According to Cointelegraph, Ethereum staking protocol Eigenlayer released the white paper for its proposed new token EIGEN on April 29. The white paper states that the token will be used for applications that rely on subjective consistency, such as prediction markets, storage services, and gaming virtual machines. Several jurisdictions, including the United States and Canada, will be excluded from the upcoming airdrop.

Eigenlayer is a blockchain network that uses staked Ethereum as its native token. Users who have staked Ethereum on Ethereum can "restake" it to Eigenlayer and earn additional staking rewards by validating transactions on both networks. Developers claim that this solution is more secure than using a separate token because it allows Eigenlayer to inherit the security of Ethereum without having to build trust from scratch.

According to the new white paper, staked ether will continue to be used to reach consensus on on-chain verifiable data, such as the validity of transactions.

The whitepaper states that some data cannot be verified as true or false on-chain, but can still be easily verified by a real person. For example, "1 Bitcoin = 1 USD" is one such statement that can be easily verified as false using widely available off-chain data. Eigenlayer claims that the new EIGEN token will help form consensus around such statements, which it calls "highly consistent with subjectively attributable errors."

The whitepaper states that EIGEN is built on previous work by Augur, which created the REP token to identify subjective protocols. However, it also claims that REP was built specifically for prediction markets, while EIGEN is intended to be a "general purpose" subjective protocol token with applications beyond this use case. Additionally, the team claims that the EIGEN token can be isolated from decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in the event of a fork, can help measure the costs of social consensus, and can compensate users who lose EIGEN due to errors.

The team claims that these properties make EIGEN well suited to be a “general purpose work token” for tasks that cannot be objectively attributed. It lists a number of possible applications that the token could be used for, including prediction markets, storage services, cloud microservices, gaming virtual machines, order matching engines for exchanges, databases, artificial intelligence (AI) training, and other uses.

According to Eigenlayer’s documentation, 5% of the total EIGEN supply has been allocated to existing users who have restaked ETH through the network. These tokens were set aside after a snapshot was taken on March 15. Additional tokens will be issued to participants in “Season 2,” which begins immediately after the snapshot. The team has not yet announced when Season 2 will end.

After the whitepaper was published, crypto trader and X-user DeFi Made Easy speculated that the Eigenlayer team might be preparing to airdrop new tokens to users. As evidence of this view, they posted a link to a “claim” webpage set up by the Eigenlayer team.

Viewing the page from a US IP address and multiple VPN server addresses located in Europe resulted in a 404 error. The Eigenlayer documentation states that the United States, Canada, and several African and Asian countries will not participate in the airdrop.