 00:27:20 happening programmatically on chain. That's very important. People would like to actually see how the system works. Right now, you can imagine what does it look like for an AVS to be paying for security. How does an operator process those? How do the restakers get the value from it? And so in principle, you see how it works, but the actual system is important to have live and working. We've seen this before, like, for instance, the FlashBots ecosystem, you know,
Starting point is 00:27:49 it takes a little while to figure out what are the roles of people who are builders and relayers and proposers. And, you know, these roles have a different place in our case because we're actually not like, we're not doing block building, but we're actually doing security building for a protocol. So there's, you know, there's a component of making sure that people know what they're getting. So if you're actually in our ecosystem and, you know, the token is unlocked, you would like to have people have that information accessible. They're not waiting and saying, oh, I hope it, I hope it comes out the way I'd like it to be. You'd be able to just read in and see that it's done. Okay. And I think I heard in this maybe a month, not years, would be sort of an estimate of when
Starting point is 00:28:30 unlocked. Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of work on it already. We can't say for sure exactly when. There's some people that we're working with, of course. There's a lot of really good, robust incentive type researchers around Ethereum, eigenlayers like barring a lot of, you know, a lot of the best ideas that we can get from it. But, you know, we'll have more updates as we're, you know, getting closer. We have a forum up and, you know, the intersubjective work token is already there. There's like more work that we can do now at the foundation. It's been around for a while behind the scenes, but now we're actually going to be public and out there as well.
Starting point is 00:29:11 So, yeah, so if you're following us, you'll start getting a better feeling for how the progress is coming along. Okay, so it sounds like the answer here is just like there's some actual technical infrastructure that needs to get built in order for the actual token to get unlocked. And then also there needs to be some sort of just like community understanding. There needs to be more conversations about what an interest of objective work token actually is. And then who are the players in the game? And so one part in the hands of the community, one part in the hands of the actual infrastructure devs on the eigen side, right? Yep. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:43 And then the third part, that's important is, you know, we, so Shrebram and the team, you know, made the decision. This is going the path of progressive decentralization. So the foundation was formed a while back. We were doing work in order to get ourselves ready for this point. And so we were able to launch the token. Token is launched out of the foundation. The stake drops also out of the foundation. And so over time, we're going to get more and more.
Starting point is 00:30:13 progressively decentralized. So, you know, we know what that means. The community is going to get more involved. They're going to have more input already over, I'd say, the next month, there's going to be opportunities for people who are, you know, more technical or more in the business side or others, things to get involved. It's been, it's been, you know, very, I'd say very thankful and appreciative that there's been a lot of interest in people who believe and understand that restaking is the way for the capability. of blockchains and especially Ethereum to scale out in very novel ways. And yeah, going forward will have a lot more opportunities for people to participate in
Starting point is 00:30:55 the discussion beyond that, you know, important but simpler thing in the beginning, which was us getting the initial TVL into the system. True, Rom, I want to bring you in here as the information theory expert here about intersubjective forking. Can you talk about just like an increased scope of what a the contract system around the eigen token, what this whole system of interest objective forking, what this unlocks for eigenlayer? Like what does eigen layer do? It provides security to AVS's.
