2024-02-10 18:37:26
The last round of participation in one of the most promising projects of the year, EigenLayer, closed on Friday evening. On February 5, the reinvestment protocol lifted the maximum limit of 200,000 ETH – roughly 500 million dollars – and in the following 24 hours we saw an increase of 1 billion dollars in the protocol in its full locked valuea TVL-am.
A new narrative where you can reinvest ETH already in stake
EigenLayer was released on the Ethereum testnet in April 2023 and on its mainnet in June, EigenLabs behind the project aims to become a major decentralized platform to enable other projects to launch, leveraging the protocol’s shared security model. The project does not yet have a native token, but airdrop hunters are almost certain that EigenLayer’s own token may arrive in the first half of 2024, despite the development team denying this.
EigenLayer allows Layer 2 platforms to reinvest already staked ETH at ETH Price, ensuring decentralization, full interoperability, and cheap and fast transactions. Reinvestment was initially only provided for Lido, Rocket Pool and Coinbase, but since then many options have appeared on the protocol, including Binance-Staked ETH, Mantle’s mETH or ankrETH. By providing a reinvestment option for previously deposited Ethereum, investors receive interest, rewards, and incentives that can be significant in potential airdrop settlements.
By the way, the development team behind the project wants to permanently cancel the maximum limit of 200,000 ETH, but at the same time, they wanted to achieve an increase in organic demand with periodic unlocks.
Activity exploded following the raised cap
According to CoinDesk’s report, EigenLayer lifted the previous cap on February 5, when the protocol crossed the $3.2 billion TVL. After the release, TVL increased by $750 million in the first hour, and according to data from DeFi Llama, it exceeded $6 billion on Friday night. EigenLayer is currently the 5th largest protocol, ahead of Uniswap and Compound Finance, among others. There are only Lido, Maker, Aave and JustLend before the protocol, EigenLayer accounts for more than 9% of the total TVL.
After the removal of the cap, Ethereum staking began to flourish, despite the fact that it put such a strain on the network that Ethereum gas fees from 9 – 94 gwei on February 5th reached 34 – 377 gwei by Friday. EigenLabs will soon launch the mainnet, allowing investors to become validators to secure nodes on the network. Along with the mainnet, EigenDA, a decentralized data access service, will also be launched – the first of 12 projects announced in August to launch on EigenLayer.
Despite the launch of the main network, however, there is still no talk of a native token, as EigenLabs announced on Twitter, but the question “airdrop wen” is raised several times a day on the protocol’s Discord. There is no doubt that the best marketing tool of the current cycle is the airdrop, which is perfectly exemplified in the last 6 months by Celestia’s TIA token, or PYTH, JITO or JUP running on Solana. For sure, if the EigenLayer airdrop arrives, it will sound huge.
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