Original | Odaily Odaily
Author | Azuma
In the early morning of April 30th, Beijing time, EigenLayer, the core project of the re-staking track, officially announced its coin issuance and airdrop plan - it plans to officially start the airdrop application of the EIGEN token on May 10th.
In fact, long before EigenLayer’s official announcement, community members had discovered some clues about the airdrop. First, many community users discovered that EigenLayer had opened a foundation account Eigen Foundation on the X platform, and multiple official accounts including Eigen Labs and EigenLayer, as well as founder Sreeram Kannan, had followed the account, and the homepage of the account included the domain name "eigenfoundation.org". Another community user discovered that the Sub Domain Finder information showed that multiple subdomains including "claims.eigenfoundation.org" had been created under the main domain name "eigenfoundation.org", which had a very obvious airdrop direction.
Perhaps because the above information quickly fermented on social media last night, EigenLayer simply "stopped hiding" and directly released the official announcement. Next, Odaily Odaily will combine all the existing official materials such as white papers, documents, announcements, etc. to extract all the key information about the EIGEN airdrop for you.
EIGEN Token Utility
According to the white paper released by Eigenlayer on GitHub, unlike common governance tokens, EIGEN is positioned as a universal and verifiable "work token". The so-called "work token" refers to utility tokens that can be staked by participants to perform certain work (such as blockchain verification). If a participant violates a specific work commitment, the staked "work token" may be subject to slashing penalties.
In the context of EIGEN, EIGEN staking is intended to provide a functional complement to ETH re-staking, and it introduces a new mechanism to deal with subjective "errors", such as behaviors that cannot be identified on the chain but still need to be punished. In other words, Eigenlayer will support a complementary staking model between ETH and EIGEN, with ETH staking mainly used to solve objective consensus problems (which can be roughly understood as whether the node is doing bad things), and EIGEN staking mainly used to solve subjective economic benefit-related problems (which can be roughly understood as whether the node is doing things reasonably).
Through the staking of EIGEN, EigenLayer can ensure the maintenance of full-scale verification capabilities without forking the Ethereum mainnet consensus, and is expected to unlock a series of active verification services (AVS) with strong economic security that were previously impossible to achieve, such as activating new innovations in oracles, DA, databases, AI, game virtual machines, intent and order matching, MEV engines, prediction markets, and many other aspects.
Token supply and distribution mechanism
According to The Block, the total supply of EIGEN tokens at creation will be 1.67 billion, with the specific distribution as follows.
45% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to the community, which will be further divided into three directions: airdrop (15%, which will be discussed in detail below), community programs (15%), and ecosystem development (15%).
29.5% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to investors, and 25% of EIGEN tokens will be allocated to early contributors. The shares of investors and early contributors will be unlocked in three years, fully locked in the first, and then gradually released at a rate of 4% per month in the next two years.
Detailed explanation of airdrop mechanism
For ordinary users, the most concerning issue at the moment is the airdrop situation.
Eigenlayer has now opened a query page for the airdrop quota for the first phase of the first season, and users can directly check the airdrop share they can obtain.
As mentioned above, Eigenlayer will distribute 15% of EIGEN tokens in the form of airdrops, and the first quarter airdrop plan officially announced this time will distribute 5% of EIGEN tokens. The snapshot time of the first quarter airdrop plan is March 15, 2024, and the airdrop claim period is from May 10 to September 7.
The first season airdrop (Season 1) will be divided into two phases. In the first phase (Phase 1), 90% of the airdrops will be distributed to users who directly re-stake through EigenLayer or re-stake through the liquidity re-staking agreement; the second phase (Phase 2) will allocate 10% and will be distributed to users who interact with EigenLayer in a more complex way (such as Pendle, Equilibrium). The second phase of airdrops is expected to start in a month.
As for the subsequent second season and potential airdrop plans for more seasons, Eigenlayer only mentioned that the second season is underway and users need to pay attention to official channels to learn about the specific information that will be announced in the future.
EIGEN Circulation Issues
It is worth emphasizing that EigenLayer has clearly mentioned in the white paper: In order to achieve full decentralization, EIGEN tokens will be non-transferable in the initial stage of application.
According to official documents, this non-transferable status is expected to last for several months (in the coming months) , and the transfer function will be activated after "the community fully discusses EIGEN's supplementary pledge mechanism", "activates AVS's payment and confiscation mechanism", and "widely distributes tokens".
How is EIGEN valued?
As the core and underlying project of the re-staking track, EIGEN's valuation obviously has a very broad imagination space - especially under the premise that upper-level LRT protocols such as ether.fi have billions of dollars in FDV.
Currently, Aevo has launched EIGEN in pre-market trading. As of the time of writing, it is temporarily trading at $10.3, which may serve as a potential reference.
Currently, since the trading market on Aevo is open for only a few hours and the trading volume of pre-market transactions is relatively low, this value cannot accurately represent the actual performance of EIGEN after it goes online and unlocks the transfer function in the future. All the answers may not be revealed until a few months later.
