On April 9th, the EigenLayer team announced that the first Available Validator Service, the platform EigenDA, has been launched on the Ethereum mainnet.
The team added that over 4.1 million ETH has been re-staked on EigenLayer, with 70% of all new Ethereum validators re-staking on the platform in the past few weeks.
Additionally, re-stakers can now delegate their entire stake to an operator of their choice running an available validator service like EigenDA.
Narrative reconstruction grows
Restaking allows users to stake the same ETH on both Ethereum and other protocols. Platforms like EigenLayer leverage Ethereum’s validators and staked tokens, allowing smaller, newer blockchains to benefit from its security and trust system.
EigenLayer also faces a trade-off between neutrality, which allows for free market behavior, and decentralization, which prevents domination by a single staking provider.
Additionally, EigenDA offers hyperscalability, cost flexibility, and ease of rollup integration. It aims to be the ultimate solution for data availability on Ethereum.
The rollup states that once the operator set and delegation is stable, they can be onboarded to the EigenDA mainnet.
“We expect to see high operator turnover in the top 200 of the active set as new operators, delegations and AVS come online in the coming weeks.”
In-protocol payments from AVS to carriers and slash mechanisms are not yet included, but are expected to be added in the second half of 2023, the announcement said.
AVS is essentially a middleware or service that runs on top of the EigenLayer protocol and provides specific functionality. AVS acts as a layer between Ethereum's execution layer and the various rollups, blockchains, and networks built on top of the L1 network.
According to DeFiLlama, EigenLayer's total lock total is now $13.3 billion, a jump of 1,100% since the beginning of this year.
Ethereum staking outlook
Ethereum’s staking ecosystem is very healthy, with approximately 27% of the total supply currently in circulation being staked.
According to Dune Analytics, this is equivalent to 32.2 million ETH, which is worth about $112 billion at current spot prices. Ethereum also has over 1 million validators, making it one of the most secure blockchains in the cryptocurrency space.
Lido remains the leading liquid staking provider, holding 29% of total staking, or $33.2 billion worth of ETH.
