Eigenlayer Q&A with Founder Sreeram Kannan

Bankless Nation, we got a live stream for you here today. We're gonna get some questions answered about, I think, something that people have the most questions about, which is restaking, Eigenlayer, AVS networks, timelines, where's the yield coming from? What are we gonna do? Uh, there's a lot of different questions I have, a lot of different questions that other people have had, and I have source questions for the past two weeks from people around the crypto sphere, around the Ethereum ecosystem, both on Twitter, in my DMs, on Farcaster as well.

We are going to bang through all of these questions one by one by one. I've got 23 questions total. Some of them are redundant, so I'll ask them all at once. Some of them will be longer than others, some of them will be very short. We're going to get through all of them. We're going to get you guys some answers to the questions that you guys have about Eigenlayer. So I'm going to bring on two people out of the Eigenlayer ecosystem. One you might not be as familiar with, Nima Bazar Viziri, who I actually met at ETH Denver 2019. He has joined the Eigenlayer ecosystem, the Eigenlabs team, and also Sri Rom Kanan. Everyone knows Sri Rom. So we're going to bring them on in just a second. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

I'm joined with Sri Ram Kanan, the founder of Modern Restaking. Sri Ram, welcome back to the show.

Hey, uh hi David. Really excited to be here. We're looking forward to do this together.

And uh also next to him we got Nima Viziri, ecosystem research and development over at Eigenlayer. Nima, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. Also,

Nima, Nima, you're uh you're a new face for us. Maybe give us a little bit of your introduction, who you are and what you do at Eigenlayer.

yeah, sure. So I joined the Eigen Labs team uh a few months ago

um to lead the ecosystem development um and AVS, you know

um

uh teams that have been interfacing with the with the protocol. Um

right before this, I was actually a research partner at Polychain, which is how I joined, which is how I got to know about the protocol in its early stages, and I just saw the ecosystem kind of flourishing.

So um I was super excited to hit up Sri Ram and be like, hey, what do you need help with? So I jumped on on board.

Beautiful. And I'm enjoying having you here because I think I want a lot of questions answered about the AVS ecosystem specifically. So I'll be directing some of those questions to you. Some of the higher level, more general stuff, I'm going to throw to Sri Ram. And I think that's actually where we're going to start. This first question that I've got was actually, I think this is kind of a troll question, but I think it's a place it's a good place to start, anyways. This is from Permaweave. Why should I care about it?

Sri Ram, why should we care about Eigenlayer?

Different people care about Eigenlayer for different things.

If you are a builder, you know it uh opens up an opportunity for you to go build new things without having to secure a trust network on your own. You can build arbitrary new protocols on Eigenlayer.

That's why you should care about it.

If you're a staker, you're staking in Ethereum,

you're already putting your ETH at risk in validating the Ethereum protocol.

Might as well contribute security to other protocols and earn some rewards because of that. If you're a node operator,

you're already running services for Ethereum validation or some other chain validation.

One of the big problems as an operator is every new chain that you validate, you have to

sell to a new community of token holders.

With Eigenlayer, what we are able to do is the same community,

many, many operations. So that's the value proposition to the operators.

If you are

Building a roll-up in the Ethereum ecosystem,

you may be bottlenecked by cost and bandwidth and the economics and eigen DA, which is on Eigenlayer, is a solution that we're offering for you.

That's the value proposition to the different sites.

Beautiful. A couple of these questions, or maybe some of them, will actually be um in the same spirit. And so I'll ask them both at once. And these next ones, Nima, are going to you. Uh Yudi, you die, Suzuki, reblock.eth, and also uh Niski.

First question, what are some unique use cases using Eigenlayer? And then the second question it's unclear how much need there will be for AVS's beyond the early handful of examples. Where will the demand come from? I think the spirit of this question is

what are the flavors of AVS's? What are the different types of services that can come from these things? How do we even know that there is a there there?

Neme, maybe you can take this one.

Yeah, sure. So

I mean, right off the bat, a few things that are uniquely enabled by the protocol, right? Let's just say bridging, right?

The economic security that that we're

uh dealing with here can just enable much more

um secure protocols to enable

uh cross chain activities. Um

The other thing that I'm personally really excited about is the idea of coprocessors, right? Where you have some crypto economic bond, but in terms of what the actual functionality of the coprocessor ends up doing, whether it's generic or hyper specialized,

that suddenly gets enabled by any L2 or even on the L1 itself.

Those are just a couple ones.

But uh in terms of um the another one that's like really interesting, I think, um, is what uh

Witness train is doing, right? With the with the proof of location and uh the fraud proof network, right? Um, you can have um

you can tap into the power of uh the Ethereum network to effectively uh deploy um it a trust minimized uh fraud proof watcher, as opposed to having each L2 itself claiming that they're uh providing fraud fraud proofing service for you as well. So I think that's gonna make the community of fraud proofing any kind of optimistic system very much more robust.

So one thing I would add to that is uh you know, a little bit of a high level response. Uh, you know, when people think of the modular uh paradigm, the modular paradigm is chains where integrated solutions for all the different things that need to be done on applications inside the chain.

But

The modular paradigm is oh, maybe there are different modules, maybe there is a data availability module, maybe there's a consensus module, and so on. And normally when people think about the modular landscape, they think of maybe there are three modules, right? Maybe there is an ordering, maybe there is a consensus, maybe there is a

um uh a settlement layer, uh uh data availability, some very few handful of modules.

Our vision is a little bit different.

You know, if you look at the cloud era.

You see, in in on cloud, there are thousands of thriving software as a service solutions, which are basically like very hyper specialized, focused services

that, if you're building a consumer application, for example, you you know,

and examples of these SaaS services include like, you know, I want to offer a database as a service. There are tens or even hundreds of databases as a service.

The reason is there are different types of databases, different types of

You know, there's a SQL database, there's a NoSQL database, and all these different uh some optimized for AI, some optimize for different purposes, and so on.

So

you have these hyper-specialized software as a service solutions. And what you do today when you're building an end user application is just concatenate a few of these software as a service solutions and then only build what components don't exist.

That becomes a consumer application.