What real-world use cases will EigenLayer's first AVSs provide?

The restaking ecosystem has finally reached two important milestones: the launch of EigenLayer (and EigenDA) on the mainnet, and the first AVSs to go live on the mainnet: AltLayer, Brevis, eoracle, Lagrange, Witness Chain, and Xterio. **

AVS is the ultimate embodiment of whether the EigenLayer protocol can really be practical and secure. The previous restaking protocols (Renzo/Puffer, etc.) or liquidity re-staking tokens are just the beginning of this ecosystem and one of the means to attract liquidity. Previously, it was more about incentivizing supply to allow more ETH to enter the restaking ecosystem and mobilize more nodes, but AVS has the potential to unleash demand and provide more value to Crypto and the decentralized network.

The first batch of AVSs to be launched are distributed across various tracks, including Rollup as a Service, oracles, ZK protocol processing, DePIN, and games. Most notably, the ZK coprocessor, which is a relatively new concept and has no mature product, was one of the first to support both Brevis and Lagrange.

In addition, the launch of EigenLayer’s mainnet does not mean that the protocol has entered a mature stage, and there are still many modules and solutions that are not yet fully understood, such as the slashing mechanism of nodes in the future, how to ensure the security of AVS from the economic level, and even the design of tokenomics, all of which need to wait for the team’s subsequent disclosure.

What is AVS?

AVS stands for Actively Validated Services and is a concept set forth in the EigenLayer protocol. To put it simply, AVS can be compared to “middleware”, that is, it can provide services for terminal products, such as data and verification capabilities, such as the often mentioned “oracle” is not a terminal product, but it can provide data services for DeFi, games, and wallets, which is one of AVS.

The downstream of AVS is likely to be an end product that can be directly targeted at the general user. The upstream of AVS is these nodes that participate in restaking, and they collect ETH in protocols such as Puffer / Renzo, and then get the nodes to support certain specific AVS.

Compared to most protocols, EigenLayer’s business model is relatively straightforward, with end users paying directly or indirectly for the products they use, and then because these products require services provided by AVS, these fees are allocated to AVS, node operators, the EigenLayer protocol, and users who provide Restaking ETH. The exact distribution also varies, and it is likely that the protocol’s own tokens will be rewarded to users in the early stages by taking advantage of Crypto’s “tokenomics”.

Therefore, it is necessary to develop more types of AVS in the future, and let the terminal products trust the reliability of AVS services, so that the entire ecosystem can complete the closed loop.

AltLayer: Rollup as a Service

AltLayer is a Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) provider that can tailor the deployment of these Layer 2 networks to your needs. For a rollup network, the choice of DA is crucial, so in addition to Ethereum, AltLayer also supports EigenDA, which was developed by EigenLayer.

In addition, AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to launch the Restaked Rollup framework and provides three modular AVS, namely:

• VITAL (AVS for decentralized verification of rollup’s state): An AVS that decentralizes the verification of rollup’s state
• MACH (AVS for fast finality): AVS for fast finality
• SQUAD (AVS for decentralized sequencing): AVS with decentralized sequencer

In fact, it is trying to solve the three problems of slow finality on the blockchain, the centralization of the settlement layer and the sequencer. These are also a few necessary modules for Rollup. This time, the MACH module is available, providing services for Xterio and Optimism.

Read more:

Brevis: ZK Coprocessor

The concept of “ZK co-processing” has been around for more than a year, but because the specific application is still relatively small and obscure, many people still have no idea. To put it simply, the zero-knowledge proof technology can be used to allow Ethereum’s smart contracts to obtain more verifiable data and enrich the application scenarios.

Brevis offers a solution that enables the power of the ZK coprocessor through AVS. The team is partly from Celer Network, a cross-chain bridge protocol, and Mo Dong is a co-founder of both projects. This time, he also gave a talk on “A Smart ZK Coprocessor” at the Hong Kong Web3 Scholars Conference.

Brevis proposed the coChain solution to further reduce the cost of “ZK coprocessors” implemented entirely based on smart contracts and zero-knowledge proof technology, that is, to provide a more cost-effective solution and provide capabilities that would otherwise not be possible. After all, EVMs still have a lot of limitations and constraints.