Starting point is 00:31:26 But what new frontier has the eigen token unlocked for the eigenlayer system? Yeah. Really, you know, the rest of the things are really supporting this particular thing, which is that how do we enable more people to build new actively validated services on top of eigenler? So you start from there, and as you, I know, some of you know here, we are building ourselves, eigenlabs, building ourselves the first ABS on top of AgenLayer, eigenTA. It's a very useful example to think about and understand how and why we had to come up with the intersubjective forking token. in for you know what is the data availability system you need a bunch of nodes to download and serve data to any participant who is actually interested in downloading the data so this is what a data availability system is intending to provide and as we were designing the eigenda system one thing that became very clear is there are certain kinds of faults which are provable on ethereum on the blockchain and certain kinds of faults which are not provable
Starting point is 00:32:37 on the Ethereum blockchain. Like, for example, we had this idea, which is building on the Ethereum researchers, Dunkrad and Justin Drake, on proof of custody, which is a mechanism which you can prove on chain that you're storing the data. You know, because you have knowledge of your private secret,
Starting point is 00:32:56 but also knowledge of that particular block. So it's kind of like a zero knowledge proof that you are actually holding the person who has knowledge of the private key also has knowledge of the block. So this can be proven, but what cannot be proven is that the person is serving this data to the users who really want it. Imagine an optimistic roll-up. An optimistic roll-up only works if any challenger, potential challenger, can get access to the data that the roll-up is publishing. And it is possible that all the eigen-Dia nodes collude and never
Starting point is 00:33:30 serve data to anybody. This is not a fault that can be observed on the Ethereum blockchain. But from the, so you take the Ethereum's point of view and you sit there inside Ethereum and you look at, hey, can I, do I know what is, has data been withheld? And you can't know because Ethereum does not know whether the IGNDA nodes are serving the data to Ryan, David and Robert. But from the outside, no user. If all the eigendae nodes colluded and said that this block has been published but never released the data to anybody, no RPC node will be able to serve it. If you run a full node, you will not be able to download the block. If you run a light node, you will not be able to get the few chunks that you are asking for. All of these give rays to intersubjective agreement.
Starting point is 00:34:17 From the outside, any two individuals can agree that the data has been withheld, even though Ethereum as a blockchain cannot know the data has been withheld. Data withholding is a great example of an intersubjective fault, where Ethereum as a blockchain cannot know whether data has been served and propagated to everybody in the world. But as from the outside, observers know very well that,
Starting point is 00:34:43 hey, I'm trying to access the pay-dependent network. I can't get it. I go to RPC nodes. I can't get it. I'm running a full node. I can't get it. I'm running a light node.
Starting point is 00:34:49 I can't get it. Therefore, I know that the data is not available. So, Sarreva, I'm really quick. I'm with you so far, right? And I can understand why this is a bad thing. I can layer nodes withholding data so it's not fulfilling their duty
Starting point is 00:35:01 of an eigenlayer node. Just a quick side quest, though, is like, why would they do that? Like, we would call that, like, corruption. Like, what sort of things? Like, I'm having a hard time off the top of my head imagining a scenario. Why would they do that? Don't they like the eigennetwork? Is there some sort of reason that comes to mind of why they're going to corrupt and go evil in this way?
Starting point is 00:35:21 That's a great question. You know, when we're building these blockchain systems, we want to protect against all kinds of, you know, nuclear events. And a nuclear event here that one would be worried about is all the eigenlayer valetators coming together and saying, hey, you know, let's just attack the system. Why would they attack the system by withholding data? Because there may be an optimistic roll-up, let's say they're involved in. And if in this optimistic roll-up, I actually make a invalid claim on Ethereum by publishing data to eigen-DA and then like getting my fraudulent state passed. because nobody can challenge, because nobody knows what the heck is going on, and I can now steal money. So we are obviously always worried about the absolute worst case.
Starting point is 00:36:11 So this requires a heavy amount of collusion, right? All the operators have to be in cohorts because a small fraction of operators can still serve the data. But they are all colluding. They're colluding with the roll-up sequencer. They're all like, you know, in it together to actually steal money from a roller. And that would be an example of why they do it. Okay, so if that happens, basically, your validator set, your kind of like node set turns evil, they get corrupt. For a lot of chains, a lot of consensus systems, that's kind of like game over.
Starting point is 00:36:41 It's like reset time. Like, oh, the system's dead. Like, it's corrupted, right? And no longer works. But I think where you're getting to is intersubjective forking means that there's still a path, even in that failure mode situation. Yes? That is correct. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:36:56 So this is, again, comes from, you know, deep in the Ethereum research culture that, you know, we want to build for, you know, World War III, as we call it in Ethereum. But the idea being that what kind of systems can withstand all these complex attacks? And, you know, people, you know, some people might say, oh, why are you worried about such adversarial scenarios? because when we think about blockchains, we don't think about blockchains as like, you know, toys that we are playing with for today, it is the kind of rails on which, you know, human coordination can be built.
