Ep 127: What is Eigenlayer? An Eigenlayer 101 with founder Sreeram Kannan and Calvin Liu, Chief Strategy Officer

[00:00] Hi. [00:00] Hey, we're in the stack today. We're absolutely stacked with podcast interviews. [00:07] Oh, I meant like, no, we're like in the infrastructure stack. [00:12] Welcome to the Feelings Check-In, a feelings first look at the news of the week. Takes no one asked for on topics everyone's talking about. I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. The Boys Club podcast? No, no. No. [00:30] Just boys club. Yeah. A technical conversation for today's podcast. [00:34] But... [00:36] An interesting one. I think even if you're not a very technical person, they did a great job talking about how it relates to actual consumers and specifically consumer applications. I think... [00:44] So for some context of what we're doing, just got right into it. We had on the founder and the chief strategy officer for Eigenlayer. Shuram Kanan, who is the founder and CEO, and Calvin Liu, who is the chief strategy officer from Eigenlayer on... [01:04] Smart guys. [01:05] Super smart guys. Very smart men. And really nice guys. Eigenlayer is the hottest thing [01:11] right now in crypto just the the hot girl at the party is eigenlayer and everybody's talking about her and we did not know her so we had her on um and it was they did a great job both of them did a really great job being very generous in relating it back to consumer applications and consumer experiences instead of getting really deep in the weeds even though part of what primarily what it is is a building block for the weeds is the weeds we're yes they are the weeds but i would just say

[01:41] context where it would be that [01:43] All of what we're doing here at Boys Club is talking about the new internet, all of these new, fantastic, amazing opportunities that are available to people as we build all of this more open and exciting internet together. And what is required is these building blocks that make it more possible to do the things that we want to do and the cool things that we want to experience. [02:13] on chain, and then how that activity is manipulated into surfacing things that are much more interesting to you. So an example would be your reputation, the work that you've done lives on chain. And then instead of having to apply to jobs and do all the bullshit that everybody hates, like writing cover letters and resumes and interviews and all this stuff, your work history is verified on the chain with your employers. And then opportunities are surfaced to you and jobs are surfaced to you. [02:43] chain quickly if we're able to have flexibility about how that data is utilized and for those transactions to be incredibly cheap. And essentially Eigenlayer is... [02:52] part of that infrastructure that makes that possible. So as you're listening, maybe that's helpful. I don't know, grounding for the conversation and what they're building. [03:00] There it is. Thanks for listening. Hey, Natasha. So a question we get asked a lot is, what do you look for in a crypto platform? So let's talk about it. Well, Dina, I look for a secure, no fuss platform that I can dive into right away. That's why I love today's sponsor, Kraken. If you're waiting for the right time to get into crypto, Kraken makes it super easy and intuitive to get started. Plus, if you get stuck, they have an award-winning client support team that's available 24-7, along with a bunch of educational guides, articles, and videos to

[03:30] secure way to trade crypto, go to kraken.com backslash boys club and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Cryptocurrency services are provided to US and US territory customers by Payward Ventures Incorporated, PBI, DBA, Kraken. View PVI's disclosure at kraken.com backslash legal backslash disclosures. [03:53] We have a juicy podcast for you all here today. We have Shuram Kanaan, who is the founder and CEO of Eigenlayer. And we also have Calvin Liu, who is the chief strategy officer at Eigenlayer. Welcome to the show, both of you. [04:10] Hello, thanks for having us. Hey, everybody, really excited to be here on Parash Club. [04:14] So are, I suppose... [04:16] impetus for inviting you guys on and reaching out to Eigenlair is we were at ETH Denver a couple weeks ago and I [04:24] Eigenlare was literally what anyone wanted to talk about all the time. And so it got to the point where we were like, okay, we don't really know... [04:33] what it is. We don't really understand it. And I think it's time for us to understand it. And so... [04:41] We like to learn in public with our community. And so we figured, why not have... [04:47] the guys come on and hear it from the horse's mouth. So that was, uh, that's where we're at. We're at basically nothing. Zero. I would say I was walking around a party and literally everybody was like, so are you restaking on Eigen layer? And I was like,

