EigenLayr: Permissionless Feature Addition to Ethereum with Sreeram Kannan | a16z crypto research

EigenLayr is a set of smart-contracts on Ethereum that allows consensus layer stakers to grant smart-contracts the ability to impose additional slashing conditions on their staked ETH allowing the extension of cryptoeconomic security to new services. By opting-in to EigenLayr, stakers can provide validation services for new systems like data availability services, fair-ordering services, bridges, and sidechains. In this talk, Sreeram Kannan (University of Washington, Seattle) introduces the technology.
Instead of fragmenting security across different middleware, EigenLayr aggregates security across all of the middleware in the ETH ecosystem, significantly increasing the security of dapps that rely on these services. Finally, EigenLayr enables a new era of permissionless innovation, where innovators don't need to build their own trust networks to implement new distributed validation services. Instead, they can rely on the security and decentralization provided by ETH re-stakers in EigenLayr.
About the speaker
Sreeram is an Assistant Professor at University of Washington, Seattle, where he runs the information theory lab focussing on information theory and its applications in communication networks, machine learning and blockchain systems. He was a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley and a visiting postdoc at Stanford University between 2012-2014 before which he received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. More: infotheory.ece...
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