Starting point is 00:37:36 And, you know, if you want to build a system to that grade, you need to make sure that it is, it can withstand these kinds of thoughts. And in this case, what will happen is because a majority of the eigenstakers have colluded and done this, malicious thing or withholding data, the token can be forked and, you know, somebody can raise a challenge and say that, hey, this is not the right token because these Ivan stakers did something
Starting point is 00:38:04 bad and create another version of the token where those particular stakers, their stake is removed. And the new token, now just removes those guys' stake and then everybody else still has their stake. And what this does is this creates a concrete penalty for these mafia from actually like, you know, going and taking their gains and running away. Instead, you have this alternative token that from the outside, we can all agree that the alternative token is the right token, because, you know, everybody knows that an attack has happened. And because of that, we all know, everybody now coheres onto the second, you know, forked token, because now we all, like, agree on this forked token, that token is what imbued with value. So when we think about what is an
Starting point is 00:38:58 intersubjective agreement, I think the simplest thing to think about is all value is intersubjective. Like, why is Bitcoin valuable? Why is this token valuable, a particular meme coin valuable, but a fork of that meme coin is not valuable, right? This is, all of this comes from, inter-subjective agreement. We all look at it and say, oh, yeah, this is the right one, let's, you know, invest. And it is a sum total of all individual, you know, free choice that creates value in one, one token versus the other token. And similarly, here, what's happening is the token system can create this fork. And by creating a challenger can create this fork. And by creating this fork, they're actually saying, you know, throwing the gauntlet to everybody, saying,
Starting point is 00:39:42 hey, you know, this is the right token. Now, you know, all of you shift your reference to this token. And so the normal problem with just doing it on a regular ERC20 token is the original token is now being traded. It is now in locked in exchanges, taxes, all these places. You suddenly go and like rub the guys and say that other token is valuable. What happened to the guys who were trading this token? What happened to the exchanges?
Starting point is 00:40:08 Like, you know, it's chaos and mealy. If you just do it on a random, yeah. RC 20 token, the eigen system not only pre-anticipates this as a behavior, it sets it up that this is the correct expected behavior. When people collude and create malicious, you know, actions, they need to be held to task. They need to be actually punished. And the system itself is designed. So that's why we have this two token model where one token can be used in a way that is fork unaware. Like, You don't need to know anything about, oh, my God, this eigen token is too complicated. There are forks and all this stuff.
Starting point is 00:40:45 You don't need to do any of that. You're just like, hey, this is an eigen token, just use it like any other token. What it does is there is another token which can fork. It's a different frame of reference. And we call it B-Igeng, backing eigen, so the one that's actually backing it at real value. And that can fork. And if you hold this like other token, you should be able to claim one each in each of these forks. So you are protected against forking.
Starting point is 00:41:10 If you are not staking and being malicious, you're kind of protected. So that's the kind of high level idea. I get it. That's very cool. So the net gain is it makes eigenlayer and kind of like the validator node set of eigenlayer nodes more corruption resistant, right? Because there can always be this like fork that happens. And that's all embedded in the protocol.
Starting point is 00:41:32 So it's like one example of something that wasn't intersubjective fork. was like Ethereum Classic, like branching from Ethereum. And for people who were like remember back then, how messy was that? The like consensus had to be reformed. There was like like wars and tribes and all of this, this messiness. Eganlayer just kind of handles a revolt against the validator set in protocol and relatively seamlessly, right? So if any kind of dictator or cabal comes to power, like there's a revolution sort of like
Starting point is 00:42:03 baked into the protocol so you could just kind of fork out. And even having that mechanism there will make it probably less, I mean, you're the game theory guy. That would make it less likely for such a cabal and corruption to form in the first place. That is correct. So, you know, so this core idea, I think David mentioned earlier that this was from Auger and actually from some of Vitalik's blog posts and even earlier from an idea called Truth Coin, which was a forking version of Futarky. So there's kind of like a history to this, you know, in the blockchain space.
