Eigen Labs drops white paper debuting EIGEN token

The team behind restaking protocol EigenLayer dropped a white paper for a native token on Monday.

The Eigen Labs team went into detail about the structure of the EIGEN token in a 43-page paper. The token will be distributed by the Eigen Foundation and the supply will sit at 1.67 billion at launch, according to a statement provided to The Block.

45% of the tokens were allocated to the foundation’s community, while stakedrops, community initiatives and ecosystem development have each been allocated 15%.

Early investors are set to receive nearly 30%, while early contributors receive 25.5%.

According to the Eigen Foundation, season one will focus on users who have staked directly with EigenLayer and those who staked in “EigenLayer via [Liquired Restaking Tokens].”

During Phase 2, another 10% will be given to “people who interacted with EigenLayer in more complex ways, where determining the appropriate EigenLayer end user was either not possible or required an opinionated decision.”

“EIGEN serves a fully complementary role to ETH with ETH staking powering objective fault slashing and EIGEN staking powering slashing for intersubjective faults. We view this intersubjective work token as taking the Ethereum ecosystem one step closer to the goal of building the Open Verifiable Digital Commons,” the team wrote.

Claims, according to the website, are set to start May 10, but the initial float won’t be tradeable until June.

EIGEN “solves fundamental challenges like universality, isolation, metering, and compensation. By using social consensus and forking, EIGEN empowers the secure execution of diverse digital tasks with crypto economic security,” the website said.

Prior to the announcement, founder Sreeram Kannan seemed to indicate that the team was at work behind the scenes after the told Unchained’s Laura Shin that the team hadn’t thought far enough head for a token, though — as Blockworks editor David Canellis pointed out — Kannan was “giggling” as he issued the denial.

In early April, EigenLayer went to mainnet, with its data availability solution, EigenDA. The project, which has received a lot of buzz, also received $100 million from a16z in February following an early 2023 raise of $50 million.

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