A fact can be roughly divided into three categories:
objective fact
Subjective
The in-between "intersubjective" facts.
for example:
1. Objective facts, for example, 1+1=2;
2. Subjective facts, for example, some people think @0x_todd is handsome;
3. The fact “between subjects” is a bit abstract and comes from “social consensus”, for example: ChatGPT is one of the leaders in AI today.
The facts “between subjects” are not as set in stone as objective facts, nor as easy to come by as subjective facts.
It is a consensus among subjects - in human terms - it is the consensus of the masses, although it may not be the truth.
If we go to Crypto, here are a few more examples:
1. Objective facts. For example, if the code executed by EVM executes a certain function, it will definitely output a certain result.
2. Subjective facts, for example, a tweet that I think @eigenlayer gave too little to early holders;
3. Facts “between subjects” also come from “social consensus”. For example, Bitcoin is the leader of crypto; or a node has done something evil because it concealed some data.
Now, everyone knows what re-staking does:
Use ETH as a deposit and complete some verification work;
1. If verification is successful, you will earn commission;
2. If you screw up, your deposit will be deducted.
But how do you judge whether you have failed or succeeded? Who will deduct the deposit? This is a difficult problem.
Verifying “objective facts” is fine, as there are very clear criteria for judgment. For example, whether a smart contract is successfully executed is easy to handle.
To verify objective facts, it is fine to use $ETH as a deposit.
But verifying the "facts between entities" is a problem, and the definition criteria are not so clear. Do you still dare to use $ETH as a deposit at this time? You definitely don't dare.
Therefore, Eigenlayer believes that whenever it comes to the verification of facts between entities, ETH will no longer be used for re-staking, but $Eigen tokens will be used.
This still doesn’t solve our previous problem. How do you know if you screwed up or succeeded?
1. Relying on majority voting? This will also lead to "tyranny of the majority", for example, large households can join forces to eliminate small households.
2. Relying on the committee to decide? Then why do we come to crypto?
Therefore, Eigen token staking is going to use the third approach:
3. Rely on forks. If there is a huge disagreement about a "fact between subjects", there is a last resort, which is forking.
If you (and others on your side) think that everyone else is wrong, even if you don’t currently hold a majority, you can simply fork the token and confiscate everyone else’s.
Note, this is the ultimate killer.
What exactly is this huge disagreement about an "inter-subject fact"?
For example, that year, Trump failed to be re-elected because of a small number of votes, and Biden was elected as the 46th President of the United States. However, in a brief window, Trump claimed that Biden "stole" his votes and that he was the truly legitimate 46th President of the United States.
Before the dust settles on this matter, there must be many people who firmly believe that Trump is the real 46th president and that they have no subjective intention to do evil, and supporters of both sides cannot convince each other.
Eigenlayer believes that the best solution to this problem is to fork the tokens and let time test everything, because eventually one side will gradually lose its legitimacy and approach zero.
so:
1. In the eyes of Trump supporters (i.e. Trump’s version of EIGEN), all deposits of Biden supporters must be confiscated;
2. From the perspective of Biden supporters (that is, the Biden version of EIGEN), all deposits of Trump supporters should be confiscated.
We all know the final result. In the public eye, Trump is not the 46th president. Trump’s version of EIGEN eventually returned to zero, so it doesn’t matter if the tokens of Biden supporters are confiscated, because they are all 0 anyway.
On the contrary, Biden is the 46th president in the public eye, the Biden version of EIGEN becomes the genuine EIGEN, and the Trump supporters’ tokens were previously confiscated, and they paid the price.
This is the problem that intersubjective forking aims to solve.
Therefore, these must be done with EIGEN coins, not ETH. ETH fork is too difficult, and it is not conducive to ETH security. Of course, there is definitely a selfish desire to lock up their own tokens as much as possible.
Another small detail is that EIGEN is a dual-token model.
One is a standard ERC-20 token, which will not fork and can be used in exchanges or DeFi.
One is a token that is actually used to judge facts. If there is a huge disagreement, it can theoretically be forked infinitely.
The two tokens are isolated from each other, but there is a certain mapping relationship between them. If you are interested, you can read the white paper. I will not go into details here.
To summarize, Eigenlayer abstracted a new type of fact (intersubjective), which cannot be solved by the previous solution (ETH Restaking), so a new solution (Staking and Slashing based on EIGEN tokens) was proposed, that is, issuing a new work token $EIGEN.