VC giant a16z crypto has bought an additional $70 million in restaking protocol EigenLayer’s EIGEN tokens, while the project today introduced EigenCloud, its novel developer platform.
Notably, a16z crypto previously led Eigen Labs’ $100 million Series B round. This latest investment will help the team’s effort to “commercialize” its new services. These, combined with EigenLayer’s third-party Autonomous Verifiable Services (AVSs) ecosystem, can “unblock thousands of app developers across crypto’s smart contract ecosystems and open the design space of crypto to any web2 developer,” the press release says.
Commenting on the investment, Ali Yahya, General Partner at a16z crypto, said that EigenLayer is “surmounting the technical bottlenecks of blockchains to enable a new category of applications built on verifiable solutions.”
Connected to that, the project has also revealed its EigenCloud. This is a developer platform that provides all application – be they on or offchain – with blockchain benefits. The team claims that the platform gives developers on any blockchain an app-building tool that utilizes blockchain tech for payments and trust. At the same time, it conducts complex verification tasks off the blockchain.
Eigen Labs has launched the alpha version of EigenCloud, enabling services to select developers today. It plans to expand availability “later this year.”
According to Sreeram Kannan, CEO of Eigen Labs, EigenCloud expands the programmability of crypto and makes virtually anything verifiable onchain. Possible projects include disintermediated digital marketplaces, onchain insurance, onchain games, automated adjudication, prediction markets, and verifiable AI.
In the immediate term, says the team, companies like Securitize will use EigenCloud to verify asset pricing data for BlackRock’s $2 billion BUIDL fund.
In the long run, it will transform verifiability into a programmable, economic primitive. This will enable developers to “prove what happened, why it happened, and that it happened, across domains where trust and correctness matter most: LLMs, AI agents, betting markets, medical records, traditional media, social media, and countless more.”
The fresh investment, which comes with a three-year lockup, was revealed by a16z general partner Ali Yahya in a post on X on April 17.
ZRO rose as much as 10% following the announcement, before retracing gains to hover around $2.39.
The move signals renewed institutional confidence in LayerZero, even as crypto markets…
EigenCloud ‘Enabling Mass-Market Crypto Apps’
While developers have been working to solve scalability, Eigen Labs argues, the lack of programmability is still an issue. Therefore, EigenCloud enables developers to build new apps that complete complex tasks in Web2 but still use blockchain for payments and trust.
The platform is built atop EigenLayer and is powered by the EIGEN token. EigenCloud’s offchain compute services are backed by EigenLayer restaking. They offer “L1-like cryptoeconomic verifiability” for general-purpose computation. Furthermore, they “extend it beyond purely objective blockchain-based disputes to virtually any offchain computation or agreement.”
At the same time, the EIGEN token enables EigenCloud’s offchain programmability and maintains verifiability. The team claims that this approach gives the EIGEN stakers a new active cash flow as they secure apps. The usage of these apps generates fees that can then be used to support staking rewards, fund product innovation, or power ecosystem incentives.
At the time of writing, EIGEN trades at $1.17. It’s down 10.6% in a day, 28% in a week, and 12% in a month. It hit its all-time high of $5.65 in December 2024, decreasing by 79.5% since.
Moreover, the alpha version of EigenCloud includes “a massive performance upgrade” for EigenDA and a preview of the EigenVerify service. The latter “lets AVSs leverage the forkability of the EIGEN token to perform slashing and impose cryptoeconomic penalties on misbehaving nodes.”
Also, the team revealed a roadmap that features new developer tooling and more dispute modes for EigenVerify. It includes the new EigenCompute primitive, which developers will be able to access over the coming months.
The platform will “enable the next generation of disruptive, mass-market crypto apps, closing the gap between what developers want to build onchain and what blockchains allow them to build,” Kannan says.
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