Quick look at 10 Eigen AVS ecosystem projects worth following.

Original Title: "The EigenLayer AVS Landscape - 10 Protocols You Should Know"

Authors: nairolf Thor

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

 

On April 9th, 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 existing trust and security infrastructure of Ethereum without having to build a similar system from scratch. In practice, EigenLayer users will re-stake their ETH. Behind the scenes, they agree to protect another system outside of Ethereum, adding some slashing conditions to their staked ETH. If they fail to protect this system, even if they correctly protect the Ethereum chain, their stake will be slashed or lost. The key point of EigenLayer is leasing Ethereum security to other projects, becoming the first marketplace for decentralized trust.

An effective market depends on the coexistence of sellers and buyers. Here, the sellers are EigenLayer users who re-stake ETH through operators, and the operators are entities that provide various services to buyers. On the other hand, buyers are Active Verification Services (AVS). Formally defined as systems that require their own distributed verification semantics. Simply put, they are projects using EigenLayer to enhance the overall security and functionality of their networks, with AVS essentially consuming decentralized trust.

Guiding security has long been a challenge for new projects, limiting innovation. EigenLayer promises to change this status quo. Over the next few months, we expect a wave of AVS releases, ushering in a new era of innovation in the crypto space we love. Let's explore some of the most anticipated AVS.

1️⃣ EigenDA

EigenDA is EigenLayer's data availability solution and the first AVS to go live. Like other alternative data availability layers such as Celestia or NearDA, leveraging EigenDA's rollups will benefit from significantly reduced transaction costs and higher throughput. Designed with scalability, security, and decentralization as its main pillars, EigenDA provides a design capable of achieving a write throughput of 10MB/s. While Ethereum currently only offers 83.33 KB/s, it is expected to increase to 1.3 MB/s through DankSharding. EigenDA has garnered attention from 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 with a single click.

2️⃣ AltLayer

AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to develop their re-staking rollups. These rollups utilize EigenLayer's re-staking mechanism to enhance decentralization, security, interoperability, and efficiency. The re-staking rollups feature three unique AVS: 1) VITAL for neutral verification, 2) MACH for rapid transaction qualification, and 3) SQUAD for neutral sorting. These functionalities can be integrated into existing rollups as needed. Xterio Games is the first to use MACH re-staking rollup, providing near-instant transaction confirmation, which is essential for projects like Xterio focused on AI Gaming. Through MACH, Xterio can achieve a final state in less than 10 seconds without compromising security.

3️⃣ Omni

Omni is a blockchain built to securely connect all rollups using re-staking. With hundreds of different rollups, Ethereum users and their capital are increasingly fragmented into isolated ecosystems, leading to suboptimal states and poor user experiences. Omni aims to unify these rollups. With Omni, developers can program across multiple Ethereum rollups in a single state. Applications built using Omni EVM can default to all Ethereum rollups, allowing developers to integrate the entire liquidity and user base of Ethereum into their applications without restrictions. Omni's use of Eigenlayer is particularly interesting, as it not only uses OMNI governance tokens to protect the Omni network but also enhances its network security by combining re-staked ETH. We expect double (or even multi-asset) staking to become more popular in the near future.

4️⃣ Lagrange

Lagrange is building a modular ZK coprocessor that provides trustless off-chain computation. When developers perform a large number of on-chain computations, such as querying the number of Pudgy Penguins held by a specific address, they incur high costs. Through the Lagrange ZK coprocessor, this data becomes easier to access and more cost-effective. In practice, queries are moved off-chain for execution, zk proofs are generated, and then verified in contracts. This ultimately enables the development of more complex, data-rich applications, such as games. Since Lagrange's design is chain-agnostic but plays a crucial role in cross-chain interoperability, EigenLayer's integration strengthens the security of these interactions.

5️⃣ Aligned Layer

Aligned Layer is the first universal verification layer built on EigenLayer for Ethereum. In practice, rollups send their proofs to Aligned Layer instead of Ethereum. Aligned Layer verifies these proofs, aggregates them, and then sends them to Ethereum. It is worth noting that what is stored on Ethereum is not the proofs but the verification results executed by Aligned Layer. This approach is cheaper, offers better interoperability, and most importantly, allows developers to use any proof system without worrying about Ethereum compatibility or costs, whether in terms of speed, proof size, development simplicity, or security considerations. While verification results are posted to Ethereum, the actual proofs are published to DA layers like Celestia or eigenDA. Regarding Aligned Layer's use of EigenLayer, they will adopt a dual staking model using re-staked ETH and future governance tokens to ensure the security of the entire verification process.

6️⃣ Hyperlane

Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer that allows permissionless connection to any blockchain. Its main competitive advantage lies in its permissionless nature. Unlike needing to lobby for your chain/rollup to be supported by cross-chain messaging protocols like Wormhole, Hyperlane allows you to use its services without permission. Specifically, this means deploying a few smart contracts for your chain enables you to connect your chain to others using Hyperlane. Hyperlane announced the development of an EigenLayer AVS back in February 2023 to enable cross-chain app developers to securely send messages from Ethereum to other chains supported by Hyperlane.

7️⃣ Witness Chain

Witness Chain claims to be the coordinating layer of the unified isolated DePIN economy. In practice, Witness Chain enables DePIN projects to transform unverified physical attributes (such as their physical location, network capacity, etc.) into verified digital proofs. These proofs can later be authenticated/questioned and used by different applications or the DePIN chain itself to build new products and services. This will ultimately allow DePINs to interconnect, establishing an end-to-end decentralized infrastructure supply chain. Witness Chain ensures the status verification process of over 20 DePINs projects' coordinating layers through EigenLayer Operators.

8️⃣ Eoracle

Eoracle is a modular and programmable oracle network. An oracle network is a way to bring off-chain data onto the chain. Whether it's NBA scores, weather data, or stock prices, blockchains cannot access this data without reliable oracles. Eoracle leverages EigenLayer to build an oracle network, or a network composed of individuals who view data, reach consensus on its accuracy, and record it on the chain. Eoracle will use EigenLayer's Operators to perform this task, rather than building its own network composed of people or nodes, understanding how this Ethereum-native solution competes with Chainlink and others.

Interesting.

9️⃣ Drosera

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

🔟 Ethos

Ethos provides a one-stop solution for the Cosmos chain, allowing them to seamlessly leverage the security of re-staking ETH. Building a new Cosmos chain incurs certain costs, including establishing a validator network. Projects must convince validators and users to hold and stake the native tokens. To overcome this barrier, Ethos has established the Guardians Chain, which is an L1 security coordination layer verified by EigenLayer's Operators. Projects looking to build validator sets for their L1 can hire these Guardians as virtual validators to benefit from Ethereum's security. You can think of this process as a diversion: Ethos gains Ethereum's security protection through EigenLayer, while providing security protection for any Cosmos L1 that wishes to avoid building their own validator set.

Conclusion

EigenLayer AVS offers endless possibilities. This article only touches on the shallow goals they can achieve, looking forward to more innovations in the future.