Starting point is 00:42:39 But the, a few things had to be resolved to actually make our, you know, version of this universal intersubjective work token. I'd say there are four major things we have to solve to actually get it, get it to the point where it's usable in this way. Number one is universality. Universality is that it is usable across not just one particular. you know, application, like Auger was designed for one particular application. And because it's designed for one particular application, it uses application-specific semantics. For example, Auger measures
Starting point is 00:43:15 how many bets are outstanding. And then you know that that's the crypto-economic surface area that is open. And it uses that to create an economic mechanism that makes sure that the system works. And when you're doing it universally, you don't know what is happening. Like somebody is using an eigen oracle in a betting market, they're using it here and there, and like, God knows where else. So when we want to make it universal, we need to have a solicitation mechanism, which is universal, which is that it somehow needs to understand what is the total crypto-economic risk without being application-specific. So that's a big thing we had to do to actually make Eigereneer work. There is another aspect to universality, which is, you know,
Starting point is 00:43:58 we think of these intersubjective systems as happening in two phases. We call it a setup phase and an execution phase. And, you know, the reason I think it's important to mention this is when many our people think social consensus, they think of, hey, we all get into a discard or like, you know, hash it out in like, you know, the, in a room. But that's really not what we mean by intersubjective forking. What we mean by it is there is a set up phase where the conditions of what needs to happen are pre-specified. For example, this token for, you know, falls in eigen-DA. Let's say, let's say that's the setup phase. Or in the auger case, this token will fork for errors in the prediction market. That is the set-up phase. Now, in the execution phase,
Starting point is 00:44:44 anybody can self-evaluate whether they need the fork one is the right thing or the other one is the right thing. It's kind of like having a fork choice rule built in to a protocol. Like in Bitcoin, and you say the longest chain is the right chain. Somebody can create a forked block, but if it's not part of the longest chain, you're going to reject it. You don't need to call anybody else to know that I need to reject that other block.
Starting point is 00:45:06 The longest chain rule already tells you that you go with the longest chain and anybody else who's going with the longest chain is already in sync, in consensus. And so this segregation into the setup phase and the execution phase, so Igen token itself has a set up phase which is basically creating the shelling point
Starting point is 00:45:24 that it is a universal intersubjection. work token. So it will fork for intersubjective false that stakers make on the in when you stake eigen in eigen layer. And this is very important, you know, because like we said, all value is intersubjective. It comes from our agreement. And if already the pre-agre agreement is that, you know, if you stake and do this wrong thing, then you will get slashed and, you know, on the token will fork. We call this slashing by forking. And so if you already know this, then, you know, you know, like Ryan said, there's maybe no incentive for you to actually go and do this. But that's the first one, universality.
Starting point is 00:46:03 We want to make this universal. It's usable across all these systems. You need to have a mechanism to know how much value is at risk. You also need to be able to fork for all these, you know, in false. The second one we call isolation, which is that a defy user should not have to know all these details about forking and all the defy should be able to work nominally. Because otherwise, you know, defy has to keep track of. Or is this the original token or the fork token or how do we handle this split?
Starting point is 00:46:31 So that becomes very messy. So the protocol has isolation, which is, that's why it maintains two tokens, one token which doesn't need to fork on the other token, which can fork in the background. The third property we call metering, which is that what is the cost to create a fork? Because, you know, you're inducing a social cost whenever you create a fork. Like imagine we were callous about how we build the system. It's a, oh, you know, everybody now, like, for a meme reason, you create a fork. fork and somebody else creates a fork and you know it just goes unbounded complexity and we want to
Starting point is 00:47:02 keep forking rare and serious how do we do that we have a metering which is that to create a fork you need to burn a bunch of the eigen token otherwise you can't create a fork because you're serious and why would you risk your eigen token to create a fork you bunch you burn the eigen token in the original fork but you don't burn your own token in the created fork because you believe that that's correct and that's where everybody will converge they're not really losing it. anything, you will lose it only if you were wrong. So we call this commitment. So you have a binding commitment to actually go to another fork and you need to have enough binding commitment to move to another fork. And this basically compensates for the cost of social consensus. You can think of
