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10 Eigen AVS Ecosystem Projects Worth Paying Attention to

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1. EigenLayer is a project that allows users to protect other systems and enhance their security by re-staking ETH, aiming to create a decentralized trust market. 2. EigenDA is the first AVS launched by EigenLayer. It is a data availability solution that can significantly reduce transaction fees and increase throughput. 3. AVS (Active Validation Services) are projects that use EigenLayer to enhance the overall security and functionality of their networks. They are essentially consuming decentralized trust. 4. EigenLayer works with multiple projects such as AltLayer, Omni, Lagrange, Aligned Layer, Hyperlane, Witness Chain, Eoracle, Drosera, and Ethos, which use EigenLayer to improve decentralization, security, and efficiency. 5. EigenLayer AVS offers unlimited possibilities and is expected to usher in a wave of AVS releases in the coming months, ushering in a new era of innovation in the crypto space.

Original title: The EigenLayer AVS Landscape - 10 Protocols You Should Know
Original author: nairolf, Thor

Original translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

On April 9, Eigenlayer announced the launch of eigenDA on the mainnet, becoming the first official active verification service (AVS).

Introduction

EigenLayer is a project that introduces re-staking. In short, it allows anyone to take advantage of Ethereum's existing trust and security foundation without having to build a similar system from scratch. In practice, EigenLayer users re-stake their ETH. Behind the scenes, they agree to protect another system outside of Ethereum, thereby adding some slashing conditions to their staked ETH. If they fail to protect the system, their stake will be slashed or lost even if they correctly protect the Ethereum chain. The point of EigenLayer is to lease Ethereum security to other projects, becoming the first market for decentralized trust.

An effective market relies on the coexistence of sellers and buyers. Here, sellers are EigenLayer users who re-stake ETH through operators, and operators are entities that provide various services to buyers. Buyers, on the other hand, are Active Validation Services (AVS). The formal definition is any system that requires its own distributed verification semantics for verification. More simply, they are projects that use EigenLayer to enhance the overall security and functionality of their network. AVS essentially consume decentralized trust.

Booting security has long been a difficult problem for new projects, limiting innovation. EigenLayer promises to change this. In the coming months, we expect a wave of AVS releases, ushering in a new era of innovation in the crypto space we love. Let's explore some of the most anticipated AVS.

1. EigenDA

EigenDA is EigenLayer's data availability solution, and it is the first AVS to go live. Just like other alternative data availability layers such as Celestia or NearDA, rollups leveraging EigenDA will benefit from significantly reduced transaction fees and higher throughput. With scalability, security, and decentralization as its main pillars, EigenDA provides a design that can achieve 10MB/s write throughput. Ethereum currently only provides 83.33 KB/s, which is expected to increase to 1.3 MB/s through DankSharding. EigenDA has attracted the attention of many projects including Mantle, Polymer, LayerN, and Movement Labs. In addition, RaaS projects such as Caldera and AltLayer have seamlessly integrated EigenDA into their stacks, enabling developers to deploy rollups with EigenDA in one click.

2. AltLayer

AltLayer has partnered with EigenLayer to develop their re-staking rollups. These rollups leverage EigenLayer’s re-staking mechanism to enhance decentralization, security, interoperability, and efficiency. The re-staking rollups feature three unique AVS: 1) VITAL for decentralized verification; 2) MACH for fast transaction finalization; 3) SQUAD for decentralized sorting. These features can be integrated into existing rollups as needed. Xterio Games is the first re-staking rollup to use MACH, providing near-instant transaction confirmations, an indispensable feature for projects like Xterio that focus on AI Gaming. With MACH, Xterio is able to ensure finality in less than 10 seconds without compromising security.

3. Omni

Omni is a purpose-built blockchain designed to securely connect all rollups through the use of re-staking. With hundreds of different rollups, Ethereum users and their capital are increasingly scattered across isolated ecosystems, and this fragmentation has led to suboptimal states and poor user experiences. Omni aims to unify these rollups. With Omni, developers can program across multiple Ethereum rollups in a single machine. Applications built with the Omni EVM can exist on all Ethereum rollups by default, allowing developers to integrate Ethereum's entire liquidity and user base into their applications without restrictions. The way Omni leverages Eigenlayer is particularly interesting, not only does it secure the Omni network with the OMNI governance token, but it also combines re-staking ETH to enhance the security of its network. We expect dual (and even multi-asset) staking to become increasingly popular in the near future.

