EigenLayer, Ethereum’s largest restaking protocol, is upgrading its rewards program to provide more flexibility for the protocol and restakers, according to a December 6 blog post.
This change allows third-party protocols that use EigenLayer (Active Validated Services (AVS)) to distribute rewards to validators based on performance. Additionally, validators, or “operators,” can set commission rates independently, EigenLayer said.
The upgrade is “designed to provide greater flexibility, efficiency, and customization to rewards within the EigenLayer ecosystem,” the restaking protocol said in a December 6 post on the X platform.
EigenLayer said the upgrade will be released on mainnet in January.
EigenLayer AVS. Source: EigenLayer
The biggest retake protocol
Launched in 2023, EigenLayer has secured dozens of AVS with nearly $19 billion in re-stake collateral, according to DefiLlama.
Re-staking involves taking tokens that have already been staked (posted as collateral with validators in return for rewards) and using them to secure another protocol at the same time.
About 20 AVS are already live on EigenLayer’s mainnet, and dozens more are in development.
These include EigenDA, an AVS operated by EigenLayer developer Eigen Labs, and ARPA Network, which specializes in trustless randomization.
On October 1, EigenLayer unlocked its own token, EIGEN. According to EigenLayer, this is designed to protect the protocol against a wider range of flaws than can be addressed using existing proof-of-stake tokens such as ETH.
According to CoinMarketCap, as of December 6, EIGEN is trading around $4.92, meaning its fully diluted market capitalization is nearly $8.25 billion.
source: Dipilama
rewards program
On September 17, EigenLayer launched a programmatic incentive program to attract returning users.
The program rewards reinvestors with EIGEN emissions, which account for approximately 4% of the total supply of tokens.
“Stakers will receive programmatic rewards based on the number of AVS they serve, and AVS will pay fees to stakers and operators,” Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer, told Cointelegraph in October.
“The more AVS costs, the more value is assigned to it,” Kannan said.
Since September, the ARPA Network has been distributing 14,000 native ARPA tokens to restakers each week as part of the EigenLayer rewards program.
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