EigenLayer

EigenLayer is a set of smart contracts on Ethereum that takes assets people have already staked, or could stake, and lets them back a second layer of services. Its documentation calls the arrangement a marketplace connecting three groups: restakers who deposit assets, operators who run software, and Autonomous Verifiable Services (AVSs) that need economic security without building their own validator set.

Two organizations sit behind it. Eigen Labs, Inc., a US company that gives a Redmond, Washington legal address in its terms, wrote the contracts and runs the websites and app. EigenFoundation, a Cayman Islands foundation company, handles protocol governance and the EIGEN token. In 2026 Eigen Labs has repositioned its public brand around EigenCloud and AI products such as EigenCompute and Darkbloom, and eigenlayer.xyz now sits under the same terms. The restaking contracts keep running; as of October 2026 the docs still describe them under the EigenLayer name.

The scale is still large. DefiLlama put EigenLayer's total value locked at about $6.05 billion on 24 October 2026, all on Ethereum, in its restaking category. The protocol does not publish a founders page that we could open, so this profile names the companies rather than individuals.

A restaker deposits an asset and delegates it to one operator. That operator then chooses which AVSs to serve and how much of the delegated stake to allocate to each one. If the operator breaks an AVS's rules, the AVS can slash the allocated stake. When the service runs properly, it pays rewards that flow to operators and stakers.

There are two ways in. Liquid restaking means depositing tokens such as liquid staking tokens, EIGEN or any ERC-20 that has a strategy contract. Native restaking means pointing an Ethereum validator's withdrawal credentials at an EigenPod contract, which requires running a validator yourself. One wallet can deploy only one EigenPod, and ownership of a pod cannot be transferred.

• Delegation is all or nothing: a staker delegates the whole restaked balance to a single operator at a time.
• Stake becomes slashable only once the operator allocates it to an operator set, but stakers have to keep watching those allocations, because operators can change them.
• Redistribution is opt-in at every level: the AVS creates a redistributable operator set, the operator accepts it, and the staker delegates to that operator. Native ETH and EIGEN are not yet eligible for redistribution.

The EIGEN token plays its own part. The foundation describes it as a way to punish "intersubjective" faults, meaning misbehavior that observers agree on but a contract cannot prove, by forking the token instead of Ethereum. For the people asking where EigenLayer's TVL comes from, it is mostly ETH-denominated deposits, either direct or through liquid restaking protocols. Mantle's cmETH, for example, lists EigenLayer among the protocols where it restakes mETH.

EigenLayer does not publish a protocol fee schedule for restakers. Rewards are paid by AVSs, and operators take a share before stakers receive the rest. Operators can set how rewards are split, and the documentation has separate pages on rewards splits and claiming. The terms of service say Eigen Labs may charge or pass through fees for some services, including network gas, without listing amounts for restaking.

In practice the costs a restaker can see are Ethereum gas for depositing, delegating, queuing a withdrawal and completing it, plus whatever the operator keeps. Reward rates are not fixed. They depend on which AVSs an operator serves and what those services pay, so there is no single EigenLayer yield to quote.

Your deposits sit in smart contracts that EigenLayer itself describes as mostly upgradeable. The Eigen Foundation's governance pages list four multisigs. The Protocol Council (3-of-5, two foundation members and three outside members, the first cohort including Sigma Prime) executes upgrades through a timelock with a minimum 10-day delay on safety-critical functions. An Operations multisig (3-of-6, Eigen Labs) can also propose upgrades. A Community multisig (9-of-13) is held by members of the Ethereum community. A Pauser multisig (1-of-8, Eigen Labs and Eigen Foundation) can pause contracts.

That pause power matters. The security docs say that when contracts are paused and withdrawals disabled, the system allows "arbitrary state or code changes" through upgrades, and that this is not routine practice. The 14-day withdrawal delay exists partly to give monitoring time to catch an attack before funds leave.

The contracts repository holds audit reports from Sigma Prime, Certora, Cantina and ConsenSys Diligence, from the first mainnet audits in March and May 2023 to Certora's review of the slash resolution delay in May 2026. The docs point to an Immunefi bug bounty, but the Immunefi page it links to returned "not found" when we opened it on 25 October 2026, so we cannot confirm the program is live or its payout ceiling.

Restaking adds layers of risk on top of ordinary staking. A staker who picks an operator inherits every AVS that operator allocates to, now and later.

• Slashing by third parties: AVSs, not EigenLayer, decide when stake is slashed. The docs ask stakers to confirm their own risk tolerance and to keep monitoring operator allocations.
• Redistribution: the docs warn that with redistributable slashing, compromised AVS or operator keys "can lead to theft of user funds rather than just burning", and that redistribution creates an incentive to slash.
• Upgradeable contracts: core contracts can be changed through the governance multisigs, with a 10-day timelock on the main path.
• Liquid restaking tokens: many depositors hold EigenLayer exposure through another protocol's token. That adds the other protocol's contracts and exit rules.
• Phishing and impersonation: DefiLlama records a $5.7 million social-engineering loss involving EigenLayer in October 2024, classified as an impersonation scam rather than a contract exploit.

We have written separately about the restaking risk that rarely gets mentioned.

Getting started means connecting a self-custody wallet to the EigenLayer app, choosing an asset, depositing it, and delegating to an operator. Native restakers first set up an EigenPod and prove their validator balances with checkpoint proofs.

Leaving takes two transactions and a wait. You unstake, which queues a withdrawal, and the funds then sit in escrow for the withdrawal delay of 100,800 blocks, about 14 days, as of October 2026. During that period queued funds can still be slashed. When the escrow ends, the balance appears as available to withdraw, and a second transaction sends it back to your wallet. The app shows the time remaining for each token. Undelegating from an operator also queues a withdrawal. Native restakers also have to deal with their validator's exit on Ethereum.

EIGEN launched with an initial supply of 1,673,646,668 tokens and became transferable on 30 September 2024, according to the foundation. Early contributors, investors and foundation service providers had a one-year lock from that date. After that, 4% of each allocation is released at the anniversary and another 4% every month, so those releases run through 2026 and into 2027. The foundation sets aside 15% of supply for stakedrops, 15% for community initiatives and 15% for R&D and ecosystem growth. EIGEN can itself be restaked, and it is the asset used for the intersubjective forking mechanism described above.

Eigen Labs' GitHub organization dates from October 2021. The first mainnet contracts were audited in spring 2023, and a mainnet deployment was tagged on GitHub in August 2023. Mainnet releases tagged M2 (April 2024) and rewards (August 2024) followed, and EIGEN transfers on 30 September 2024. Slashing and operator sets were audited in early 2025. Later releases added multichain support (September 2025), slashing usability changes (January 2026), Rewards v2.2 with duration vaults (March 2026) and the 7-day slash resolution delay (June 2026). For a comparison of the protocol with other large DeFi systems, see how EigenLayer compares with other DeFi protocols.