Starting point is 00:47:43 the eigen token as providing social consensus as a service. And so you need to have like a cost. Otherwise, you know, people will abuse, you know, by spam and various ways. You know, there's just lots of meme tokens and then like who knows what is happening. So foking is considered to be a serious event and it will happen only if somebody is willing enough to create the fork that they're willing to bet their life or a certain fraction of the token that the other fork is the one that's going to survive. As a third property, we call metering. Then the fourth property, which is actually a really, I think, a striking property in crypto economics
Starting point is 00:48:18 we call compensation. Compensation is, imagine I use an Oracle as a D5 protocol. a learning protocol that relies on an oracle. If that Oracle goes wrong due to the behavior of the stakeholders, then, you know, normally, you know, you're like tough luck, you know, move on, you know, that bad things happen. Let's just move on and figure out what to do with it. But with the eigen token, one of the things you do is you can have a mechanism to compensate
Starting point is 00:48:47 an aviase for misbehavior because we are taking the bad guys tokens and burning it, of burning all of it, a portion of it can be redistributed to the ABS, and there is a mechanism to redistribute tokens. So these are all the new dimensions that are opened up with the eigen token, and that's why, you know, we are like, okay, now we are ready to actually talk about this universal intersubjective. I'm laughing because people came for the, theirdrop, and we're finishing this episode with a master class on crypto economics, and that was both geeky and incredibly cool and incredibly ambitious, I would say. And I think shows a lot of foresight into the seriousness of how you guys are designing eigenlayer to sort of plan for a complete
Starting point is 00:49:33 corruption of the node set and still have a like a failover strategy for that too. So very cool. Is there a whole white paper on that, Sri Ram, if people are like interested in exploring how you set up the intersubjective forking functionality? Absolutely. You know, the the The white paper is published on the EigenLear web page. Its link is, you know, we'll give you a link at the end of the chat. That is also a blog post. You know, the paper is pretty dense and long. You know, it's a 40 plus page paper.
Starting point is 00:50:09 But there is a five-page blog post, which is, you know, a somewhat simplified version of what is going on in the white paper. Yeah. So we are looking forward to, and, you know, Robert mentioned, you know, the few dimensions we were waiting for before transfer restrictions could be removed. And one of the first ones is community discussion. And one of the aspects of community discussion is some of the parameters, what fraction of eigen should be burnt in order to consider a fork, right? So there are some core parameters like this. How do you define a new AVS now inherits the forkability?
Starting point is 00:50:47 Like, you know, it's like a constitution and like, you know, edits to the conflict. What is the mechanism? Is it enough that you just take in eigenlayer? Does it have to be written somewhere? What is the mechanisms to modulate intersubjective forking? These are the few dimensions which we want to nail before we open the token to both forkability and transferability. Yeah, and it's really important. It would be, I mean, it would be possible to make some guesses at what are the right thing to do. But as we've seen with Ethereum and others, look at how, you know, look at how much effort is put into the design parameters on 1559, or in thinking about going from 32 eth validators to, you know, 1,000 plus eth validators. And before that, right, I mean, there was like 1,000 shards and 64 shards, then one shard with roll-ups. These are, you know, you need a lot of great minds. And even, you know, Vitalik and Ethereum has had many times, they go down a path and they work
Starting point is 00:51:46 for a while and then they have to figure out something else. So, you know, this is important enough to get a lot of people's input towards. Yeah, and while that was kind of a lot, it's actually kind of simple at the same time. Once you put all the pieces together, really a lot of this complexity stems from the fact that we want EGIN to be interoperable with DFI, yet also have to this forking ability. And so like the base case of Eigen, actually kind of like the first class citizen, the main version of the token, is actually the DFI version of the token. is actually the D5 version of the token, the token that people are generally familiar with.
Starting point is 00:52:22 And then there's this derivative, if you're one called it Back to Egan, which is like this forking contract which spawns two separate universes for people to choose which universe they want to go to, one which is the militia attack and one is the non-malicious attack. And really, like, why is this happening?
Starting point is 00:52:40 It's actually because Eugen layer is increasing the scope of the things that it can provide security for inside of their ABS ecosystem. So it's just like kind of a natural byproduct of the nature of what Eugenlayer is and how we can build smart contracts a day and the fact that also people are also going to want to put their tokens into defy and do defy things with it. That's kind of my summary with this.
