1/ Congratulations to the @EigenLayer team on announcing the EigenCloud! In many ways this is the holy grail of marrying onchain and offchain computing paradigms into one cohesive whole, so I wrote a breakdown of its most important concepts. Let’s dive in 👇 2/ The Problem: Crypto is verifiable, but not fully programmable.

Blockchains’ superpower is verifying and enforcing computational correctness. However, blockchains can only do that with information that is onchain. Anything offchain, and the trust model breaks, requiring oracles to bring a very limited set of information onchain. This works well for a subset of apps like stablecoins, defi, NFTs, etc., but starts to break down when you’re talking about more complex use cases that tie into the real world where you’d like to use standard libraries, make API calls, and other “web2” developer activities.

1/ Congratulations to the @EigenLayer team on launching the EIGEN token! This is a *wildly* different design from anything we’ve seen to date so I’d like to share simple explanations of the most important concepts in EIGEN to help everyone grok it. Let’s dive in 👇 2/ Work Token Models

A work token model is one in which a user running a node agrees to provide certain services to the network that can then be consumed by other users. Examples of work token models include The Graph network’s nodes providing data to developers or Livepeer providing video transcoding to video distributors (e.g., YouTube). Work tokens are used not only as entry conditions for performing digital work but also for punishing non-compliant workers through a cryptoeconomic mechanism called slashing (i.e., when digital workers break the covenants inherent in the platform, they risk losing their work tokens).

Existing work tokens have at least one of two limitations: (a) they are special-purpose: created specifically for a particular enshrined digital task (e.g., the ETH token is used for validating Ethereum blocks), and/or (b) they are objective: enforceable only when the violations of the digital worker are clearly attributable onchain (via a programmatic proof).

1. Kingmaker feature for blockchain building frameworks 2. Blockchain building framework like Substrate, Cosmos SDK, OP stack, etc. make it ~relatively easy (in the scheme of things) for a dapp developer to also have their own dedicated blockchain without building a blockchain from scratch.

1. Fixed vs variable costs for dapps and blockchains 2. A good way of reframing the decision every dapp must make as to whether to deploy on a general purpose chain or to have their own dappchain, is to decide whether they want their operating costs to be fixed or variable.