Get a16z $70 million lead investment article to understand what EigenCloud is

Author: Viktor Bunin, Coinbase Agreement Expert; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

Congratulations to the EigenLayer team for officially launching EigenCloud! From many perspectives, this can be regarded as the holy grail of the perfect integration of on-chain and off-chain computing paradigms. This article will study its core essence in detail, let us find out.

1. **Core problem: The crypto world can be verified but not fully

programmable**

The core capability of blockchain is to verify and ensure the correctness of computations, but this capability is only applicable to on-chain information. Once off-chain data is involved, the trust model will expire and the oracle must rely on the oracle to put extremely limited information on the link. Although this model can support some applications such as stablecoins, DeFi, and NFT, it will be difficult to connect to complex scenarios that require connection to the real world - these scenarios often require typical "Web2" development operations such as calling standard libraries and initiating API requests.

2. **Solution: Build a verified cloud to improve encryption

programmability**

EigenCloud allows developers to migrate rich application logic to verifiable off-chain containers, retaining only the most basic consensus mandatory logic on the chain, and leaving front-end without verification infrastructure in the existing public cloud. Token logic always resides on the chain, while application logic is mainly transferred off the chain (while maintaining verifiability).

3. EigenCloud application scenarios and value examples

Trusted API Calls – API requests for islanded Web2 data can now directly contact the on-chain token logic. Users can prove any Web2 data feature in their private login information, thereby breaking the Web2 data silos and achieving seamless migration of users to blockchain.

Independent AI Agents - Relying on-chain original production rights characteristics and EigenCloud's programmable capabilities, fully on- chain AI Agents no longer require human authorization to act: they can hold assets, sign contracts, assume debts and even create DAOs.

Enterprise Compliance Guarantee – Combining familiar cloud tools with blockchain-level audit trails provides enterprises with low friction paths to verify compliance and settlement.

4. EigenVerify and EigenCompute will be launched

in 2025 to support EigenCloud

EigenVerify ensures the correctness of the computing process, while EigenCompute encapsulates the entire EigenLayer ecosystem into a developer- friendly toolkit.

5. Gradually analyze the collaborative operation mechanism

Containerized deployment to EigenCompute : Developers create containers that accommodate application logic to extend the token logic of any blockchain. The container is then deployed to EigenCompute, which simplifies the matching process between the appropriate stakeholders and the operating nodes.

EigenLayer ensures computing security: Computing tasks are performed by EigenLayer operating node sets and are guaranteed through some of the security capital allocated specifically for this application by the stakeholder. The calculation results with the signature certificate will be passed to the target blockchain. On-chain contracts can choose to call these unique economic security results immediately, or wait for the challenge period to obtain higher security (similar to optimistic rollups).

EigenDA realizes data availability: Computing data records to the data availability layer (DA), and any observation node can independently verify the computing process through EigenDA.

EigenVerify Challenge Verification: If a challenge is initiated, the original calculation will be verified through the EigenVerify service—the service re-executes the calculations for verification purposes. If the initial node group is judged as a bad node, its pledged assets will be slashed and allocated to the application.

Token fork protection EigenDA and EigenVerify : If most EIGEN stakeholders in EigenDA or EigenVerify are protected from poor behavior and contamination of process, the EIGEN token will trigger the fork. This move will confiscate the pledged assets of the bad pledgee and the operating nodes, ensuring system integrity without simply relying on the credibility of the majority committee. Anyone can initiate a fork by destroying a specific proportion of native EIGEN tokens and receive a larger number of post-fork EIGEN tokens as rewards, thereby ensuring that there is sufficient fork trigger incentives.

Application / chain fork enhances security: Apps, services or chains built on EigenCloud can be selected for pre-committed and synchronized fork with EIGEN tokens. This ensures that on the correct forked chain, the application and service results are always intact.

6. Conclusion

It should be emphasized that this is not a completely new concept. Many projects have tried different versions of similar solutions for their applications, but none of them have been popularized. The fundamental reason is that users still need to maintain absolute trust in application developers. EigenCloud is the first attempt to provide this feature in the form of a service, and now more than $12 billion in pledged capital has provided security guarantees for the agreement.

Verified computing is needed more than ever: it will drive global assets to be chained and provide users, regulators and partners with immutable assurances. Congratulations to the EigenLayer team again on publishing this result and look forward to the launch of the main website!