Starting point is 00:53:03 There are some other, like, loose ends I think we still actually kind of need to tie off on this conversation. One is the Eigenlayer Foundation. So brand new organization. That's why Robert, you're here on the show with us today because you're the new director of the foundation. So what's the mandate of the foundation? Who is going to the foundation? Is this, are people from Egin Labs going to go work for the foundation and leaving Eigen Labs? What's the roadmap for the Eigen Foundation? What's kind of the deal? Kind of give us the DNA of the
Starting point is 00:53:31 Igen Foundation. Yeah, I mean, the foundation, it's, it's brand new in terms of being public. It's been behind the scenes for a little while now. There's a lot of prep involved in the process of getting up to doing one of these types of transitions from having, you know, a labs running entire protocol to the labs making the trusted decision to start moving things over into the community. So that started happening from a while back now. The foundation is basically a new organization. So everything in eigenlayer labs, eigen Labs, is staying in place. There's always a tradeoff. Sometimes people make an option. They kind of roll a lot over. It's It's actually important that for two things, one is the execution.
Starting point is 00:54:17 We all want eigenlayer itself to move very quickly and not disrupting the organization is a very critical step to that. And then the second is, you know, this is a separate new organization. It has a different mandate. Igenlayer Foundation is a shareholder less nonprofit who's objective and it would be violating its, you know, its constitution basically, its articles of association. if it was doing anything other than spending all of its efforts to make the eigenlayer protocol more successful. And so there's a set of kind of ideals in it.
Starting point is 00:54:53 And it's a difference between, you know, eigenlayer labs, which had to necessarily be an investor-based company. It had to have something that looks like a regular corporate structure. And then eigenlayer Foundation, which is much more or really compatible with a community-focused environment. And a lot of communities form themselves around Dow's. there's many different structures. I mean, Ethereum Foundation doesn't even have a Dow, it doesn't have token voting, yet still the foundation has those ideals. So you see different versions of it.
Starting point is 00:55:21 Optimism Foundation is a great example. Forms is like very much for public good and other things. And, you know, our foundation is also public good with the public good being, how can we use social consensus to make blockchain and crypto security applicable to many more use cases other than people creating new layer one, layer two chains, you know, these types of first things. We want to project crypto security into a lot more of the technology world and business world. So yeah, so the summary is, you know, we're building. We are hiring quite a bit. You know, on the announcements, there's some links to go to our web pages as well. You know,
Starting point is 00:55:59 for the most part, people have been coming in. There's a lot of people who are very interested, been in the space. People are, you know, engaged and want to do that. It's a fast-growing organization. We've got a lot to cover. So happy to, you know, happy to, you know, happy to have that. And we do have a couple of people. We'll be putting out some announcements, really excited about who joined our team as the chief governance officer and some others. So we'll kind of flesh it out some more and there'll be more community participation even on our side. But yeah, really good question. Thank you. That, you know, it is a whole new organization and it's not, you know, lab shifting over. It's a separate organization. Okay. So just some straggling questions as we
Starting point is 00:56:41 finish this conversation off. So people are probably wondering, points. Does anything happen to eigenlayer points? Is there a points program continuing moving forward? Do you have any comments on this? Yeah. So as far as like after March 15th was the cutoff date and, you know, everything from that point on is still in the system. It's not part of this season. But it's all tracked and, you know, it is nothing is going away. Nothing is like going to stop being considered going forward. We just had to pick a point in time and commit to it because there was quite a bit for us to do in preparation for getting to the to the stake drop. So that part is all, is all, you know, set up for the future. The issue around restake points going forward,
Starting point is 00:57:29 fundamentally today, we made, you know, a big difference here because now we know that users who are participating in eigenlayer, the only thing to do has broadened out a lot more. Previously, you could put stake in and it was registered as being in the eigenlayer system, but it wasn't actually contributing to the social consensus. Now people understand, you know, what the system is. We started seeing it with the launch a couple weeks ago, that the operators, ABSs are coming up. Now we see it with the eigen token as well.
Starting point is 00:57:58 And so after May 10th, there's going to be more attributable things that users can be doing that will signal that they are good ecosystem participants and they are helping the protocol. So we're not ready right now to say what that is, but we're working on getting that out communicated. It'll be available with people before they need to actually take action. So just follow along on Eigen Foundation on Twitter. Igen Foundation, EigenLayer will, I'm sure, referable to them as well. So people who are following that account as well can see it. But yeah, no, there's definitely changes that are going to be coming.
