Chainfeeds Introduction:
In the past two days, EigenLayer, the pioneer of the re-staking track, has announced two major actions regarding EIGEN tokens. One is that the second season (Season 2) airdrop is now open for application, and the other is that programmatic incentives will be launched, and EIGEN incentives will be issued to qualified stakers and operating nodes on a weekly basis starting from October.
Source:
https://www.odaily.news/post/5198501
Article author:
Azuma
Viewpoint:
Azuma: Regarding the unlocking time of EIGEN, the first thing that needs to be emphasized is that there has been a long-standing misunderstanding in the market that the circulation unlocking time is September 30. The reason for this misunderstanding is that the Eigen Foundation mentioned the date of September 30 in the official document on the unlocking timeline in May. From the statement of the Eigen Foundation, it can be seen that the unlocking of EIGEN's transfer function should be after the realization of "launching new functions and further decentralization", and September 30 is the time expectation set by EigenLayer for "launching new functions and further decentralization". In short, the EigenLayer official did not mention that the transfer function of EIGEN will be unlocked on September 30, but combined with the progress of the completion of the condition of "further decentralization", I personally predict that after the second quarter airdrop and incentive plan are opened, the final unlocking time of EIGEN will not be delayed too long. EigenLayer official data shows that the protocol currently supports 16 AVS (active verification services) including EigenDA, covering DA, oracle, privacy, DePin, games, ZK verification and other fields. Although major re-staking protocols from different ecosystems such as Symbiotic, Karak, Solayer, Jito, etc. are coming in full force, at present, EigenLayer is still the protocol with the largest value scale, the fastest development progress and the strongest network effect in the entire re-staking track. In terms of valuation, although EIGEN has not yet activated the transfer function, some pre-market trading markets including Aevo have launched EIGEN contract transactions. As of the time of posting, EIGEN is temporarily quoted at $2.95 on Aevo. Since the total supply of EIGEN at the time of creation was 1.67 billion, the offer of $2.95 means that the FDV corresponding to EigenLayer is approximately $4.9265 billion. When announcing the first quarter airdrop earlier this year, EigenLayer mentioned that 15% of EIGEN tokens would be distributed in the form of airdrops, and the first and second quarter airdrops announced were planned to distribute 113 million and 86 million EIGEN respectively, totaling about 200 million EIGEN, accounting for about 11.9% of the total supply of 1.67 billion genesis tokens. This means that within EigenLayer's plan, about 3.1% of EIGEN tokens will still be used for future airdrop rounds. In addition to airdrops, another way to earn EIGEN directly is the incentive program that will be launched in October. The program aims to issue EIGEN incentives to qualified stakers and operating nodes on a weekly basis. Combining the above data, we can simply calculate the potential rate of return of staked users under this incentive program. First of all, the distribution targets of the incentive plan are two major groups, namely stakers and operating nodes, but EigenLayer does not specify the proportion allocated to the two major groups. Therefore, we chose to refer to the distribution ratio of EigenLayer to stakers and operating nodes when designing the second season airdrop. As shown in the figure below, EigenLayer distributed 3.68% of the supply of EIGEN to stakers and 0.52% of EIGEN to operating nodes in the second season airdrop, with the distribution ratio of the two major groups being roughly 88:12. Calculated at this ratio, it is estimated that 58.91 million EIGEN will be distributed to stakers out of the total incentive share of 6,695 EIGEN in the first year, which is approximately $174 million at a price of $2.95. As mentioned earlier, EigenLayer's current TVL total value is temporarily reported at $10.79 billion, which means that the potential return of stakers under this incentive plan is expected to be 1.6%.
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