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EIGEN’s purpose, unlock, transferability

What is the main purpose of the EIGEN token?​

EIGEN is designed to empower the EigenLayer ecosystem, offering a complementary role to ETH restaking. It introduces a mechanism to handle "intersubjective" faults, or behaviors that are not identifiable onchain but warrant a penalty. With this mechanism, EIGEN provides a way for the token to be forked without forking the Ethereum mainnet consensus.

What new use cases does EIGEN unlock?​

EIGEN fundamentally offers a form of security needed for a wide range of AVSs, significantly enhancing the capacity of what can be developed on EigenLayer. Some potential use cases include transaction ordering, databases, storage services, oracles, artificial intelligence processors, and much more.

What are intersubjective faults?​

Intersubjective faults refer to instances of misbehavior that cannot be objectively identified onchain, yet are evident to all reasonable observers. Two individuals would agree that a penalty is deserved in such cases.

How does EIGEN handle intersubjective faults?​

EIGEN employs a process called "intersubjective forking", where a fork can be proposed in case of a perceived intersubjective fault. Users could then choose to support the version they deem valid, occurring entirely within EigenLayer on the Ethereum blockchain, without needing Ethereum’s social consensus.

Furthermore, the protocol provides a mechanism for applications and users to utilize the token without needing to keep track of forks.

How often does intersubjective forking occur?​

Intersubjective forking is designed to occur very rarely. It necessitates the commitment of a significant number of EIGEN tokens by a challenger. The commitment is rewarded or burned based on social consensus rules.

Where can I learn more about EIGEN’s unique design?​

The whitepaper explains EIGEN's unique design enabling intersubjective slashing. Or read a short summary here: blog.eigenlayer.xyz/eigen

Why wasn't EIGEN transferable initially?​

In launching EIGEN, we aimed to satisfy two primary goals:

  1. Security through Intersubjective Forking: The intersubjective forking mechanism that the token enables is essential to the security model of EigenDA (and other AVSs in the pipeline). It was crucial to introduce EIGEN early so that AVSs could build with the intersubjective forking primitive in mind.

  2. Responsible Rollout: The Eigen Foundation is committed to a responsible token and protocol rollout to maximize long-term adoption and sustainability. We believed that achieving certain product and decentralization milestones before allowing EIGEN to become liquid would best serve the protocol and ecosystem.

By initially launching a non-transferable EIGEN token, we were able to focus on satisfying both of these goals.

When did EIGEN become transferable?​

EIGEN became transferable as of September 30th, 2024.

We reached several critical milestones to ensure a responsible transition:

  1. Community Discussions: The intersubjective forking mechanism relies on social consensus. By giving the community time to engage with EIGEN's design, parameters, and proposed implementation, we ensured that the token's transferability would have strong social legitimacy.

  2. Rewards: Programmatic Incentives v1 were announced on September 17th, 2024 providing programmatic EIGEN rewards to stakers and operators for their active participation in supporting AVSs.  Rewards began accruing to all qualified stakers & operators on Thursday, August 15, 2024.

  3. Enhanced Decentralization: We achieved a broader distribution of EIGEN, including through the 15% reserved for stakedrop seasons, laying a more decentralized foundation for community participation in protocol governance.

With these milestones met, EIGEN's transferability marks the next phase in its journey toward a sustainable and decentralized ecosystem.

What are the investor and core contributor unlock schedules?​

All tokens allocated to investors and core contributors will remain fully locked up for 1 year AFTER the date on which the token first becomes transferrable for the community.

After this date, EIGEN allocated to investors and core contributors will unlock 4% per month. This means EIGEN held by investors and core contributors will not be fully unlocked until 3 years after the date the tokens first become transferable for the community.