How to interact with EigenLayer now that it has officially launched on the mainnet?
How to use EigenLayer on mainnet?
EigenLayer, the Ethereum re-staking protocol, announced that the first phase of their application has been launched on the main network, allowing users to re-stake through two methods: liquid restaking and native restaking.
In the last quarter, EigenLayer completed a $50 million Series A financing round, led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Bixin Ventures, Hack VC, Electric Capital, and IOSG Ventures.
EigenLayer had previously completed a $14.5 million seed round, led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures.
Due to its innovative re-staking mechanism, EigenLayer has attracted significant attention during the current Ethereum trust layer expansion trend, and is even considered by many practitioners to be the most important project in the current Ethereum ecosystem (perhaps without “one of” for many people).
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As previously mentioned, users can experience and interact with EigenLayer through two re-staking methods: liquid restaking and native restaking. The difference between the two is that the latter is suitable for staking users who run their own validation nodes.
In the following sections, we will describe the operation details of these two re-staking methods, especially the liquid restaking method, which is more suitable for ordinary users.
Liquid Restaking
First is liquid restaking. In the current stage, EigenLayer supports three types of liquidity staking derivative tokens: Lido stETH (stETH), Rocket Pool ETH (rETH), and Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH).
For stability reasons, EigenLayer has temporarily imposed limits on the protocol’s TVL and single deposit amount. In terms of TVL, the limit for the three assets stETH, rETH, and cbETH is 3,200 tokens each (a total of about 9,600 ETH), and in terms of single deposit amount, users are required to deposit only 32 tokens at a time.
Due to EigenLayer’s high popularity, although these limits are already high, the TVL cap for the three assets was quickly reached shortly after the main network went live, and it is currently not possible to deposit more assets.
However, EigenLayer has also mentioned that it will gradually relax the TVL and single deposit amount restrictions in the coming weeks to months. For users who are interested in interacting with this leading protocol, it is still necessary to understand the operating methods in advance so as to quickly seize the “position” when the next limit is lifted.
Before proceeding with the operation, users need to prepare a certain amount of stETH, rETH, or cbETH.
Using the most commonly used stETH as an example, after clicking the stETH column on the Dapp official website, you can jump to the corresponding re-staking page. Next, the user needs to enter the amount of stETH they want to re-stake, click “Next”, complete the authorization (here you will be prompted to “customize the upper limit of expenses”, select the maximum), and confirm the two transactions. After that, seeing “Deposit Successful” means that the re-staking is successful.
Odaily Star Daily Note: Because the main network can no longer make deposits, this is a screenshot of the test network.
After returning to the homepage, we can directly track the changes in our stETH rewards after re-staking.
Odaily Star Daily Note: Because the main network can no longer make deposits, this is a screenshot of the test network.
After completing the re-staking, we can also withdraw our assets through unstaking. The specific method is to select “UnStake” on the re-staking page of a specific token. There is one thing to note about unstaking. Extracting funds from EigenLayer requires a 7-day security period, so you must wait at least 7 days to extract assets.
Native Re-staking
Unlike liquidity re-staking, native re-staking requires autonomous operation of a verification node, so the technical threshold and capital threshold for users are relatively high (also 32 ETH, but the liquidity re-staking will lift the restrictions in the future, while this is a hard requirement of the Ethereum staking mechanism and will not change in the future).
For this method, EigenLayer has also set a TVL limit of 9600 ETH, but currently only 384 ETH has been deposited (which translates to only 12 addresses have made deposits), so there is still a lot of room for growth.
For users who are running their own verification nodes and want to re-stake through this method, they can refer to the tutorial provided in the official documentation to allocate the withdrawal credentials of the validator to EigenPods address. There are four steps in the specific deposit operation.
First, enter the Dapp official website and link the wallet.
Then, click “Create EigenPod” to create an EigenPods. After successful creation, click “Pod Details” to obtain the specific address of the EigenPods.
Next, the user needs to configure the withdrawal voucher on the Beacon chain to the EigenPods address (to complete this step, you need to run an Ethereum verification node first).
Finally, you can also return to the homepage to check the real-time changes in your re-staking rewards.
Phase One, Just the Beginning
It is worth mentioning that in addition to the interaction, EigenLayer also issued a commemorative NFT for free on Zora (Zora charges a minting fee of 0.000777 ETH). The current minting window is still open for another 3 and a half days, and users who meet the conditions may want to get one.
According to the official description of EigenLayer, the launch of this protocol will be divided into three stages to attract various participants to join the ecosystem.
In the first stage “Stakers” launched this time, pledgers can try to re-stake through EigenLayer. In the second stage “Operators”, node operators can accept the commission of pledgers on EigenLayer. When it comes to the third stage “Services”, proactive verification services will be launched.