[05:00] I don't know any of those words. We're going to have to start completely over. So thank you for being here. And I think the first question is, what is Eigenlayer? Either one of you can take it. Go for it. Yeah, sure. I am happy to. Well, first of all, that's really, you know, exciting for us to hear that people were talking about Eigenlayer. So yeah, hopefully we can help clear up what exactly it is. There's kind of many ways to look at it. One of the most straightforward ways is to [05:30] about, so like the Ethereum blockchain is secured by a network of nodes and validators that provide crypto economic security. [05:40] via state ETH [05:42] and having a very large network of validators behind the Ethereum blockchain. [05:48] And essentially, Eigenlayer is a protocol that lets new services and protocols [05:54] borrow or rent, [05:56] that Ethereum validator network. [05:58] either the crypto economic security in the form of stake, so having lots and lots of basically financial value backing different types of on-chain protocols and actions, [06:10] or by being able to borrow or rent a large number of validators from Ethereum. [06:16] So essentially, yeah, we think of this basically enables like a lot of [06:22] new and different types of use cases where you don't have to bootstrap a lot of financial stake or a large validator set. [06:29] and

[06:30] The types of protocols that are building on top of Eigenlare today are generally like very kind of blockchain infrastructure types of services and projects. [06:40] But we're slowly working our way up to be [06:43] the backbone of not just these types of blockchain infrastructure projects, but also applications and consumer facing use cases. Great. [06:51] Okay, so... [06:53] Quick question. [06:54] That all makes sense clearly from sort of a developer standpoint. [06:58] when you talk about these consumer applications that are being built or a consumer experience with Eigenlayer, is that [07:05] going to happen through a developer build something on Eigenlayer, on the protocol, and then me as a consumer is interacting with that application. [07:13] Yeah, I think that is the most sort of straightforward way to think about it is that a lot of the use cases that are being built on top of blockchains or in crypto. [07:24] They benefit from a lot of really interesting features of blockchains, like decentralization, censorship resistance. [07:31] permissionlessness, composability of different smart contracts and different services, tokens, [07:38] Sovereign ownership. [07:39] and [07:40] The services that are being built on top of Eigenlayer [07:43] either supercharge or add [07:46] different functionality to blockchains. And ultimately, like the applications that are built [07:52] on top of blockchains will benefit from having better [07:56] infrastructure underneath them. It'll enable new use cases, better functionality. And I would also add that like, while we're kind of focused on like this blockchain infrastructure layer below applications, we are more and more getting into talking to like the applications directly, whether they're social applications,

[08:16] NFT applications, games. [08:19] and finding like very direct connection between what we're trying to do what we're trying to enable and what they need in terms of functionality and also finding a lot of shared values like ultimately the things that are exciting about i think about a lot of consumer use cases are like being able to own your own data or own your own assets or being able to pour your assets across different types of systems that are composable [08:45] or being able to remix [08:47] different things together. And [08:50] kind of the driving value behind Eigenlayer is this concept of open innovation. We want people to be able to build whatever they want on top of blockchains and we think that when we enable as much innovation as possible these innovations kind of stack [09:05] to end up creating things that we couldn't even imagine today. [09:09] And I think that's kind of the same ethos that's really exciting about more consumer facing crypto is like there's so much possibility. [09:17] There's so much ability to mix different things that you don't think necessarily would naturally fit together, whether it's tokens and a dating app, wild ideas like that. The same level of experimentation and innovation. [09:31] It's happening at the blockchain infrastructure layer. And we think in the future, we'll power more and more consumer use cases. I want to get into what exactly Eigenlayer brings to those consumer use cases, because it's not immediately clear to me. So I want to dig into that in a second. But I appreciate your explanation of Eigenlayer, because I was getting it wrong. And I'm sorry to anyone who I talked to at ETH Denver who asked me what Eigenlayer was, and then I explained it inaccurately.