4.Lagrange

Lagrange is building a modular ZK coprocessor that provides trustless off-chain computing. When developers perform a lot of on-chain computations, such as querying the number of Pudgy Penguins held by an address, they incur extremely high fees. With the Lagrange ZK coprocessor, this data becomes more accessible and less expensive. In practice, queries are moved off-chain for execution, zk proofs, and verification in contracts. This ultimately makes it possible to develop more complex, data-rich applications, such as games. While Lagrange is chain-agnostic by design, it plays an important role in cross-chain interoperability, and the integration of EigenLayer strengthens the security of these interactions.

5.Aligned Layer

Aligned Layer is the first general-purpose verification layer for Ethereum built on EigenLayer. In practice, rollups send their proofs to Aligned Layer instead of Ethereum. Aligned Layer verifies these proofs, aggregates them into a whole and then sends them to Ethereum. It is worth mentioning that it is not the proofs that are stored on Ethereum, but the verification results performed by Aligned Layer. This approach is cheaper, has better interoperability, and most importantly, it allows developers to use any proof system, even if it is not compatible with Ethereum. By accepting a variety of proof systems, developers can now choose the proof system that best suits their needs, whether in terms of speed, proof size, ease of development or security considerations, without having to worry about compatibility or cost issues with Ethereum. Although the verification results are published to Ethereum, the actual proofs are published to DA layers such as Celestia or eigenDA. Regarding Aligned Layer's use of EigenLayer, they will utilize a dual staking model of re-staking ETH and future governance tokens, using re-staking to ensure the security of the entire verification process.

6.Hyperlane

Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer that allows any blockchain to be connected without permission. Its main competitive advantage lies in its permissionless nature. Unlike the need to fight for your chain/rollup to be supported by cross-chain message protocols such as Wormhole, Hyperlane allows you to use its services without permission. Specifically, this means that you only need to deploy a few smart contracts for your chain, and you can use Hyperlane to connect your chain to other chains using Hyperlane. As early as February 2023, Hyperlane announced the development of an EigenLayer AVS to enable cross-chain application developers to securely send messages from Ethereum to other chains supported by Hyperlane.

7.Witness Chain

Witness Chain calls itself the DePIN coordination layer that unifies the isolated DePIN economy. In practice, Witness Chain enables DePIN projects to transform unverified physical properties (such as their physical location, network capacity, etc.) into verified digital proofs. These proofs can later be authenticated/questioned and used by different applications or the DePIN chain itself to build new products and services. This will eventually allow DePINs to connect to each other and establish an end-to-end decentralized and infrastructure supply chain. WitnessChain ensures the state verification process of more than 20 DePINs project coordination layers through EigenLayer Operators.

8. Eoracle

Eoracle is a modular and programmable oracle network. The oracle network is the way to bring off-chain data to the chain. Whether it is NBA scores, weather data or stock prices, blockchains cannot access this data without reliable oracles. Eoracle uses EigenLayer to build an oracle network, or a network of people who view data, agree on its accuracy, and record it on the chain. Eoracle will use EigenLayer's Operators to perform this task instead of building this network of people or nodes yourself. It will be interesting to see how this Ethereum native solution competes with Chainlink and others.

9. Drosera

Drosera is an incident response protocol that uses covert security strategies to contain and mitigate vulnerabilities. In short, Drosera acts as a security market where DeFi protocols can set a "trap" or security threshold to determine whether an emergency response needs to be triggered. Once the emergency conditions are met, the operator will execute the protocol's on-chain emergency measures based on the consensus mechanism. For example, Nomad may have set up a Drosera trap that was able to detect 30% of the total value locked (TVL) being illegally transferred out within a block time, thereby preventing further loss of funds in its $190 million asset theft.

10. Ethos

Ethos provides a one-stop solution for Cosmos chains, allowing them to seamlessly leverage the security of re-staked ETH. Building a new Cosmos chain requires certain costs, including setting up a validator network. Projects must convince validators and users to hold and stake the native token. To overcome this obstacle, Ethos has established Guardians Chain, which is an L1 verified by EigenLayer's Operators, acting as a security coordination layer. Projects that wish to build a validator set for their L1 can employ these Guardians as virtual validators, thereby benefiting from the security of Ethereum. You can think of this process as a diversion process: Ethos gets the security protection of Ethereum through EigenLayer, and Ethos provides security protection for any Cosmos L1 that wishes to avoid setting up its own validator set.

Conclusion

EigenLayer AVS offers endless possibilities. This article only touches on the shallow goals they can achieve, and look forward to more innovations in the future.