📄 Read the full paper at: https://spice.ai/papers/eigenlayer-restaking-insights.pdf

With $360M (~175K ETH) and growing already restaked on EigenLayer, understanding restaking crypto-economic security is a must for Ethereum developers and ecosystem participants.

The Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network, Ethereum, currently provides almost $70 Billion (~33.5M ETH) of economic security for applications and smart contract protocols built upon it. EigenLayer, introduces restaking, a new primitive that enables the reuse of ETH, Ethereum’s native token, on the consensus layer for pooled crypto-economic security.

Smart contract protocols are not the only participants that demand crypto-economic security. Blockchain infrastructure including bridges, oracle networks, and data availability layers require their own distributed validation semantics for verification to establish their crypto-economic security. However, it’s extremely difficult to bootstrap such blockchain infrastructure (EigenLayer Research, 2023), not to mention one having the same level of crypto-economic security as Ethereum.

EigenLayer is created as a solution to such a dilemma. EigenLayer enables a market of pooled crypto-economic trust, where restakers, operators, and actively validated services (AVS) all benefit. Understanding EigenLayer’s restaking economy and its players is therefore crucial for every Ethereum ecosystem participant.

To help provide a better understanding of EigenLayer, Spice AI analyzed restaking assets: the underlying asset that sustains the economy, and restakers, the security provider of the restaking economy, and shared them through the paper, Exploring the Restaking Economy: A Data-Driven Look at EigenLayer’s Restaking Primitive. Below are some of the highlights.

The security provision of EigenLayer at this nascent stage is predominantly powered by liquid restaking (Figure 1.1). There’s a tendency among restakers to concentrate rather than diversify their restaking asset distributions (Figure 1.2)

Restakers tend to speed up withdrawals when dealing with large amounts of withdrawals, which holds for both native (Figure 2.1) and liquid asset withdrawals.

EigenLayer NFTs have proved to be a true success: attracting both restakers and NFT collectors alike.

A significant proportion of mainnet restakers did not have any smart contract interactions 3 months before mainnet launch and the contracts they did interact with, they had in common (Figure 4.1).

Detailed analysis can be found in the paper: Exploring the Restaking Economy: A Data-Driven Look at EigenLayer’s Restaking Primitive.

If would like to participate in EigenLayer or simply have a deeper understanding restaking ecosystem, we hope this paper will help provide some general insights and understanding.

EigenLayer leverages Spice AI’s enterprise-grade, high-availability infrastructure and as a developer-first platform, Spice AI will continue supporting the Ethereum community including providing mission-critical beacon-chain consensus data. The complete set of EigenLayer datasets available on the Spice.ai platform can be found at https://docs.spice.ai/reference/sql-query-tables/ethereum/eigenlayer-tables.

EigenLayer Research. (2023, November 11). You could have invented eigenlayer: Explaining eigenlayer. EigenLayer Blog. https://www.blog.eigenlayer.xyz/ycie/

EigenLayer. (n.d.). Key terms. Key Terms — EigenLayer Docs. https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/overview/key-terms