EigenLayer launched on Ethereum mainnet in 2024 as the protocol that pioneered restaking, a mechanism that lets ETH already committed to staking secure a growing list of external networks and applications at the same time. Instead of every new protocol recruiting and paying its own set of validators from scratch, it can effectively "rent" security from Ethereum's existing pool of staked ETH, with restakers earning extra yield in return for taking on extra risk.

Users deposit native ETH or supported liquid staking tokens into EigenLayer's contracts and delegate that stake to node operators, who opt in to validate one or more Actively Validated Services (AVSs), covering things like data availability layers, oracle networks, cross-chain bridges, and a growing set of AI-verification services. EigenDA, EigenLayer's own data availability layer built for rollups, remains the best-known AVS, alongside projects such as AltLayer and Lagrange. Restakers can also mint liquid restaking tokens through platforms like Ether.fi and Renzo, keeping their capital usable elsewhere in DeFi while it keeps earning restaking rewards.

Since April 2025, EigenLayer's slashing system has been fully live on mainnet, so operators, and by extension the restakers who delegated to them, can genuinely lose funds for provable misbehavior on an AVS. This is the core tradeoff of restaking: additional yield in exchange for additional downside, including the risk that one slashing event cascades across several AVSs that all draw security from the same underlying stake. EigenLayer's token, EIGEN, coordinates governance as the project expands into a broader "EigenCloud" vision covering verifiable off-chain compute and data services.