10 Eigen AVS Ecosystem Projects Worth Paying Attention to

Original author: nairolf Thor

Original translation: TechFlow

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

introduction

EigenLayer is a project that introduces re-staking. In short, it allows anyone to leverage the trust and security foundation that Ethereum already has, without having to build a similar system from scratch. In practice, users of EigenLayer re-stake their ETH. Behind the scenes, they agree to secure another system outside of Ethereum, which adds some slashing conditions to their staked ETH. If they fail to secure that system, their stake can be slashed or lost, even if they correctly secured the Ethereum chain. The point of EigenLayer is to securely lease Ethereum to other projects, becoming the first marketplace for decentralized trust.

An efficient market relies on the coexistence of sellers and buyers. Here, sellers are EigenLayer users who re-stake ETH through operators, and operators are entities that provide various services to buyers. Buyers, on the other hand, are Active Verification Services (AVS). The formal definition is any system that requires its own distributed verification semantics for verification. More simply, they are projects that use EigenLayer to enhance the overall security and functionality of their network, and AVS essentially consumes decentralized trust.

For too long, bootstrapping security has been a difficult problem for new projects, limiting innovation. EigenLayer promises to change that. In the coming months, we expect a wave of AVS releases to kick off a new era of innovation in the crypto space we love, so let’s explore some of the most anticipated AVS.

EigenDA

EigenDA is EigenLayer's data availability solution and it is the first AVS to go online. Just like other alternative data availability layers like Celestia or NearDA, rollups leveraging EigenDA will benefit from significantly lower transaction fees and higher throughput. With scalability, security, and decentralization as its main pillars, EigenDA provides a design capable of achieving 10 MB/s write throughput. Ethereum currently only provides 83.33 KB/s, which is expected to increase to 1.3 MB/s through DankSharding. EigenDA has attracted the attention of numerous projects including Mantle, Polymer, LayerN and Movement Labs. Additionally, RaaS projects like Caldera and AltLayer have seamlessly integrated EigenDA into their stacks, enabling developers to deploy rollups with EigenDA in one click.

AltLayer

AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to develop their restaking rollups. These rollups leverage EigenLayer’s restaking mechanism to enhance decentralization, security, interoperability, and efficiency. The restaking rollups feature three unique AVS: 1) VITAL for decentralized verification, 2) MACH for fast transaction finalization, and 3) SQUAD for decentralized ordering. These features can be integrated into existing rollups as needed. Xterio Games is the first restaking rollup to use MACH, providing near-instant transaction confirmations, an indispensable feature for a project like Xterio that focuses on AI Gaming. With MACH, Xterio is able to ensure finality in less than 10 seconds without compromising security.

Omni

Omni is a purpose-built blockchain designed to securely connect all rollups through the use of re-staking. With hundreds of different rollups, Ethereum’s users and their capital have become increasingly fragmented into siloed ecosystems, and this fragmentation has led to suboptimal states and poor user experiences. Omni aims to unify these rollups. With Omni, developers can program across multiple Ethereum rollups from a single machine. Applications built with the Omni EVM can exist on all Ethereum rollups by default, allowing developers to integrate Ethereum’s entire liquidity and user base into their applications without restrictions. The way Omni leverages Eigenlayer is particularly interesting, not only securing the Omni network with the OMNI governance token, but also combining it with re-staked ETH to enhance the security of its network. We expect dual (and even multi-asset) staking to become increasingly popular in the near future.

Lagrange

Lagrange is building a modular ZK coprocessor that provides trustless off-chain computation. When developers perform large on-chain computations, such as querying the number of Pudgy Penguins held by an address, they incur extremely high fees. With the Lagrange ZK coprocessor, this data becomes more accessible and cheaper. In practice, queries are moved off-chain to be executed, zk-proven, and verified in contracts. This ultimately enables the development of more complex, data-rich applications, such as games. While Lagrange is chain-agnostic by design, it plays an important role in cross-chain interoperability, and the integration of EigenLayer strengthens the security of these interactions.

