EigenLayer plans to start “slashing” restakers on April 17, resulting in the Ethereum restaking protocol’s “first feature-complete iteration,” it said in an April 2 announcement. 

Implementing slashing will mark EigenLayer’s final step toward establishing the protocol as “infrastructure for a new generation of verifiable apps and services built on the Verifiable Cloud,” it said in a post on the X platform.

In 2024, EigenLayer started distributing rewards — including emissions of its native EIGEN token — to incentivize restakers. However, slashing has so far been limited to EigenLayer’s testnets.

Once slashing is live, node operators and restakers will be able to voluntarily “opt-in,” resulting in a gradual transition for users, EigenLayer said in a blog post.

Related: EigenLayer eyes consumer adoption post EIGEN unlock, founder says

Gradual roll-out

Launched in 2023, EigenLayer secures third-party protocols — dubbed actively validated services (AVSs) — against a pool of “restaked” cryptocurrencies used as collateral. 

Restaking involves taking a token that has already been staked — posted as collateral with a validator in exchange for rewards — and using it to secure other protocols simultaneously. 

Slashing is the primary method for securing proof-of-stake protocols — including Ethereum as well as “restaking” protocols such as EigenLayer — and involves penalizing a network’s node operators for poor performance or misbehavior.

“If Operators do not meet the conditions set, the AVS may penalize them. But, if the Operator runs the service successfully, AVSs can reward the Operator’s performance and incentivize specific activity,” EigenLayer said in an April 3 blog post. 

This “allows for a free marketplace where Operators can earn rewards for their work and AVSs can launch verifiable services,” the post said. 

Growing ecosystem

Upward of 30 AVSs are already live on EigenLayer’s mainnet, and dozens more are being developed.

They include EigenDA — run by EigenLayer developer Eigen Labs — and ARPA Network, a protocol specializing in trustless randomization.

In October, EigenLayer unlocked its native token, EIGEN. It is designed as a more flexible option for securing consensus-based protocols than other proof-of-stake tokens, such as Ether, according to EigenLayer.

EigenLayer is prioritizing onboarding crypto-native apps in segments such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming before expanding beyond Web3, founder Sreeram Kannan told Cointelegraph in October. 

“We’re starting with the inside-out approach, focusing on high-throughput consumer apps like DeFi and gaming, but once we grow a little bigger and have critical mass, we’ll go outside and start targeting broader consumer markets,” Kannan said.

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