Starting point is 00:58:33 But nobody is going to get wiped out for what they've done. Everything is going to be counted as well, since much. So some of the messaging for this conversation is today folks can go to the website and go check to see how much their address might be eligible for except, and this is a subset of bankless listeners. People who live in the U.S. are hit with a block and other certain jurisdictions are hit with a block. And also not like I've heard Dale on Twitter of VPN blocks as well. Is there anything you can say about that? I mean, we all know, bankless listeners know we are living in a difficult, let's say, regulatory regime these days. So I'm not sure to what extent you can
Starting point is 00:59:15 comment on this. But like it is a concern. It is something top of mind for those folks looking to like participate in these networks. Do you have any comments on this? Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult situation like you're saying. It's not possible to operate in the space without, you know, following, you know, regulatory guidelines and being responsible to that. And, And, you know, the challenging part is there's not a lot of clarity and, you know, there is pretty strict guidance around what is possible to be done and not done in places like the U.S. So I don't think we're doing anything different. I think that's been the majority of tokens that have come out.
Starting point is 00:59:59 The foundation itself is a non-U.S. entity. and so it's a non-US, non-US involved action, you know, non-U.S. involved procedure. And that, you know, unfortunately for, you know, many other protocols that have come before, that you have to end up having these types of geographic restrictions as well as technology restrictions. One thing I'll say to bankless listeners, this is from me personally. If you're angry, go contact your Congress representative. Like go contact your lawmakers, get involved politically, because that's what it's going to take to sort of change some of these things. Yeah, I'll get on my pedestal for a second as well, which is, I mean, we, you know, we have a government. We actually, you know, it is our government in the United States especially. I assume you're kind of talking more about countries such as the U.S. And so, yeah, the voting system is, you know, where we really get our voices in. Ultimately, I think a lot of us in the crypto space feel this way that, you know, for countries to not pay attention to those of us who are in this space and to not adjust, you know, make the laws
Starting point is 01:01:06 work for that is just pushing innovation to other places, and it's actually putting countries at a deficit. Yeah, sometimes, Robert, I wish we had an intersubjective fork in the U.S. that we could just kind of wrap too, but I don't know if that's baked in the Constitution. So we've got to work these things out socially. We've got to work a conference where one of the big, there's a number of senators and others who are trying to push this forward. There are states that are a lot more aggressive about trying to represent the real interest. You know, I think a lot of the laws we have, they were created a time that it's very hard for them to anticipate the rapid pace of technology. So we just
Starting point is 01:01:39 need to, we need to just keep our voices, you know, loud, speak up. And, you know, we know we can move, we can move things in the right direction. Yeah. We're just tying off some loose ends here. I'm collecting some questions from people in the bankless nation discord. There's like a different, a whole different, like, rabbit hole we could go down on like a sizing philosophy for distributing a token to the community. There's like linear versus unlinear. There's like, do you give 8%? 10%, 15%, eigenler is given 15%, which in my opinion,
Starting point is 01:02:10 like check me if I'm wrong, listeners, but like 10% is kind of like the industry standard has been loosely, give or take. Eganleer has chosen to do 15, but do you guys have any just like directional like philosophy thoughts
Starting point is 01:02:24 about like how you guys chose the parameters that you've chosen? Like I've been trying to solicit like feedback from people, but like everyone's got different opinions and everyone's is all kind of of conflicting with each other. So maybe just like at a high level question, just like philosophy on the parameters and how they were chosen and why. Yeah. I mean, I think the general parameter
Starting point is 01:02:44 that we have is we want to make sure that there's a meaningful participation early on from the whole community. And, you know, we know in this case we have a locked token and there's still a lot of, you know, a lot more that, you know, we are looking at making sure. that we're able to kind of get people in and, and kind of reward people who are, you know, paying attention and, you know, would be good for, you know, future participants in the community. So, so it's good for us to have a higher number. I mean, obviously, there are people who might look and say, oh, we want to go to lower percentages or, you know, pick this arbitrary one. I don't think it's zero sum. It's a very positive sum situation when it comes to air drops. The main goal and, you know,
Starting point is 01:03:33 what we are, you know, hoping over time is it's a very compelling protocol. As people see this token, as people start to understand this idea about creating social consensus as an API that can get attached more readily, it means we're going to increase the velocity. We'll be able to, like, see much faster pace of new exciting protocols being built in the crypto space. And, you know, having air drops like this, it's an important tool for us to be able to decentralized. I mean, you have to actually get some people into the space through an irdrop who have not invested anything, right? They're just participating in your ecosystem. And, you know, you know they're the kind of people who would be good to be part of the,
