The original title: "Evolution of the Trust and EigenLayer"

Original author: DoganEth

Original translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's note:

Cryptocurrency researcher DoganEth analyzes EigenLayer from the perspectives of trust and crypto-anarchism. He points out that innovative technologies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EigenLayer play a crucial role in building decentralized trust systems, while also emphasizing the challenges and trade-offs involved.

Through the exploration of the DA layer and EigenDA, DoganEth demonstrates the future possibilities of trust in the crypto economy. BlockBeats has translated the original article as follows:

"Trust is a fundamental aspect of interpersonal relationships and society, rooted in the belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or power of someone or something."

ChatGPT's answer to "What is Trust"

Since the beginning of human history, trust has always been a concept that constitutes the foundation of society and the core of human relationships. Trust is first necessary for survival, then for hunting and gathering activities, and finally for social structures. Today, trust has become a major element of modern society, primarily provided by the government, especially in the economic and legal fields.

Dall-E - The Evolution of Trust

Since the earliest days of trade, trust has always been at the core of business. People initially trusted that their trading partners were not selling counterfeit goods and that the value of the goods exchanged was equal to their own. Later, they trusted in gold and believed that its supply could not be easily increased, making it a primary currency. Today, we trust in government-issued currency. The government gives us a piece of paper (or some constantly increasing numbers on our mobile applications), and we assign value to them and use them in our daily payment systems.

The Evolution of Currency - Dall-E

Trust in the Digital Age: Blockchain and Game Theory

The undeniable fact is that for centuries, governments have been the primary authority providing trust. "Anarchists" who refuse this authority and deny the existence of government have always tried to create different concepts of trust. In the digital age, our privacy is decreasing and authority is constantly increasing, which has activated a series of activists and led to the birth of "crypto-anarchism".

The Cryptographic Anarchist Manifesto

Crypto-anarchists believe that people can now communicate through systems that rely on mathematics and computers without revealing their identities, which could fundamentally change the social structures we know. Crypto-anarchists have proposed certain ideas to ensure that society, rather than central participants, benefits from this constantly changing social structure.

Crypto-anarchists have been researching systems that do not require human trust for many years, but it was not until Bitcoin that they succeeded. A talented engineer named Satoshi, whose name, identity, location, and even gender are unknown, developed the concepts of Bitcoin and blockchain, presenting them to the digital age. Since then, our concept of trust has never been the same.

Banking and Bitcoin - Dall-E

Bitcoin has created an infrastructure that takes trust away from central authorities or organizations and gives it to mathematics and game theory. In short, the infrastructure works as follows: Alice wants to send BTC (Bitcoin's native currency) to Bob. She sends a transaction to the network that includes a BTC commission.

In this network, if a miner sees this transaction and acts "honestly", they will receive BTC transaction fees and additional BTC rewards. They will include the transaction in a block and broadcast it to other participants in the network. If everyone agrees, our miner will receive the reward and continue to work on finding new blocks.

The focus here is not on how Bitcoin operates, but on how its trust mechanism operates. Miners solve difficult mathematical problems on computers, and the first person to solve the problem finds the block. If a miner includes invalid transactions or engages in "malicious" behavior in the block, the rest of the network will see it, and dishonest miners will not be able to receive block rewards. Bitcoin's trust is based on game theory, where miners act honestly to receive this block reward.

Although Bitcoin has paved the way for decentralized trust and payment systems, it has one problem: it can only be used for payment systems and its programmability is limited.

For Ethereum, this is a different game. Participants who verify the network will receive a certain amount of Ethereum in advance, and if they act honestly, they will receive Ethereum rewards. Unlike Bitcoin, malicious behavior (note: the types of malicious behavior are very different, and I choose this as the most appropriate translation for malicious behavior in Turkish. If it causes confusion, I deeply apologize) not only leads to the inability to obtain rewards, but also leads to the destruction of Bitcoin. Ethereum is locked by the verifier.

The trust mechanisms of Bitcoin and Ethereum have given birth to a new concept of trust in the digital age: "cryptoeconomic trust".

Programmable Encryption Economy Trust: EigenLayer

Systems like Ethereum, which use PoS (Proof of Stake), essentially provide the following trust: validators stake a certain amount of assets and are rewarded for acting honestly, but are punished with a burning of locked assets if they act dishonestly.

The biggest problem with these systems is that every application that requires encrypted economic trust must build its security from scratch. This can lead to some issues:

· Due to the fact that each application has created its own economic security, the problem of "fragmentation of economic security" has emerged.

· It is impossible for every application to issue tokens, and poorly designed or useless tokens make it impossible to build a game theory for the network.

EigenLayer provides an infrastructure that allows for partial leasing of Ethereum's cryptographic economic security by re-collateralizing tokens. (I will explain why this is partial in the next section.) With this infrastructure, developers can build their applications by leasing security from Ethereum without issuing new tokens. This can be used to securely store data in any database, decentralized ordering, bridge projects, or develop new chains.

EigenLayer is what exactly?

EigenLayer is simply a series of smart contracts that exist on the Ethereum network. These smart contracts support token deposits, withdrawals, and reductions. It is important to note that everything is entirely off-chain and is carried out by participants known as operators.

Therefore, when you re-stake tokens in EigenLayer, you trust that your delegate operator will act honestly, as their misconduct will result in your Ethereum being burned. This is actually a problem with the delegation system in most dPoS (delegated proof of stake) systems, but it introduces additional risk that does not exist in the Ethereum main protocol. The same is true for LST.

Blockchain is not just about cryptographic economic security, you can't rent it with money: autonomous communities. In Ethereum and Bitcoin, what really provides security is not just cryptographic economic security, but the dominant position of off-chain communities over on-chain. Even if most validators or miners behave dishonestly, or there are problems with the chain's software, the community can fork the chain and invalidate previous transactions. EigenLayer cannot rent and take over this security provided by off-chain communities in Ethereum.

Vitalik mentioned this in his article "Don't Let Ethereum Consensus Overload". He suggests that your double staking and re-staking application should not rely on Ethereum for reduction, nor should it add additional complexity for Ethereum's simplified consensus.

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