$EIGEN Token Announcement With Sreeram Kannan and Robert Drost

Bankless Nation, not every single day is launch day for a pro protocol. The Eigenlayer token details are here. Don't call it an airdrop, 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. Ryan, how you doing today, my man?

I'm good. I'm pretty excited about this uh stake drop we got going on. So what are we in for? What's happening?

Uh, we're gonna 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 uh uh Sri Rom and Robert. Robert, the new director of the Eigenlayer Foundation on the show today to answer all these questions and unpack the announcement details. 15% of the total supply of Eigen don't uh distribute it over multiple seasons. Season one starts today. That's what all the news is about, with 5% of the supply, along with one of the most sophisticated sets of smart contracts on chain on mainnet. Uh, Eigen is not your typical ERC20 token. It's got this feature called intersubjective forking, which is a unpack exactly what that is and how this actually increases the scope of what Eigenlayer can provide security for.

Uh and so, like I said, in addition to the token details getting released, we're also getting an the Eigen Foundation

with a new director, Robert Drost, uh, who we're 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 stake drop with Sri Rom and Robert. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless Nation, we're here with Sri Rom Canon, the co founder of Eigenlayer Sri Rom. Welcome back to the show.

Hey David, hi Ryan. Excited to be here.

And joining Sri Rom today is Robert Drost, the new director of the Eigenlayer Foundation. Robert, also, welcome to Bankless.

Hey, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

So big day today, guys. Uh, this is not an airdrop, this is a stake drop. Um, first, we have to explain what that is. Uh so what is a stake drop, and why are we getting one? Sri Ram, uh, what's the thought behind this?

Yeah.

The eigen token is designed as a staking token in the eigen layer ecosystem.

And a staking token allows for

new functionality that

each staking alone cannot provide.

And

the the tokens designed around this functionality. And we so that's why we're calling it a stake drop where you know users who participated in the protocol.

Can now actually claim their tokens and then uh stake it

to actually participate in providing security to new services that can then be built on top of this.

That's the high level idea. We'll get into a lot more details.

So

I was just gonna add, I mean, because people do talk about staking a lot, the token has this um,

you know, I think it's it's a good contribution, but this technical underpinning um where it it is, you know, it is a token, um, but it also has this ability that

it can be viewed intersubjectively. Uh

intersubjectively

pleased with that one.

Objectively. Yeah.

Contribution.

Yeah, exactly. So um

so that allows the um token to have abilities that are

um 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,

uh basically impossible to tell on chain.

So it adds a new element of social consensus embedded right into the protocol.

So there's been uh some just questions about like why is the the token like frozen on chain, right? Is currently the eigen token is non-transferable. Uh and eigenlayer has been in this process of slowly rolling out component after component after component, putting it on mainnet. Uh and so like, you know.

Airdrop 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 Mainnet to really like complete the engine of the Eigenlayer system. And the next phase that's 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. Is that kind of the philosophy of this?

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Um 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're 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 a regular token because you'd have to organize everybody agreeing there's a new version, 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 it needs a token. It doesn't need it to actually be traded on markets. Of course, at some point that will happen.

But for right now, that allows the network to get started.

And it's an important step. I mean, it's uh,

you know, I think the history of crypto has had a lot of these cases where, you know, uh true believers kind of understand it takes a while to roll out things responsibly and

you take the time to do it right.

Yeah. Yeah, this intersubjective forking uh is a mechanism that I remember Augur invoking way back in the day. Uh and uh 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.

Uh and it's really something that the Eigen token specifically is bringing into the scope of Eigenlayer to really expand the roles of what um eigen layer security can really do.

And so we have like the interests and like net needs of the eigenlayer protocol. But then we also have the token uh receivers on the other end of the system who are also uh looking for some details about like what the whole roadmap of the token is. So there are some like parameters of this stake drop. Uh, I believe 15% of the total eigen supply is going to be stake dropped. Uh, and we are at season one. This is the details from the announcement. We are at season one of the stake drop, in which the first 5% of the total supply.

Uh of Eigen as being stake dropped in a non-transferable way. But that means that there are future seasons, right? And so just can we can we kind of run through some of the high-level parameters of like how many seasons are there? How many, what percentage of Eigen tokens per season? And just like the distribution parameters, if we can kind of just run through that.

Yeah, I think um, you know, similar to a lot of situations, if you're talking about things that are in the public markets, um, you know, talking about a lot of future things, we are trying to uh say as much as we can without

getting to a situation where

um

uh

You know, we're giving we're giving specific details on things. Um, we, you know, we do have a good plan for how we're thinking about things going forward.

Um, I think people are going to be happy with it. Um, but