EigenLayer (EIGEN) pioneered 'restaking' on Ethereum. Normally, ETH staked to secure Ethereum can't do anything else. EigenLayer lets stakers 'restake' that same ETH to also help secure other services (called AVSs — things like data-availability layers, oracles, bridges and, increasingly, AI-verification and cloud infrastructure), earning extra rewards for taking on extra risk. The pitch is 'shared security': new projects can rent Ethereum's massive economic security instead of bootstrapping their own from scratch. EIGEN is the token for governance and for the protocol's economics. It has broadened into 'EigenCloud', a push toward verifiable cloud and AI compute. Its bet is that lots of services will want to plug into Ethereum's security and pay for it.
Where it stands today: EigenLayer utterly dominates restaking — it holds the vast majority (over 90%) of the roughly $15+ billion in restaked value, so the concept clearly attracted capital. The first generation of services (its own data-availability layer, some oracle and bridge systems) are live and paying rewards. But there's a core problem: most established Layer 2s still use Ethereum directly or Celestia rather than EigenLayer's services, so the actual paying demand hasn't caught up to the huge amount of capital restaked. Crucially, most of the yield restakers earn today comes from EIGEN token emissions (the protocol printing its own token) rather than real fee revenue. A 2026 tokenomics overhaul aims to fix this by routing service fees into EIGEN buybacks. So today it's the runaway leader of a big idea whose token value hinges on real service demand finally materializing.