[10:01] the Ethereum network. And we do that because Ethereum's proof of stake now. It used to be proof of work and then it moved to proof of stake. So we're staking our ETH to help secure the Ethereum network and also to earn rewards. And then my understanding was Eigenlayer was the rewards that are being generated through that staking are then restaked with Eigenlayer. So it was like a staking and then a restaking. And so that was my understanding. But hearing you talk about it, it sounds much more... [10:29] Like a marketplace where, yes, you have the staking and the restakers, but that you're actually looking for applications or other protocols that would be leveraging that pool to then secure their network. [10:43] Is that explanation accurate? [10:44] You are not wrong. There's kind of- Huge. Huge, Gina. Huge. It is a marketplace with many stakeholders. [10:55] ranging from stakers who are re-stakers on Eigenlayer [10:59] to developers who are building applications and protocols on top of Eigenlayer to also [11:05] the validators and operators themselves, who basically kind of bridge the gap between stakers and then using that stake to run services for those developers. [11:15] So what you're describing is sort of one aspect of what one stakeholder set can do, like you can technically restake [11:24] your ETH staking rewards into Eigenlayer. [11:27] But yeah, there's a lot more than that. That's sort of one angle from one stakeholder group. You contain multitudes is what you're telling me. Sure. Can you tell me why you are a smart man? Why this problem set to focus in on?

[11:43] If you think about application development and the internet, not crypto, [11:49] Imagine you were developing an application in 99.5. What would you do? You would have to build your own servers. You have to build your own like payments. You have to build your own identity. You have to build your own database stores like all the stuff. And then you're building whatever new thing. Let's say you're building an Amazon bookstore. You're also building all these other things. [12:11] So very, very, very few people can actually go and do that. [12:15] But in [12:16] 2024, if you want to build your own e-commerce website, [12:21] You would go to AWS and then on AWS, there'll be like a Stripe as a payment service. And then maybe you use MongoDB as a database or for authorization. [12:32] And Shopify like puts together all of these things and then create your own like, you know, e-commerce website. This makes it so much easier for anybody to come in and build a new like, you know, application. [12:43] So what you're thinking about is how do we replicate? So today creating like your own like application requires you to make one of two choices in crypto, right? One is [12:54] You can go to a big blockchain like Ethereum or Savannah or whatever, and then you can build a smart contract on top of it. [13:00] You have very limited programmability. [13:03] What do I mean by that? That means Ethereum has a programming language already, like the Ethereum virtual machine, and you have to build on top of it using Solidity. [13:12] Ethereum has a block space which is constrained. Like, oh, you know, you don't have whatever amount of block space that you want.

[13:18] Ethereum has committed to a certain kind of consensus protocol, which orchestrates all these nodes and arrives at consensus. But you as a developer may have like, oh, I don't like that. I need something to run much faster. I need... [13:30] not all the nodes to download all the data. I need each node to download a different portion of the data. [13:35] I need the nodes not to run like Ethereum's optimized for home stakers, but I want [13:40] super GPUs to actually run, you'll have hundreds of different constraints that are kind of [13:47] And if you're a power user, [13:49] You write a smart contract is not enough. [13:52] Okay, so what do you do if you're a power user today is you have to go build your own chain, which is like you have to build your own token, you have to build your own value reset, you have to build your own consensus waterfall, you have to build everything. You're kind of creating your own universe in some sense. [14:07] And this is not the way to create open innovation, which is our driving value. You know, it's not a, Eigen is not a DeFi protocol or anything. Eigen in German for your own. [14:18] It's your own layer. [14:19] open innovation. We want anybody to come in and build their own creative new things. And that's true for the consumer level, that's true for the infra level. We want more people to come in and build new and fun stuff for all of us to actually interact and enjoy. And if you take this [14:37] Thank you. [14:37] value them [14:40] What Eigenlair is trying to do is [14:42] Can we create a similar... [14:44] you know, stack that is there for the cloud, can we create it in crypto? Of course, the dividing line of cloud and crypto is decentralized trust. Anything, you know, any crypto application, you remove decentralized trust from it.

