Quick Overview of 10 Notable Eigen AVS Ecosystem Projects

2024.05.11

Quick Overview of 10 Notable Eigen AVS Ecosystem Projects

EigenLayer AVS offers infinite possibilities.

2024.05.11 - 07:48:33

Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights

EigenLayer AVS offers infinite possibilities.

Authors: nairolf & Thor

Translation: TechFlow

On April 9, Eigenlayer announced the mainnet launch of eigenDA, becoming the first official Active Validation Service (AVS).

Introduction

EigenLayer is a project introducing restaking. In short, it allows anyone to leverage Ethereum’s existing trust and security foundation without having to build a similar system from scratch. In practice, EigenLayer users restake their ETH. Behind the scenes, they agree to protect another system beyond Ethereum, thereby adding slashing conditions to their staked ETH. If they fail to protect that system, their stake can be slashed or lost—even if they correctly secured the Ethereum chain. The core idea of EigenLayer is renting out Ethereum's security to other projects, creating the first marketplace for decentralized trust.

Efficient markets rely on the coexistence of buyers and sellers. Here, sellers are EigenLayer users who restake ETH via operators—entities that provide various services to buyers. On the other hand, buyers are Active Validation Services (AVS). Formally defined, an AVS is any system requiring its own distributed validation semantics for verification. More simply, they are projects using EigenLayer to enhance their network’s overall security and functionality—essentially consuming decentralized trust.

Bootstrapping security has long been a challenge for new projects, limiting innovation. EigenLayer promises to change this. In the coming months, we expect a wave of AVS launches, ushering in a new era of innovation in the crypto space we love. Let’s explore some of the most anticipated AVSs.

1️⃣ EigenDA

EigenDA is EigenLayer’s data availability solution and the first AVS to go live. Like other alternative data availability layers such as Celestia or NearDA, rollups leveraging EigenDA will benefit from significantly lower transaction fees and higher throughput. Designed around scalability, security, and decentralization, EigenDA supports a write throughput of up to 10MB/s—compared to Ethereum’s current 83.33 KB/s, projected to increase to 1.3 MB/s with Danksharding. EigenDA has already drawn attention from major projects including Mantle, Polymer, LayerN, and Movement Labs. Additionally, RaaS platforms like Caldera and AltLayer have seamlessly integrated EigenDA into their stacks, enabling developers to deploy rollups with EigenDA in one click.

2️⃣ AltLayer

AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to develop restaked rollups. These rollups leverage EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism to enhance decentralization, security, interoperability, and efficiency. Restaked rollups feature three unique AVS components: 1) VITAL for decentralized validation; 2) MACH for fast transaction finality; 3) SQUAD for decentralized sequencing. These capabilities can be integrated into existing rollups as needed. Xterio Games is the first restaked rollup using MACH, offering near-instant transaction confirmation—an essential feature for AI gaming-focused projects like Xterio. With MACH, Xterio ensures finality within under 10 seconds without compromising security.

3️⃣ Omni

Omni is a blockchain purpose-built to securely connect all rollups through restaking. With hundreds of different rollups fragmenting Ethereum’s users and capital across isolated ecosystems, this fragmentation leads to suboptimal states and poor user experiences. Omni aims to unify these rollups. With Omni, developers can program across multiple Ethereum rollups as if they were a single machine. Applications built using the Omni EVM exist by default across all Ethereum rollups, allowing developers to integrate Ethereum’s full liquidity and user base into their apps without restrictions. Omni’s use of EigenLayer is particularly interesting—it secures the Omni network not only with its OMNI governance token but also combines restaked ETH to further strengthen network security. We expect dual (and even multi-asset) staking models to grow increasingly popular in the near future.

4️⃣ Lagrange

Lagrange is building a modular ZK coprocessor that provides trustless off-chain computation. When developers perform heavy on-chain computations—such as querying how many Pudgy Penguins an address holds—they incur extremely high costs. With the Lagrange ZK coprocessor, such data becomes more accessible and cheaper to retrieve. In practice, queries are moved off-chain for execution and zk-proof generation, then verified on-chain within a contract. This ultimately enables the development of more complex, data-rich applications, such as games. Although chain-agnostic by design, Lagrange plays a crucial role in cross-chain interoperability, and integration with EigenLayer strengthens the security of these interactions.

