According to CryptoPotato, the EigenLayer team announced on April 9 that the platform's EigenDA, the first Available Validator Service (AVS), has been launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The team reported that over 4.1 million ETH had been restaked on EigenLayer, and in recent weeks, 70% of all new Ethereum validators restaked to the platform. Restakers can now delegate their entire stake to an operator that has opted to run available validator services like EigenDA.
Restaking allows users to stake the same ETH on both Ethereum and other protocols. Platforms like EigenLayer leverage Ethereum's validators and staked tokens, enabling smaller and newer blockchains to benefit from its security and trust system. EigenLayer also faces a tradeoff between neutrality, allowing free market behavior, and decentralization, thus preventing dominance by a single staking provider. Furthermore, EigenDA offers hyper scalability, cost flexibility, and ease of integration for rollups. It aims to be the ultimate solution for data availability on Ethereum. Rollups can onboard to EigenDA mainnet after the operator set and delegations stabilize.
An AVS is essentially a middleware or service that runs on top of the EigenLayer protocol to provide specific functionality. AVSs act as a layer between Ethereum's execution layer and the various rollups, blockchains, and networks built on top of the L1 network. Currently, EigenLayer's total value locked is $13.3 billion, having surged 1,100% since the beginning of the year.
The Ethereum staking ecosystem is extremely healthy, with around 27% of the total circulating supply currently staked. This equates to 32.2 million ETH, worth around $112 billion at current spot prices. Ethereum also has just over a million validators, making it one of the most secure blockchains in the crypto space. Lido remains the dominant liquid staking provider, with 29% of the total amount staked, or $33.2 billion worth of ETH.
