Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist said that he "recently" became an advisor to EigenLayer, joining colleague Justin Drake on similar terms.
Together with Justin Drake, I have recently decided to become an advisor to Eigenlayer, on the same conditions -- I am taking this position personally, not representing the Ethereum Foundation, and with a focus on risks and decentralization. I am therefore fully expected to take…
— Dankrad Feist (@dankrad) May 21, 2024"I take this position personally, I do not represent the Ethereum Foundation and I focus on risks and decentralization. Therefore, I am rightly expected to have opposite views on EigenLayer," Feist wrote.
He added that he receives a "significant amount" of EIGEN tokens in this position, however, this "will not affect thoughts about the protocol and its future development."
To confirm their critical view, the developer identified several existing risks of EigenLayer:
The "main agent problem" is that the operator does not necessarily coincide with the person providing the capital and, therefore, may have different incentives than those for which the protocol was originally developed. Liquid staking tokens also pose a great threat of "divergence of interests". Additional burden on stakeholders due to the launch of new services, which may lead to centralization.Using the restaking infrastructure to carry out attacks on the Ethereum protocol in the form of "bribery".The development of protocols similar to EigenLayer could lead to a "dystopia of dangerously designed re-betting services."Feist's publication, like Drake's post, provoked a mixed reaction from the community. Many are afraid of a possible conflict of interest.
your seriously stating that taking huge compensation from an organization with different incentives than Ethereum will not influence your decision making???
You realize we’re not five year olds right?
"Do you seriously think that receiving huge compensation from an organization with incentives other than Ethereum will not affect decision-making? We are not five years old, do you understand?", — one of the users was indignant.
A user with the nickname tim-clancy thanked Fights for disclosing information and admitted that "in order for the subtractive model to work, members of the Ethereum Foundation need to receive funding from this so-called industry."
Thank you for the disclosure. For the subtractive model to work, Foundation members need to get this \"industry\" funding eventually. What you and Justin are doing is not inherently worse than Protocol Guild mustering client team funding from dangerous actors like Lido.
I think…
"What you and Justin are doing is inherently no worse than Protocol Guild raising funds for the [Ethereum] client team from dangerous entities like Lido. I think you two are mostly experiencing anxiety because this is EigenLayer, and EigenLayer is specifically bad," the user believes.
In February, protocol co-founder Sriram Kannan announced that the project had no plans to launch a token. Already at the end of April, the team announced the EIGEN airdrop. The first stage of distribution started in May.
Recall that in the same month, the media learned about the support of the founders of the DeFi platform Lido competitor EigenLayer — Symbiotic.