EigenLayer

Hey, GM, GM, everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell here. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been building in Web3. This could be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, auto-structured projects, etc. Basically, you've got a passion for something, this is the show for you to come on and talk about it to your peers at Developer DAO and in Web3. And today, I am ecstatic to have on Nader Dabit and Gajesh Naik from Eigen Labs, who are going to be giving us an overview of the developer ecosystem in and how to get started building with EigenLayer. Welcome to the show, gang. Pleasure to have you on.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah, sure thing. I'm Gajesh. I work at Eigen Labs as a DevRel. Previously, I used to do smart contracts for EigenLayer. Before that, I worked at Solana Labs, FTX Ventures, and a couple of other DeFi protocols. One of them had like about $7 million of TVL at peak; another one I raised like $1.3 million and got acquired. Before that, I used to jump around different things like game development, web development, data science—did all this stuff—then found a home in crypto. So that's like a brief intro about me.

And before we get to Nader's introductions, you, if I'm not mistaken, just reading your about me page, you have done this at quite a young age. Yeah, that's very impressive what you've done in such an early part of your life and I guess what kind of has pushed you to do all of these things at such an early age?

Oh, I started coding when I was seven. But the main motivation for getting into coding was I was really into playing a lot of games back then like Fruit Ninja, Temple Run, every game which came in the market. But then there was an IT bootcamp happening nearby, and I went in. I was probably seven years younger than the average crowd, but I got to learn Scratch and build games like ping pong and stuff. Then I found a real interest in programming and got into proper programming languages starting with C, then C++, and just exploring different things. I also have a bit of ADHD, so I keep on exploring different things. I like to be curious and try to find a different thing.

Cool. Yeah, so I work with Gajesh at Eigen Labs on EigenLayer and EigenDA. I'm doing developer relations, developer experience, documentation—everything that kind of falls into those buckets. I've been doing DevRel for about seven years and been doing developer education for about 10 years. I've only been working at EigenLayer for a little over a month, so it's been a month and two weeks. But yeah, really excited to be here to talk about this stuff.

I would like to give my own interpretation, and I would love to hear Gajesh's because I think there's a lot to cover. A lot of times people think of EigenLayer in the context of staking or even DeFi because they haven't really dived into why it exists, why that restaking and staking primitive exists in the first place. Really, the thing that excites me as a developer is that it's almost like a developer platform for people to build out protocols a lot easier than they could in the past. I think that it's more akin to something like an AWS than it is to a DeFi protocol. The core unlock is that in the past, if you wanted to build out your own decentralized network, you had to bootstrap your own security. This was very, very challenging for a lot of different reasons. You had to deal with things like launching a token and then having people acquire that token and then use that token to run different nodes to provide security for your network. Even if you were very successful, the amount of security that you could provide was orders of magnitude less than something like Ethereum. With EigenLayer, it's essentially a protocol that allows people to take the Ethereum security and apply that to new services. So if you launch a service, instead of having to bootstrap a billion dollars in security or ten billion dollars, which is very, very challenging, you can essentially tap into the existing security of Ethereum. And then the people that are staking their ETH can then earn additional rewards by choosing to validate these new services without really doing too much work. It's very simple; they can essentially take their ETH and restake it, or they can take their liquid staking tokens which are given to them from protocols like Lido and then apply those to secure new services. So it's a big value proposition for developers and it's a big value proposition for stakers.

Interesting. And just to clarify, when you say services, what do you mean exactly? Do you mean protocols, DApps, microservices in the traditional sense?

It could be microservices, protocols, a blockchain, an oracle, a coprocessor—really anything that needs some type of verification that would have in the past needed to have some type of decentralized network. Most of the time, Proof of Stake is what people would be building.

Giving a TL;DR, I think it would be we have three elements right now: stakers, operators, and services. Stakers are the people who deposit their ETH and provide security. The second one is operators who run services or the tasks for the services. And services are like oracles and bridges and anything which requires trust. Right now, there is security which is provided by the users, there is computational power which is provided by the operators, and then the services have to just launch really good products and they don't have to worry about these two main categories. There is also like a fourth category, which is consumers, who will be using the services. And yeah, that's like a really brief version of it.

Gotcha. So it sounds quite involved. I guess is there a particular area folks should start when they want to get going with EigenLayer? Or I guess what's the Hello World version of getting started with EigenLayer?

We have 'Incredible Squaring'; it's like a very Hello World equivalent for us. We'll be launching workshops on its own, but right now there is a GitHub for it and people can just run a few commands and get going with the whole thing. It's really simple. Basically, there are operators who get a number and then they square it and submit the number, and then the aggregator checks it if everything is fine. Yeah, that's like the most basic version of how to build on EigenLayer right now.

