EigenLayer Attracts Over 30,000 ETH Just Minutes After Raising Deposit Caps

EigenLayer, a protocol designed to allow staked Ether to secure additional applications outside of the Ethereum blockchain, is unquestionably on crypto investors’ radars.

Earlier today, the project raised the cap on liquid staking tokens (LSTs) users could deposit in the protocol from 9,600 to 30,000 staked ETH. After investors quickly piled in, EigenLayer bumped the limit up to 45,000 tokens less than an hour later.

Deposits of Lido’s stETH and Rocket Pool’s rETH, the two most widely held LSTs, are now full. Deposits of cbETH, issued by Coinbase, stand at just above 12,600 at the time of writing. In total, EigenLayer has roughly $75M worth of LSTs deposited in its smart contracts.

LSTs are yield-bearing tokens which represent ETH staked to secure the Ethereum blockchain and have fostered a burgeoning sector dubbed LSTfi.

EigenLayer is one of the more recognizable projects in LSTfi, and the speed at which investors filled up its deposits demonstrates the demand for the project’s restaking capabilities.

EigenLayer is designed to allow other projects, like bridges or oracle networks, to rely on restaked ETH for security, rather than needing to bootstrap their own validator sets and native token economies. These projects would pay EigenLayer for its services, resulting in additional yield for restakers.

Potential Airdrop

EigenLayer doesn’t have a token yet, so some early users are undoubtedly hoping for a future airdrop.

EigenLayer’s rollout is planned in three phases, the first of which was completed with the launch of the restaking mainnet last month. Next up, which EigenLayer has said will happen later this year, is the mainnet for “Operators” who facilitate the usage of the restaking protocol. The final phase is “actively validated services” or AVS, which will be the projects reusing Ethereum’s security to bootstrap their own ventures.

EigenLayer has been the source of some controversy because of concerns that it may threaten the neutrality of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism as more applications come to rely on LSTs.

EigenLayer launched last month with an initial cap of 9,600 LSTs, which was filled in minutes.