Eigenlayer Token Unlock: Everything You Need to Know

Transcript

a lot of people in this industry look at like launching a token as the Finish Line we're just starting you know it's inherently a permissionless platform correct scop we going to build welcome back to the rollup for today's video I sat down with Vias Krishan of the Ian Foundation to talk about the igen token unlock the entire ethereum ecosystem has been waiting for this since the announcement of the igen token the world's first inter subjective token several months ago today the transferability mechanism has been unlocked and the igen token is officially trading we talked about the I token utility the ABS ecosystem the Future Vision and a lot more let's Jump Right In after a quick word from some of

our awesome Partners here we [Music] go cares is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enh en the capabilities of blockchain Technology ctei enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cy. that's cares. to learn more about building your own app chain today welcome to the ignition Mantle's newest campaign to liberate the growth

power of Bitcoin fbtc ignition has officially begun with a total token supply of over 2,000 fbtc with a tvl of over 150 million right now you can go on the fbtc website to see all of the featured campaigns saking opportunities and liquidity pools where you can utilize fbtc onchain today for some of the best yields available on l2s the ignition Sparkle campaign can be found at fbtc docomo all right we're live in Singapore um happy igen token future day um congrats man it's been a long time coming I know

that you you recently switched from I think it was like the labs to the foundation so your leading efforts there um working with the amazing group of people at the foundation um again a great few years at Labs like been there since day one and you know still very close to the entire team there but there's a lot of work to be done on the foundation side as well in terms of getting things up and running um obviously the token itself which came through the foundation and the work from a lot of people here so yeah it's been great yeah man I mean it's been it's been one of the probably if not the most anticipated drops um I mean ever definitely like this cycle um I think I

want to start with just kind of the way you guys went about this I think when the points meta was was going on with you know Pendle and lrts and these things the hype and excitement was super super high and then you guys decided to launch with this non-transferable token mechanism uh as well as this kind of idea of inter subjectivity which I think the community was a little bit like thrown off by um Talk us through kind of why you guys made that decision like that why you didn't just launch the token with transferability um and kind of what what the results of that have have kind of been so far yeah absolutely um again the you know most projects did a stake drop

we did a lock drop right and um there have been a few other examples of lock drops but probably not something of this scale or this sort of like impact um or immediate reaction from the community I think there were a lot of things um that we got really positive feedback from the community about which we took into effect and like made some you know changes and reacted positively to the input and then on the flip side the reality is like I think no matter what you do you're never going to make everyone happy oh air drops are the most polarizing thing in in crypto exactly so um I think the real question became how do we make sure that we're protecting the honest minority who

is the real like community in this process and making sure we're not you know making decisions based on this like loud majority voice that like doesn't necessarily have the best interests sometimes and um then there is this like true majority which like is this community of Builders and participants that want to see this ecosystem grow and like grow in the positive ways there's a lot of complexity behind why we did a lock drop um I think the main thing was like partially legal partially like how do we start introducing um we recently introduced like other erc20 standards to be able to be deposited into Igan so like how do we expand the set this ecosystem in like a very stable safe manner before we unlock and allow people

to transfer Etc so it really became this thing of like how do we Kickstart the flywheel and how do we make sure that the flywheel is in this like Smooth operating flow before we start introducing new variables into it um and also just like with the state of um you know you touched on the inter subjective token this is something that like we wanted to create a token that wasn't just something that uh um you know one of the main focus points of Ian layer is to make sure that the value acral of all these projects that are building on the ethereum ecosystem go back to the ecosystem itself and creating a token that would have just been launched to act as you know some sort of gas token or some sort of like um non-utility

token would have taken that value away right and so by creating this inter subjective token we were able to come up with this consensus mechanism that people can use using the igen token for these social consensus problem s throughout the entire ecosystem and I think then that becomes like far more interesting where the token isn't just the only product there is a product associated with the token itself right like it takes time to kind of build that out and and have something to show prior to launching that's correct and now we're at the point where we're focused on finding the right Partners who want to implement this token and start building this out and you know you will start to see rollups and other projects using the igen native token as part of

their uh social consensus mechanism and start using that for forking um this actually also like goes in hand inand with um something that the ethereum community was speaking about in terms of not overloading ethereum consensus right right and like as a result we tried to come up with a mechanism that like prevents from overloading ethereum consensus and keeps a lot of these social consensus problems native to the igen ecosystem and we don't have these like constant escalation methods the way I think about it is like you would have escalation methods in like let's just say school right like you have an issue with an individual so you escalate to a teacher then you escalate to like maybe the teacher escalates with parents then