Starting point is 01:04:17 you know, the community and helping to do governance and other things. So, yeah, we definitely were trying to be at a number that would allow a lot of people, a lot of people to get in. So we'd have freedom. And so, you know, we started off with this, first season, but we know there's a lot of things like this season. We were taking a look at particular restakers who are in the earlier phases. There's a lot of other people in the space who are developers, who are doing other things in the community. So we need to make sure that we're able to look for activities in other places well in future seasons. Well, congrass to the eigen ecosystem on the stake drop. This is definitely another exciting milestone in what we've observed
Starting point is 01:05:01 with Eugen layer shipping so much and kind of this whole narrative and idea around Brie Staking's been really excited to go down the rabbit hole. So I have a question for each of you guys as we end. So want the foundation's perspective and then one Eugen Labs perspective is what's next? What's the most exciting next thing that you guys are looking forward to?
Starting point is 01:05:22 Let's get Eugen Labs first, Sri Rom. Yeah. I think looking forward to some of the unblocking some of the technical infrastructure, like payments and slashing, getting them ready and going on mainnet, that would be the biggest thing we're looking at from labs. How about you, Robert? Yeah, I think the complement for that, the foundation, its goal is to serve the larger community to be able to meaningfully get involved.
Starting point is 01:05:54 And so what I'm really excited about is, you know, as our foundation is, you know, getting our feet planted. And we are able to communicate more of the community, allow more people to be involved in some of the important research that needs to happen in community building, in getting people to be aware about this new opportunity to interact with crypto in a very different way, where you really think about it much more as like a software developer who understands what you want to get done. but, you know, blockchain is something that's a much easier service for you to consume
Starting point is 01:06:33 rather than having to, you know, actually transition your whole application mindset over. So there's a lot of like Web 2 moving into Web 3. I dare say, you know, everyone will be like, I'm saying AI. Everybody says AI. I think I'll say it because I know for somebody like me, I know Shariaz in that case also, we've been big AI fans for, you know, well over a decade because, you know, we saw this coming. But, you know, so Web 2 and things that are like the future direction, of computing, getting things set around eigenlayer so that we can support that.
Starting point is 01:07:03 And I do say that very humbly, like, you know, for a foundation, we're going to be assisting the whole community to make this happen. And then eigenlayer itself, for everybody who's, you know, looking at it, it's a layer of infrastructure. It's a security layer of infrastructure, but there's a massive amount of value that anybody who's bringing applications or services in, you know, will be able to get by utilizing it. And, you know, it's a marketplace. It's not looking to be extractive, not going to be rent-seeking. It's just providing service that is valuable and allows a lot more value to flow into crypto by real-world use cases. Exciting times. Robert Shri-Ralm, thank you so much for joining us today on Bankless.
Starting point is 01:07:44 Congrats, guys. Bankless Nation. One thing to leave you with, of course, is be careful of scam links. There could be all sorts of go to the official channels. We will include links in the show notes to those official channels. We can see the announcements. and you can see the links and all of those details. Gotta remind you, of course, crypto's risky. You'd lose what you put in, but we are here. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
Starting point is 01:08:10 Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO is the first Dowled Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network, network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem
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Starting point is 01:09:08 Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading defy ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the Web3 gaming hub. Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.io. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum orbit chain? Arbitrum allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own orbit chain,
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Starting point is 01:10:02 Selo is the mobile-first EVM-compatible carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. Driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile defy. And with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest growing Web3 wallets, Sello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses.
Starting point is 01:10:19 And now Sello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a layer two, optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Sello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability secured by Ethereum validators, and one block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Sello layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using Social Connect. But Sello is a community-governed protocol. This
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