[14:59] It's a cloud application. Any cloud application, if you add decent less trust to it. [15:03] it becomes a crypto application. [15:05] So that's why we focus very heavily on what is the root of decentralized trust. Where is decentralized trust coming from? Take Ethereum, it is coming from somebody taking their... [15:16] take making a promise that I'm gonna run your protocol correctly. If I don't, if I run my protocol correctly, [15:23] Give me... [15:24] some rewards. If I don't run your protocols correctly, [15:27] take away my money. Like that gives confidence to the other side, the consumer that actually, okay, you know, this is going to run correctly because otherwise... [15:35] I can slash or induce this, the protocol will induce this negative penalty on this step. [15:40] So we take the Trudeau first. [15:42] from Ethereum and export it flexibly for anybody to come and build anything that they want. And what we call these is AVS. AVS is Actively Validated Service. Actively Validated Service means any service [15:57] Think of, I want to run an AI and I want to get the inputs into a blockchain. I want to run a database, you know, which I was running in my enterprise and I want to bring it into a database. I want to run a game and I want to know the output of who won the game on a blockchain. All of these things are services, right? [16:15] Any of these things can be configured to be a service. And what I want in each of these, we call them actively validated services. And our vision is there will be infrastructure people who will come in and say, oh, here is a gaming virtual machine as a service. Here is AI inference as a service. Here is...

[16:34] How to distribute a secret. I have a secret I want to store in the network and only when certain conditions are satisfied, the secret should be published or given only to my... [16:43] you know, son or daughter or whatever, right? You should be able to create these kinds of programmatic services. [16:49] And these require enormous amounts of control that's like Ethereum or Solana, nobody gives you. Because it tells you what you can do on each node in the network. Not after you've arrived at Concentral, after you've built a virtual machine, after you've constrained the block space, after you've done all these things, what you can do on top. [17:07] Every single node in the network, you can reprogram to what you want them to do. So that gives you enormous amounts of control. So people who are trying to build infrastructure can come in and build all these layers. So now as a consumer application, Natasha earlier asked, what is the benefit if you're building a consumer application, your eigenlayer? [17:25] What you would do is you would come in, you know, it's not yet today. We have like, you know, 30 to 50 people building actively validated teams, building these actively validated services today. But, you know, in a year, you are building a consumer application. You should be able to come in and say, [17:39] Hey, I'm using this secret sharing service, that database, this... [17:43] AI, and now I have this enormous toolkit of how to build consumer applications. And that is going to let a new kind of creativity that was blocked in blockchains to actually come out. Right? So... [17:59] That is the kind of vision. I can open innovation. We want to ensure lots of people build new things. And one of the base layer services we built ourselves is EigenDA. EigenDA, DEA for data availability.

[18:14] And the idea is, you know, Ethereum has this layer two or roll up roadmap, which is I'm doing complex computation. I don't want all the Ethereum nodes to do the computation. So I run the computation myself as a layer two node. [18:29] And I prove that I run the computation correctly. I can prove it in one of two ways. I put up a deposit and say that, hey, if you don't like my computation, challenge it. And then we will execute on Ethereum so that we're not paying the Ethereum fees all the time. [18:43] Or I somehow compute a cryptographic proof and put it on Ethereum that I've done the computation correctly. These applications, these kinds of major tools... [18:51] don't need to publish the data, which is the input or output of the computation, into a place where anybody can access it. Because if you don't put it into a place where anybody can access it, [19:02] then I may make a claim about a computation that nobody else can download on Verisite. I'm saying something that [19:07] Nobody knows what I'm saying. [19:09] So the security of the entire system is reliant on the ability to... [19:14] publish the data in a place that it is available for anybody to download and check that the computations are done correctly. This is called data availability. And we are building a service called EigenVA, which is a [19:26] extremely scaled [19:28] data availability service. And one way to measure data is what is the bandwidth with which you can write data, right? Like when we have 4G or 5G in cell phones, we look at like, [19:37] Oh, is it like a 10 Mbps? Is it a hundred Mbps? Right. And we are, [19:42] Building a data availability service which runs at 10 megabytes per second