it goes to a principal then it goes like above and beyond and you know so on and so forth and similarly like we wanted to create these like very structured stable escalation mechanisms and keep it as natively um within the igen ecosystem as possible and it just takes time to build out these sort of like both uh cryptoeconomic secure while also like you know the engineering efforts to implement these two things yeah and that's kind of where you get some of the push back about slashing just being for igen token versus kind of eth and like when slashing is enabled but it's just kind of like partial slashing to Star and then you kind of have to work towards eth and then eventually more assets it's a it's kind of like H how

you guys opened up caps to deposit in the beginning it's it's consistently been a slow and kind of like steady process and you know I think that sometimes the community uh finds that a bit tough to understand yeah I think it goes to this like bigger um principle this meta principle of like the stability versus agility tradeoff yeah right and I think like different projects and different ecosystems have their own thesis about which of these they prioritize right we have always aired on the the side of stability especially when you're handling you know billions of dollars of people's assets correct you can't you know build fast and break no right like that's just not the way you go about doing things

and so yes I think you guys have more responsibility and or held to a certain level of accountability than than other projects in the space and we take on that responsibility and try to move with you know very methodical and very um thought out approaches and as a result it we are not the fastest moving teams at times right um but we you know make it a point to put out solutions that have very stable and very like structured formats yeah and as a result here the token's launched exactly it's gotten to the point so now I guess we can kind of think about like what does this what does this mean for the ecosystem for the projects building in

the space for for for the industry of what does the transferability of the igen token mean yeah absolutely so the igen token is now transferable tradable available on you know these markets and exchanges and things like that so people can actually buy and hold this as part of their um crypto portfolio and then you know going Downstream to the abss and builders that are inside our ecosystem they can start implementing this natively into their um into their rollups into their you know ABS stack Bridges Etc where this sort of um social reputation layer that exists with the you know social consensus layer of the igen token can be used to solve some of

these inter subjective problems throughout the crypto ecosystem right um an example of this would be like the data withholding problem which exists in da yeah where you don't have Clarity on whether the um node operator who was supposed to serve or the node you know the data requestor are uh being honest and which is the honest party and so you can resolve some issues like this um there's a lot more applications that will have a lot of content out in terms terms of what are some of these inter subjective faults that exist within the ecosystem and we can you know go deeper into that as well um so yeah I think that's part of it and also just um I think it's important for the native utility of the igen token inside these

ecosystems to start expanding and we start um you know eventually introducing the igen token into what is a far more like institutional manner so you know one day it's possible that ethereum ETFs are natively reaking uh onto anigen and so we're seeing like capital inflow into the igen ecosystem that is coming from like very stable very structured uh institutions who have a far more you know rational yield expectation rather than some of the mercenary Capital that has existed in the entire ecosystem to this day where um it becomes very difficult in terms of civil resistance to identify who is a honest benevolent participant in

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joins the existing Suite of fra products including fra Swap and frax lend you can see frax fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fraxel main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of frol you are still early joined today take part in our Expedition into the singularity now yeah you kind of touched on on a couple here and I'm curious if there's anything else that's from the foundation's perspective on the on the road map side or initiative side

what does that look like for you guys now that token's transferable absolutely yeah now that token's transferable it becomes a lot easier to do things like grants y it becomes a lot easier to do things like governance um you know we are actively working on our grants structure and um we have a few grants already out a bunch in the pipeline right now yep um it's about going out and using the resources to fund what we describe as like you know our responsibility to participate in building the infrastructure to onboard that next generation of users to crypto um there's a lot of great infra being built and that infra is now being consumed by some consumer applications and now we need to go further and further Downstream and align with the

right Partners to make sure that we're coming up with um really like positive incentive mechanisms for this user acquisition problem yeah which is how do we get users onto crypto and the reality is like a lot of the technology can be abstracted away but consumer distribution will win markets and we need a way to make sure that the teams that are working on that consumer distribution have an incentive mechanism that they can go out and use and perhaps that's the igen token perhaps it's their own native token perhaps that's being subsidized by the grants that we're issuing right there's a lot of factors here but yeah it's super exciting to be able to do that just feels like the ecosystem is being turned on like the entire thing right like slashing is

