The Ethereum restaking protocol is expanding its development footprint with EigenCloud, designed to provide trust and verifiability to applications both on-chain and off-chain.
EigenLayer has unveiled its new developer platform, EigenCloud, alongside a $70 million investment in EIGEN tokens from venture capital giant A16z.
EigenCloud is touted as a developer platform that “extends the main benefits of blockchain – trust and verifiability – to any application, on or offchain.” The platform utilizes EigenLayer’s Autonomous Verifiable Services, as well as data availability and new developer primitives known as EigenVerify and EigenCompute.
Its goal is to empower Web2 applications with the trustless nature of blockchain dApps, by converting verifiability into “a programmable cloud service, enabling developers to prove what happened, why it happened, and that it happened.” EigenCloud is targeting some of the largest industries in the world, which all may stand to benefit from trustless information sourcing, such as large language models (LLMs), medical records, and media.
EigenCloud will ship its alpha version this week, alongside a gated version of EigenVerify. EigenCompute is part of the team’s future roadmap.
“EigenCloud expands the programmability of crypto and makes virtually anything verifiable onchain. It opens up the opportunity for developers to build highly ambitious products like disintermediated digital marketplaces, onchain insurance, fully onchain games, automated adjudication, powerful prediction markets, and verifiable AI,” said Sreeram Kannan, the CEO of Eigen Labs.
EIGEN Underperformance
A16z, a tech-focused investment firm with $42 billion in assets under management, has doubled down on its EigenLayer position by purchasing $70 million worth of EIGEN from the Eigen Foundation. A16z also led EigenLayer’s $100 million series B in February 2024.
Despite the flurry of announcements and vote of confidence from A16z, the EIGEN token continues to perform poorly and dropped another 8.3% today.
EIGEN, which launched at a $740 million market capitalization and $7 billion fully diluted valuation, is down 51% from its launch price and currently changes hands at a $361 million market capitalization.
Notwithstanding the price action, the protocol remains one of the largest in DeFi, with $11.3 billion in total value locked (TVL), only trailing Aave and Lido.
