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EigenLayer has launched EigenCloud, a developer platform offering verifiability-as-a-service for onchain and offchain apps. Built on three new primitives — EigenDA, EigenVerify and EigenCompute — the platform aims to support a variety of use cases. Venture firm a16z is betting heavily on it, with an extra $70 million investment announced today.

— Macauley

Avalanche pumps in usage:

Avalanche’s C-Chain is seeing the highest usage this year, with about a weekly average of 6-7 million transactions.

Activity is likely driven by Arena, a pump.fun-like app that went live in early May. MapleStory's Henesys Chain is likely contributing to the surge as well. Though Henesys lives as its own separate Avalanche L1 (FKA subnet), users are bridging NXPC through the C-Chain to interact with DEXs or off-ramp to CEXs, adding another layer of traffic to the main network.

— Donovan Choy

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Katana is a DeFi chain built for higher sustainable yield and deep liquidity.

It concentrates liquidity into core applications and channels the chain’s revenue back to the users. Creating a better DeFi experience that benefits the active users on the chain.

Earn KAT tokens: Pre-deposit with turtle club

EigenCloud wants to be crypto’s AWS

EigenLayer today launched EigenCloud, a developer platform designed to bring crypto-economic trust to any application, whether on- or off-chain. The product debuts alongside a fresh $70m investment from a16z, bringing the venture firm’s total commitment to over $170m.

We’ve previously covered EigenDA, but today’s launch brings two additional service offerings to the fore: EigenVerify and EigenCompute.

The gist is to bring EigenLayer closer toward a full-fledged crypto’s AWS: a verifiability layer for Ethereum that combines off-chain execution with onchain guarantees. The protocol is already stocked with $12b in restaked assets, namely ETH. This TVL has, of course, fluctuated in USD terms with the ETH price, but has remained remarkably sticky in ETH terms.

EigenCloud promises a new generation of applications across AI, media, gaming and finance, with key features focused on provability: the what-when-why something happened.

For instance:

• AI agents that issue proofs for model inference or decision paths

• Oracles and games where disputes are crypto-economically resolvable

• Memecoins whose mechanics are enforced by programmable slashing

• Media feeds immune to deepfakes or manipulated news

In short, any Web2 application that needs trust, but doesn’t need to be its own L1 chain.

EigenCloud components

EigenDA: A high-throughput data availability layer offering >10 MB/s throughput. Think of it as a turbocharged alternative to Ethereum’s blobspace, ready for rollups and content-heavy workloads.

EigenVerify: A programmable dispute resolution system. Developers can specify fraud or correctness conditions, and violations are punished through slashing.

EigenCompute: Verifiable off-chain compute-as-a-service that abstracts, for instance, node management and links crypto-economic guarantees to general-purpose workflows.

Together, these primitives give developers a sort of plug-and-play access to verifiability, piggybacking on Ethereum’s validator infrastructure.

The risks

A compelling vision to be sure. But it’s also early for practical applications and risks abound.

Much of EigenLayer’s TVL ramp-up was driven by airdrop speculation, and built up before slashing was enabled in April. But capital can flee just as fast as it arrived.

Second, critics (including Vitalik Buterin) have warned about restaking contagion, potentially putting Ethereum's social consensus between a rock and a hard place. However, EigenCloud’s primitives are secured by a separate operator set distinct from Ethereum’s core validators, so slashing on EigenLayer does not affect Ethereum consensus. Its architecture prevents a single unit of stake from being slashed multiple times across services, with cryptoeconomic guarantees underwritten by the EIGEN token.

Rival Symbiotic’s risk model is a bit different still, with isolated vaults and per-network slashing parameters. Since each vault operates independently, a failure in one vault does not cascade across all restaked funds.

Third, governance has a relatively big role. With a16z funding both the infrastructure and many of the AVSs it secures, some worry about ecosystem capture.

EigenCloud enters a crowded field, aside from Symbiotic. EigenDA competes with data availability networks like Celestia and Avail, and there are similar compute systems like Gensyn and Akash. 

A select group of developers are getting access to EigenCloud today, including Securitize, which will use EigenVerify to validate pricing data for BlackRock’s $2b BUIDL fund. Broader access and staking rewards are expected to follow in waves.

The a16z $70m token purchase sounds impressive, but it has a massive $4.5 billion fund, so it brings its bet to only about 3.7%.

If EigenCloud can execute on its promise, it could finally bridge the gap between Web2 flexibility and Web3 trust. But it still needs to prove that real slashing, decentralized governance and non-DeFi use cases will actually work and scale.

— Macauley Peterson

Here’s a fun degen idea: Go leveraged long on the two strongest assets of the year — BTC & HYPE — while shorting everything else.

It turns out there’s an exact Hyperliquid vault that will do that for you.

That aptly titled "Long HYPE & BTC | Short Garbage" vault takes a 5x leveraged long on HYPE and a 40x leveraged long on BTC, while shorting 31 other tokens, from XRP and ETH to TRUMP and ATOM and ZK.

The vault description reads in broken English: “70% HYPE 30% BTC long Short portfolio may change but will always include a basket of at least 10+ high FDV high emission coins.”

The vault has posted an 80% return in the last month. The vault is Hyperliquid’s largest vault by TVL, at ~$5.4m.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is a community vault and 90%+ of Hyperliquid vaults go to zero, but who can argue with BTC (and HYPE) dominance?

— Donovan Choy

Chess clocks ticking, pull-up bars waiting, dunk tank ready — all hosted by the 0xResearch and Blockworks Research teams.

Expect real arguments, fast plays, and a crowd that knows the difference between conviction and cope.

📅 June 24-26 | Brooklyn