[19:47] in comparison to Ethereum's tens of kilobytes per second. So three orders of magnitude of ProVent. [19:54] And we have a roadmap to scale it another three orders of magnitude after this. So that is basically the eigenDA service. What this does is turbocharge the layer to economy that's already starting to thrive on Ethereum. Yesterday, the day before this recording, we had Ethereum's new upgrade called 4844 went live, which was Ethereum's native data service, which... [20:18] which increases the total amount of data that you can publish on Ethereum itself. [20:22] That's great, but still that's only a tens of kilobytes per second. And what we are offering is tens of megabytes per second. So that's an example of why we think a lot more consumer applications get unblocked. And to answer Deanna's question, that's why we started building Eigenlayer. In my previous life, I was a professor at the University of Washington running the UW Blockchain Research Lab. [20:46] where we were building all kinds of new infra protocols [20:50] But there was no place for us to go and experiment and try and deploy these protocols in production. [20:55] You have to wait for an Ethereum upgrade, which may take several years, and many people want their ideas to go there. Core protocols, layer one protocols move very slowly for good reason. [21:09] And whereas I can learn that anybody come and build new things that can be tried in a smaller market scale before it can automatically stretch. [21:17] Imagine when all of ETH is resaved.

[21:20] Then, you know, a service that somebody else builds... [21:22] could have potentially the entire Ethereum security, [21:25] in a free market manner as opposed to a protocol upgrade manner. [21:29] Wow. So interesting. A few questions. So first question is, [21:36] Understanding eigenlayers. I can't remember the name that you said, but the tool that's basically helping you with the data that's on Ethereum. Eigen, what was it? [21:45] DA. Okay, so is the am I understanding it correctly that if I am thinking about building a consumer application that's utilizing the data that is on the Ethereum blockchain, what your tool does is essentially make the processing of that data much quicker and much more [22:04] flexible in terms of what you're pulling and how it's [22:08] feeding into your application that you're building. Is that... [22:12] somewhat correct? That's right. I'll just add a minor change to it. It's basically... [22:18] If today for your application you're writing all your data to Ethereum and writing data to Ethereum is the most expensive part of your application. Okay. What you would do is write it instead to EigenDA and EigenDA reports to Ethereum that that portion of the data has been returned correctly. [22:37] And therefore, you can use your application still rooted on Ethereum, but you're not paying this crazy gas fee on Ethereum. Instead, [22:47] And even if you were able to afford the crazy gas-free

[22:51] you cannot run very high throughput computation because the total amount of capacity on Ethereum itself is limited. [22:57] Whereas on this system, you can run new applications that simply you couldn't do. [23:01] on Ethereum itself. Now this was one of like some of the other layer ones that positioned on [23:07] hey, we're bringing a high-throughput chain, right? Like, that's a... [23:11] feature [23:13] And now with identity, Ethereum becomes a high throughput chain. [23:17] Can I offer one more lens? I think I saw you had a forecaster on, maybe lens. These types of social applications, [23:27] When you try to build these things on like Ethereum, [23:30] Today, the entire exercise of building a protocol on top of Ethereum without things like EigenDA, [23:36] and without roll ups. So maybe a couple of years ago when everything was built directly on Ethereum as smart contracts, [23:41] The entire exercise is like, [23:43] How can I build what I want to build? [23:45] with like a huge amount of constraints, like computational constraints, storage constraints. The whole exercise was like, how smart can I be about optimizing and simplifying what I'm doing? [23:56] as much as possible so that it will even run on Ethereum, which is like this pretty like [24:02] expensive, slow world computer. And then over the past few years, there's been a lot more kind of services and layers introduced, roll ups like Optimism, Arbitron, Polygon, DK Sync, many, many of these now. [24:16] services that make it easy to do on roll-ups like Conduit, Caldera, [24:21] Alt layer gelato, these roll ups as a services.