Aligned Layer

Aligned Layer is the first general-purpose validation layer for Ethereum built on top of EigenLayer. In practice, rollups send their proofs to Aligned Layer instead of Ethereum. Aligned Layer verifies these proofs, aggregates them into a whole and then sends them to Ethereum. It is worth mentioning that it is not the proofs that are stored on Ethereum, but the results of the verification performed by Aligned Layer. This approach is cheaper, has better interoperability, and most importantly, it allows developers to use any proof system, even if it is not compatible with Ethereum. By accepting a variety of proof systems, developers can now choose the proof system that best suits their needs, whether in terms of speed, proof size, ease of development or security considerations, without having to worry about compatibility or cost issues with Ethereum. Although the verification results are published to Ethereum, the actual proofs are published to the DA layer such as Celestia or eigenDA. Regarding Aligned Layer's use of EigenLayer, they will utilize a dual staking model of re-staking ETH and future governance tokens, using re-staking to ensure the security of the entire verification process.

Hyperlane

Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer that allows permissionless connection of any blockchain. Its main competitive advantage lies in its permissionless nature. Unlike having to fight for your chain/rollup to be supported by cross-chain messaging protocols such as Wormhole, Hyperlane allows you to use its services permissionlessly. Specifically, this means that you only need to deploy a few smart contracts for your chain, and you can use Hyperlane to connect your chain to other chains using Hyperlane. Hyperlane announced the development of an EigenLayer AVS as early as February 2023 to enable cross-chain application developers to securely send messages from Ethereum to other chains supported by Hyperlane.

Witness Chain

Witness Chain calls itself the DePIN coordination layer that unifies the isolated DePIN economy. In practice, Witness Chain enables DePIN projects to transform unverified physical properties (such as their physical location, network capacity, etc.) into verified digital proofs. These proofs can later be authenticated/challenged and used by different applications or the DePIN chain itself to build new products and services. This will ultimately allow DePINs to connect with each other and establish an end-to-end decentralized and infrastructure supply chain. WitnessChain ensures the state verification process of the coordination layer of more than 20 DePINs projects through EigenLayer Operators.

Eoracle

Eoracle is a modular and programmable oracle network. An oracle network is how off-chain data is brought on-chain. Whether it’s NBA scores, weather data, or stock prices, blockchains cannot access this data without reliable oracles. Eoracle utilizes EigenLayer to build an oracle network, or a network of people who look at the data, agree on its accuracy, and record it on-chain. Rather than building this network of people or nodes themselves, Eoracle will utilize EigenLayer’s Operators to perform this task, and it will be interesting to see how this Ethereum-native solution competes with the likes of Chainlink.

Sundew

Drosera is an incident response protocol that leverages stealth security strategies to contain and mitigate vulnerabilities. In short, Drosera acts as a security market where DeFi protocols can set a "trap" or security threshold to determine whether an emergency response needs to be triggered. Once the emergency conditions are met, the operator will execute the protocol's on-chain emergency measures based on a consensus mechanism. For example, Nomad may have set up a Drosera trap that was able to detect 30% of the total value locked (TVL) being illegally transferred out within a block time, thereby preventing further loss of funds in its $190 million asset theft.

Ethos

Ethos provides a one-stop solution for Cosmos chains, allowing them to seamlessly leverage the security of re-staked ETH. Building a new Cosmos chain requires certain costs, which include setting up a validator network. Projects must convince validators and users to hold and stake the native token. To overcome this hurdle, Ethos built Guardians Chain, an L1 validated by EigenLayer’s Operators, which acts as a security coordination layer. Projects looking to build a validator set for their L1 can hire these Guardians as virtual validators, benefiting from the security of Ethereum. You can think of this process as a triage process: Ethos is protected by the security of Ethereum through EigenLayer, while Ethos provides security protection for any Cosmos L1 that wishes to avoid building a validator set on its own.

Conclusion

EigenLayer AVS offers endless possibilities. This post only scratches the surface of what they can achieve, and we look forward to more innovations in the future.