This article summarizes the key information and valuation forecast of EigenLayer airdrop

24-04-30 10:49

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Original title: "The King Bomb Arrives, One Article Summarizes the Key Information of EigenLayer Airdrop"

Original author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

In the early morning of April 30th, Beijing time, EigenLayer, the core project of the re-staking track, officially announced the coin issuance and airdrop plan - It is planned to officially open the airdrop application of the token EIGEN on May 10th.

In fact, long before EigenLayer's official announcement, community members had discovered some clues about the airdrop. First, many community users discovered that EigenLayer has opened a foundation account Eigen Foundation on the X platform. Several official accounts including Eigen Labs and EigenLayer, as well as founder Sreeram Kannan, have followed the account, and the homepage of the account includes the domain name "eigenfoundation.org". Another community user found that the Sub Domain Finder information showed that multiple subdomains including "claims.eigenfoundation.org" have been created under the main domain name "eigenfoundation.org", which has a very obvious airdrop direction.

Perhaps because the above information fermented rapidly on social media last night, EigenLayer simply "stopped hiding" and directly released an official announcement. Next, Odaily Planet Daily will combine all existing official materials such as white papers, documents, and announcements to select all the key information about the EIGEN airdrop for you.

EIGEN Token Utility

According to the white paper released by Eigenlayer on GitHub, unlike common governance tokens, EIGEN is positioned as a general and verifiable "work token". The so-called "work token" refers to utility tokens that can be staked by participants to perform certain work (such as blockchain verification). If participants violate specific work commitments, their staked "work tokens" may be subject to slashing penalties.

In the context of EIGEN, EIGEN staking is intended to provide a functional supplement to ETH re-staking. It introduces a new mechanism to deal with subjective "errors", such as behaviors that cannot be recognized on the chain but still need to be punished. In other words, Eigenlayer will support a complementary staking model between ETH and EIGEN, where ETH staking is mainly used to solve objective consensus issues (which can be roughly understood as whether the node is doing bad things), and EIGEN staking is mainly used to solve subjective economic benefit-related issues (which can be roughly understood as whether the node is doing things reasonably).

Through the staking of EIGEN, EigenLayer ensures that it maintains a full range of verification capabilities without forking the Ethereum mainnet consensus, and is expected to unlock a range of active verification services (AVS) with strong economic security that were previously impossible, such as activating new innovations in oracles, DA, databases, AI, game virtual machines, intent and order matching, MEV engines, prediction markets, and many other aspects.

Token supply and distribution mechanism

According to The Block, the total supply of EIGEN tokens at genesis will be 1.67 billion, with the following specific distribution.

45% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to the community, which will be further divided into three directions: airdrops (15%, which will be discussed in detail below), community plans (15%), and ecosystem development (15%).

29.5% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to investors, and 25% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to early contributors. The shares of investors and early contributors will be unlocked in three years, fully locked in the first, and then gradually released at a rate of 4% per month in the next two years.

Detailed explanation of the airdrop mechanism

For ordinary users, the most concerned issue at the moment is the airdrop situation.

Eigenlayer has now opened the query page for the first phase of the first season of the airdrop quota, and users can directly query their available airdrop shares.

As mentioned above, Eigenlayer will distribute 15% of EIGEN tokens in the form of airdrops, and the first season airdrop plan officially announced this period will allocate 5% of EIGEN tokens. The snapshot time of the first season airdrop plan is March 15, 2024, and the airdrop claim period is from May 10 to September 7.

Season 1 airdrop will be divided into two phases, of which Phase 1 will allocate 90%, and the airdrop will be distributed to users who directly re-stake through EigenLayer or re-stake through the liquidity re-staking agreement; Phase 2 will allocate 10%, which will be distributed to users who interact with EigenLayer in a more complex way (such as Pendle, Equilibrium), and the second phase of airdrops is expected to start in a month.

As for the subsequent second season and potential airdrop plans for more seasons, Eigenlayer only mentioned that the second season is in progress, and users need to pay attention to official channels to learn about the specific information that will be announced in the future.

EIGEN circulation issues

It is worth emphasizing that EigenLayer has clearly mentioned in the white paper: In order to achieve full decentralization, EIGEN tokens will be non-transferable in the initial application period.

And according to official documents, this non-transferable state is expected to last for several months (in the coming months), and the transfer function will be activated after completing "the community fully discusses EIGEN's supplementary pledge mechanism", "activates AVS's payment and confiscation mechanism", and "wide distribution of tokens".

How is EIGEN valued?

As the core of the re-staking track and the underlying project, EIGEN's valuation obviously has a very broad imagination space - especially under the premise that upper-level LRT protocols such as ether.fi have billions of dollars in FDV.

Currently, Aevo has launched EIGEN in pre-market trading, and it is temporarily reported at US$10.3 as of the time of writing, which may serve as a potential reference.

At present, since the trading market on Aevo is open for only a few hours and the trading volume of pre-market trading is relatively low, this value cannot accurately represent the true performance of EIGEN after it goes online and unlocks the transfer function in the future. All the answers may not be revealed until a few months later.