[24:24] And the reason applications like Lens and Forecaster are considering [24:32] are basically going the direction of building their own roll-ups is now instead of [24:37] needing to build within all the constraints on top of Ethereum, [24:40] You can get almost all the benefits of building on top of Ethereum, but with [24:45] a lot more customizability. [24:48] a lot more speed. [24:50] much cheaper, and so you end up being able to build applications that actually can do what you want to do. [24:57] And it's just moving more and more in this direction. The types of services we're building, like Icanda, enable this. Still, there are many constraints that you have to consider if you want to build your social application on top of a rollup. [25:09] But what we're trying to do is break down those constraints until eventually there are no constraints. [25:15] If you think about 15, 20 years ago and you wanted to deploy like the boys club website, how would you do it? You'd have to like put the whole stack together yourself. And then now you probably maybe it's on Webflow or maybe you use like some some service that extracted away like so much of the stack of you deploying that website. And in the future, deploying that. [25:37] applications on top of the blockchain is going to be that easy. But, you know, we're not that close yet, but we're heading that direction. It's time for a more open, inclusive and transparent financial system. A system that serves nearly everyone, everywhere, all the time. That's why we love today's sponsor, Kraken. Kraken is a crypto platform that provides a super simple on-ramp to the world of crypto with a 24-7 support team. Crypto transcends physical and imaginary borders. No matter where you are, you can send funds easily and quickly to almost

[26:07] and waiting lines. You can send, receive, and trade crypto anywhere near instantly. [26:35] Okay, I think I'm tracking. Thank you guys, both of you, for being so thorough in your explanation, but also being really generous and making sure that we're getting it and zooming out a bit. So I appreciate that from both of you. I think that the metaphor to Web2 is a really helpful framework to think about how this is abstracting away a lot of that necessary infrastructure layer, and that ultimately on a consumer application layer, it would make things... [27:04] faster and more secure with [27:07] cheaper transactions. [27:08] When I hear that set of benefits, that is what I understand layer [27:14] twos to do. And so I guess my question is, [27:17] Is Eigenlayer a layer two? [27:20] Or I'm not understanding sort of the relationship between the layer twos, which I understand to do that work and what you guys are doing, if that makes sense. Yeah, I can take that question. [27:31] So a layer two basically offloads certain computation from Ethereum. And then you have Optimism, Arbidron, Aether.

[27:40] publishing some kind of crypto-economic proofs that promises that my money is at risk if I don't build a computation correctly, or a cryptographic proof. These zero-knowledge systems like Polygon, StarkWire, [27:52] the casing scroll. [27:54] which are making these zero-knowledge worlds to a thinnium. [27:57] But all of these systems need other auxiliary services. [28:02] for example, the publication of data. [28:05] Right now they're writing data to Ethereum. It's very expensive. [28:09] we create a service like EigenDA, which lets them write data to EigenDA and reduce the cost. [28:16] What other services do layer tools need? [28:18] Layer tools, because there are so many layer tools, they have to interoperate, which means you need a bridge to more data between them. [28:27] There are many people building bridges on Eigenbecher. [28:30] Layer 2s are waiting for Ethereum to finalize a block. It takes 12 minutes for Ethereum to finalize a block. [28:37] There are services building on AgonLayer, which is like right to this layer and you get super fast finality. [28:44] Another feature for layer tools covering up on Ethereum. [28:47] the, on EigenLayer, layer tools need watchtowers, right? Because they make claims and the claims, if they're not correct, somebody can challenge them. But can you have a group of nodes which can actually be credibly watching what is going on? [29:03] So a lot of the auxiliary services for layer 2s are being built on Eigenlayer. So Eigenlayer itself is not a layer 2. Eigenlayer is in some sense takes Ethereum and gives you access to the trust network and the stake to now build any kind of service. Layer 2s are basically a restricted class of services because you have to be able to prove the computation back on Ethereum.

