The total value of assets deposited in EigenLayer increased tenfold from $1.1 billion year to date to $10.4 billion at the time of writing, or approximately $2.93 million of ethers. This positions EigenLayer as the third largest DeFi protocol, after Lido and Aave.
Eigen’s TVL is slightly lower than that of lending protocol Aave, which is at $10.6 billion.
EigenLayer offers a protocol that allows users to deposit and “restake” Ether from various liquid staking tokens, with the goal of then allocating these funds to secure third-party networks.
This increase is partly explained by the continuation of ether deposits on Eigen (mainly via liquid re-staking protocols) coupled with the increase in the price of ether. The first stage of the protocol launched on the Ethereum mainnet in June 2023. Over the next eight months, the protocol’s TVL soared to over $6 billion by February.
Currently only native restore with EigenPod is open.
Secure other protocols
The protocol’s strategy is to leverage the economic security of ETH by accepting native ETH, which can be directly reinvested by Ethereum validators, and liquid-staking ETH, or liquid staking protocols. This mechanism (called restaking) can then be used to secure other protocols, although this functionality has not yet gone live.
EigenLabs closed a $50 million Series A funding round in March 2023 led by Blockchain Capital. Last month, Andreessen Horowitz led the Series B round, investing $100 million in EigenLayer.
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