I think for people watching this, developers would be more interested in the AVS side that Gajesh is talking about. There's also the app consumer or the protocol consumer, which would be like the DApps. That's an area that we're going to be diving more into now that we're getting closer and closer to mainnet. But yeah, the two areas that I think for developers watching this would be building an AVS. You can fork that Incredible Squaring GitHub repo that Gajesh mentioned, or you can go to the EigenLayer website (eigenlayer.xyz) and you can see the different existing services that are launched and you can then try to use one of those. A good example would be something like Verseatus. Verseatus is a new blockchain that allows developers to deploy programs in JavaScript or TypeScript. It's actually really nice because they've abstracted away a lot of the more complex stuff that you might have needed to understand when you're writing Solidity. Another example is EigenDA. It is the first service that is being launched on EigenLayer as an AVS. It's a data availability layer, but what it allows people to do is deploy a rollup and use EigenDA. Often that's a pretty complicated process, but there are now Rollup-as-a-Service platforms like Conduit, AltLayer, Caldera, and Gelato that support EigenDA. You can build out your own specialized rollup without being a blockchain protocol engineer anymore.

Interesting. I guess one step above that—I'm not particularly familiar with the acronym AVS. Perhaps you could just touch on that briefly in like a TL;DR on that?

Sure, an AVS is just any service that's built on EigenLayer. It's typically a Proof of Stake network, but it can be any type of network that requires some type of distributed validation semantics for verification. So any network that needs verification, but typically those are Proof of Stake networks. And that could be an oracle, it could be a sidechain, it could be a bridge. Bridges—we're seeing a lot of bridges, a lot of coprocessors, things like that. People want to do trading across different networks, and typically that was very challenging to do in a secure fashion. With an AVS, you're able to again inherit a lot of that security to do more high-value trades and transfers.

And a tangent question on that from Nelson: Since we could 'AVS everything,' what is the AVS idea actually that you've seen that is the least obvious and the most head exploding?

I think it's essentially just making it easier for people to build any Proof of Stake network or any network that they could have built in the past but might not have because it was quite complicated and challenging to do. So I don't know, while it probably unlocks a few new primitives, I think one good example might be AltLayer. AltLayer is a rollup-as-a-service, but they are also building out other parts of the rollup stack that are AVSs as well. So they're using EigenDA as the actual data availability layer, but they've created this product where they're doing verification with one AVS called Vital, I think it is. They're doing the actual finality with another AVS called Mach, and then they're doing the sequencing with their own sequencer network, which is also an AVS.

A rollup can be like a lot of things. You can build your own app chain. You can launch your own Farcaster or Spotify. We are actually working on something similar to that, where if you have an idea, you just need to bring it. You can launch a rollup, post the data over there, and it would be super simple. Users won't have to have wallets as such, no need to have signatures—everything is account abstracted, powered by EigenDA and OP Stack. That's actually one of the things I'm really excited about because it gives Web2 users an entry point because they don't have to worry about a wallet, they don't have to worry about gas fees. There are infinite possibilities with this.

Excellent, great answer. We have a couple more great questions from the crowd. Daniel asks: How does restaking staked ETH on EigenLayer add to the security of EigenLayer?

Well, you're running your own validator node and securing the network while also providing security to these AVSs. It's the same thesis as running a validator, but now you can do more with your staked ETH. The native restaking is called EigenPods. So basically, you assign the withdrawal to us and yeah.

In this case, would you have to run two nodes separately, one for ETH and one for EigenLayer?

No, just one—just an Ethereum validator node and you just point it to EigenLayer. Or you can not run any nodes; you could also just stake to an existing operator, and the operator's running the nodes. For computation, you have to run a separate node depending on the AVS; for the validator, you can just use whichever validator software you're using.

Excellent. Great questions gang. We are getting close to time here, but how would you recommend folks to just get going with EigenLayer? Would it be just going through that example, are there docs folks can look at, other video walkthroughs—what would you recommend?

If you go to docs.eigenlayer.xyz, we have a brand-new learning resources section there that's really, really great. It has a lot of great videos, codebases, everything you need to kind of get started. Then I would probably go to the Incredible Squaring repo, fork it, run it, dive into the code. Then I would also probably go to eigenlayer.xyz and look at the ecosystem page and look at the different AVSs. I would probably experiment with some of those. Again, one of the ones that's cool for me as a JavaScript and TypeScript developer is Verseatus just because it has like a new way for me to build programs and it's been kind of fun.