[29:27] But Eigenlayer is basically arbitrary new services that can... [29:31] you know, interoperate with Layto's, but you can also, for example, just go and create your own new chain on Azure. [29:37] I want to build a new kind of Solano. I'll just go to Eigenlayer and start a new chain, but I need stake for the chain. I need a group of nodes. [29:46] get it from eigenlegal. [29:48] So, [29:48] This... [29:49] Level of programmability didn't exist before, so there's no name for this. [29:54] And I think this simple metaphor about layer one and layer two is not quite right or [30:01] not sufficient to capture all the complexity that is going to come up. [30:05] because, [30:06] If you look at the internet, [30:07] It's not like the cloud is a layer one and then like, you know, Stripe is a layer two and something else. All these services interact in some very complicated mesh. [30:19] I have this service, depend on that service. These two services are used by that other service, that service... [30:25] That's how it's gonna be. So this... [30:27] Layer one, layer two, probably not enough, but we are an Ethereum-centric system, which means like I can let it send mints on Ethereum. [30:35] So in that sense, Ethereum is the layer one. All these other things are like complex services that interoperate and... [30:42] you know, settling back to Ethereum. So that's the topology of what this is looking like. [30:48] I have one rough analogy that's probably broken in a lot of ways, but might be a useful framework. So AWS is this really huge business that kind of started, I don't know that much about AWS, but I think it started as basically cloud storage and cloud compute.

[31:05] And then it turns out that like, [31:07] every application on the internet, [31:11] either depends on like AWS or Google Cloud or some small set of these providers that provide like [31:18] internet, scale, cloud compute, and cloud storage. And if you think about each rollup as an application, which is like-- [31:27] the, [31:28] very big simplification of what they actually are, these applications will end up being served by like a bunch of services that are built on top of [31:39] in my analogy that are essentially like built on top of AWS, or they depend on AWS directly themselves. [31:48] but essentially abstract away a whole bunch of infrastructure that they no longer have to deal with. In this analogy, eigenlayer is sort of some version or layer on top of AWS that makes a certain type. [32:01] of [32:02] That basically makes decentralized trust from Ethereum accessible to applications in the form of rollups. [32:08] Cool. That makes sense. I was actually going to say or ask... [32:11] is Eigenlayer basically like AWS. [32:15] We're somewhere in the same world here, figuring it out. [32:19] We're here. No, so great. That makes a lot of sense. So really exciting. Thank you so much. This is super, super useful. I would love to hear from you guys what's next for Eigenlayer. What are you excited about? What's on the roadmap? And yeah, just hear from you what's...

[32:35] getting you juiced in the morning when you wake up. [32:38] Yeah, sure. Gosh, there's... [32:42] So much going on. So I lead like growth, so I'm really focused on kind of like growth and adoption. We've got an incredible team, I think, you know, a couple of them. [32:53] And we have mainnet for Eigenlayer and EigenDA coming a little bit later this year. [33:01] And we've got a lot of attention on the project as, as, [33:06] you know, you noted in ETH Denver. And for us this year, it's all about like, how do we [33:12] get to mainnet successfully, [33:14] and bring all that attention and convert it into real energy and activity on mainnet later this year. [33:21] Great. [33:22] Shuram, anything to add? [33:24] No, I think the main thing is we want to unblock developers from infra constraints, right? [33:33] Imagine you had unlimited throughput. Imagine you had the lowest fees. What set of applications did you build? [33:39] you can start building them in like two months when we go on mainnet. So that is a huge thing. [33:46] So if you had a project where you were thinking, hey, you know, if only [33:50] You know, crypto didn't, you know, I didn't have to worry about block space. If only I didn't have to worry about availability of features, you know, come ping us. There is a lot of cool stuff you can do to cover. [34:02] Perfect note to end on any builders who are listening. [34:05] Ping Shuram, if you've got something going on, if you've got an idea. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you so much. Appreciate you very much. And good luck with Mainnet whenever that happens. Thank you. Thank you, Diana. Thank you, Natasha. I really, really appreciated this conversation.