5️⃣ Aligned Layer

Aligned Layer is the first general-purpose validation layer for Ethereum built atop EigenLayer. In practice, rollups send their proofs to Aligned Layer instead of directly to Ethereum. Aligned Layer verifies these proofs, aggregates them, and then submits the result to Ethereum. Notably, what is stored on Ethereum is not the proof itself, but the verification outcome produced by Aligned Layer. This approach is cheaper, offers better interoperability, and most importantly, allows developers to use any proving system—even those incompatible with Ethereum. By accepting various proof systems, developers can now choose the one best suited to their needs in terms of speed, proof size, ease of development, or security considerations, without worrying about Ethereum compatibility or cost. While the verification result is published on Ethereum, the actual proofs are posted to DA layers like Celestia or eigenDA. Regarding its use of EigenLayer, Aligned Layer will employ a dual-staking model combining restaked ETH and future governance tokens, using restaking to secure the entire validation process.

6️⃣ Hyperlane

Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer enabling permissionless connections between any blockchains. Its key competitive advantage lies in its permissionless nature. Unlike protocols such as Wormhole, where your chain or rollup must be approved for support, Hyperlane allows you to use its service without permission. Specifically, you only need to deploy a few smart contracts on your chain to connect it via Hyperlane to any other chain using Hyperlane. As early as February 2023, Hyperlane announced plans to develop an EigenLayer AVS, enabling cross-chain application developers to securely send messages from Ethereum to other chains supported by Hyperlane.

7️⃣ Witness Chain

Witness Chain describes itself as a coordination layer unifying fragmented DePIN economies. In practice, Witness Chain enables DePIN projects to transform unverified physical attributes—such as physical location or network capacity—into verified digital proofs. These proofs can later be authenticated, challenged, or used across different applications or DePIN chains themselves to build new products and services. This will ultimately allow DePINs to interconnect, forming an end-to-end decentralized infrastructure supply chain. Witness Chain leverages EigenLayer Operators to secure the state validation process across more than 20 DePIN projects.

8️⃣ Eoracle

Eoracle is a modular and programmable oracle network. Oracle networks are how off-chain data is brought on-chain. Whether NBA scores, weather data, or stock prices, blockchains cannot access such information without reliable oracles. Eoracle uses EigenLayer to build an oracle network—a group of participants who observe data, reach consensus on its accuracy, and record it on-chain. Instead of building its own network of people or nodes, Eoracle leverages EigenLayer Operators to perform this task. It will be interesting to see how this Ethereum-native solution competes with established players like Chainlink.

9️⃣ Drosera

Drosera is an incident response protocol utilizing covert security strategies to contain and mitigate vulnerabilities. In short, Drosera acts as a security marketplace where DeFi protocols can set a “trap” or security threshold to determine when emergency measures should be triggered. Once emergency conditions are met, operators execute on-chain emergency actions based on a consensus mechanism. For example, Nomad could have set up a Drosera trap capable of detecting the unauthorized withdrawal of 30% of its total value locked (TVL) within a single block, potentially preventing further fund loss during its $190 million hack incident.

🔟 Ethos

Ethos provides a turnkey solution for Cosmos chains to seamlessly leverage the security of restaked ETH. Building a new Cosmos chain incurs costs, including establishing a validator set. Projects must convince validators and users to hold and stake native tokens. To overcome this barrier, Ethos has built the Guardians Chain—a Layer 1 validated by EigenLayer Operators that serves as a security coordination layer. Projects looking to build a validator set for their L1 can hire these Guardians as virtual validators, thus benefiting from Ethereum-level security. You can think of this as a分流 process: Ethos receives security via EigenLayer from Ethereum, and in turn provides that security to any Cosmos L1 wishing to avoid building its own validator set.