Brevis coChain is a PoS blockchain that can be secured with ETH staking, relying on the EigenLayer protocol. It is designed to be more like a combination of the “optimistic” mechanism and the “ZK” mechanism, or it can be called proof of fraud and proof of validity. If any evil is found, it can be challenged by generating zero-knowledge proofs and punishing the perpetrators. There will also be some design and considerations for game theory and tokenomics.

Read more:

**

Eoracle: Modular and Programmable Oracle Network

The oracle protocol eoracle gets its name from (e)thereum + oracle. They claim to be the first “native” oracle on Ethereum, probably because the security of the oracle is guaranteed by staked ETH, whereas oracles like Chainlink are secured by Chainlink’s network of nodes and its token, LINK, with different security assumptions.

The requirements and business models of oracles are much clearer than those of other AVSs, and many DeFi and RWA require off-chain data, while oracle networks verify data through participating nodes.

eoracle has made it clear that it will be a dual-token model, and several other AVSs may also be in this model, that is, the security of the network is guaranteed by Restaked ETH, and the native token of AVS will also be issued to incentivize nodes. As for the more purpose and design of the native token, it has not been disclosed for the time being, but they believe that the native token can promote participation in the network (i.e., incentivize users?), ensure fair value distribution (i.e., revenue is distributed according to the token?), and promote the decentralization of the eoracle protocol (i.e., as a weight or governance?).

Read more:

Lagrange: Parallel ZK Coprocessor

Lagrange is also a ZK coprocessor, but they also emphasize the concept of “Parallel”. Other than that, it’s somewhat similar to what Brevis provides.

According to the Lagrange team, the ZK coprocessor they designed natively supports parallelization and horizontal scaling, making it easy to prove the results of large-scale distributed computing storing or transacting data on-chain, and proving that workloads can be distributed across thousands of worker nodes at the same time, and that security is also guaranteed by ETH on EigenLayer.

Last month, Renzo, Swell, and Puffer also announced a partnership with Lagrange, which will each delegate $500 million in Restaked ETH to Lagrange. Lagrange has also designed some features for these platforms that take advantage of the characteristics of their protocols, such as the ability to call Lagrange to obtain historical data on the chain, and then calculate points for users based on this data.

The name Lagrange is derived from the mathematician, mechanic, and astronomer “Lagrange”.

Read more:

Witness Chain: DePIN Network

Witness Chain is a network designed for decentralized IoT devices, which includes many components, such as DCL (DePIN Coordination Layer), which actually provides some basic services required by the DePIN ecosystem, such as the security of the chain itself, the bandwidth of nodes, and the physical location. They call these basic services Watchtowers, which are used to measure this data, which can then be used to generate valid proofs and be used in the DCL layer. It’s a lot like the literal meaning of Witness in Witness Chain: “Witness”.

Read more:

Xterio: L2 focused on the gaming ecosystem

Xterio is slightly different from the above AVS in that it is actually a layer 2 blockchain based on EigenDA and OP Stack issued using AltLayer’s RaaS. Xterio Chain will focus on scenarios related to AI and Web3 gaming. According to AltLayer, Xterio L2 uses the aforementioned MACH (AVS for fast finality). AltLayer also provides MACH services to Optimism’s mainnet.

Read more:

Prospects and challenges

There will definitely be more types of AVS on the EigenLayer ecosystem. However, the systemic risk posed by EigenLayer to the Ethereum ecosystem is also a concern for many people, because EigenLayer skips the “smart contract” and directly takes over the node ecology of Ethereum, which is different from all other previous Ethereum-based protocols. But that’s the beauty of permissionless systems, and even without EigenLayer, there will be others who will try it.

In addition, as the largest liquid staking protocol in the Ethereum ecosystem, Lido not only stakes the most ETH, but also has many node operators, perhaps these direct conflicts of interest between EigenLayer and Lido will also make Lido rethink their business model and sustainability, and EigenLayer itself also needs a lot of time to gradually fill in the missing modules.