eventually going to come if just for Ian token at first I believe correct and then eventually other assets so the avss can start to kind of like you know operators can start to delegate understand like what what's you know it just feels like everything's going to be turned on and and absolutely like the the experiment begins in a very you know experimental manner in the beginning but a cautious and steady kind of Outlook like it just feels like it's like it's a culmination it's like okay now we're starting the what feels like the beginning of it all again absolutely yeah a lot of people in this industry look at like launching a token as the Finish Line this is like the opposite like yeah absolutely we're we're just starting yeah we're just getting started the whole mechanism requires the token

and eventually other assets exactly and yeah and we're excited to have more and more internal tools and products that come out from us and from the ABS ecosystem that effectively is using the igen tokens stuff like igen Insurance wouldn't be possible if we don't you know have this inter subjective token layer where we can do slashing where we can do things like this where um Bridges can eventually use the igen token to buy insurance and protect assets and Transit you know things like that where it just wouldn't be possible and so like yeah to your point it's we're just getting started yeah like and does feel like the number of abss is significantly increasing to to the point where uh you know during this series we've been like

particular just to make sure that each team is like you know they're building it it does feel like there's going to be teams that are just kind of like jumping on the a layer kind of hype train if you will I mean I don't don't mean to be too pessimistic here but I just think that that's going to happen and is happening so we'll continue to kind of vet that and make sure that that people are using CU like like the core thing here is that we need to make sure that operators and LRT are being are you know being properly uh risk managed right and so that's going to be a really really interesting space to cover absolutely and I think throughout this series we'll cover a lot of like some of of the risks as well as different mechanisms of slashing and so

excited to kind of dive more into the technicals there you know it's inherently a permissionless platform correct so we cannot control yeah people are going to build and we can't control whether they're going to ape in because of you know they see it an opportunity to align themselves with the right Community or if they're like building it because they want an actual value prop of like the slashing conditions note operators um or you know using the inter subjective token itself and so there's going to be like varying levels of stickiness in like the integration itself correct and that's the point of a permissionless system and in a properly self-functioning positive incentive design Market what will happen is you will have less stake and less operators

serving these lower value additive teams and you'll have like the riskier ones exactly and you'll have the you know it's the power law exactly yeah last thing um we're running low here all chains fit on Ian da yeah that was really fun um came out of literally like shiram having an idea of like hey like why don't we just post post every block from all yeah every chain on Dr da um that kind of goes to our like overall Road Maps like we have a lot of teams working on a lot of different things now um IG DA has its own road map for like 100 megabytes per second by end of year 1 gigaby per second eventually what are the use cases that we can open up it's not just like um you know something that

we wanted to uh bootstrap the protocol with it's not just like a proof of concept it's something that like we think is a fundamental tool that's needed in the infrastructure layer for all l2s for all you know projects and as we go out and build this sort of AWS Style stack an infrastructure layer um because our real goal is how do we convert Cloud to crypto how do we build the backend rails for onboarding the next generation of consumers um da is going to be a huge part of that and eventually it's going to be able to support things like live streaming like you know yeah um onchain betting platforms Etc where the amount of data is extremely high and yeah what's funny is right now I da can handle it all but I I hope the future

that we're going to requires a lot more a lot more hopefully a lot more da yeah and you know one of the beautiful questions is like what would it take to pour over 10% of all Web Two traffic on web 3 yeah right like what does the infrastructure look like and we are trying to build for that future we're not trying to build for what is the utilization today right and so you know for us at igen it's always about identifying where is the market moving what is the direction and the vector that we want to head in and are we building infrastructure that aligns with that Vector of the market or do we need to the market and builders that direction to some because we can come up with infastructure and come up with use cases and encourage people to come and build and that's where again

the igen token comes into play because we can have these we can use that as a very positive incentive mechanism to like get people to come and build awesome man well thanks for coming out it's been a pleasure congratulations on the success of the Ian token transferability and looking forward to the future absolutely thank you so much Andy appreciate you taking your time um I know it's been a long day as well but um yeah no this has been amazing and we're super excited to have the token out super excited to um you know be a player in this ecosystem for a long time we're trying to build a 10 20 30 or 50y year company and it's um you know we operate similar to a web2 org to some extent and like I don't see that as a

negative like there are some really positive things that we want to steal from that and I would just want to leave us with like one thing like Gary tan has a great quote which is the only thing only status game that matters is did you ever build something that people want and we are focused on building things that people want and need so the igen token is just like a step in that direction and we have a long way to go amazing thank you man thank you brother