Community Update: Airdrops and the EigenLayer Ecosystem Network

CoinDesk published an article on airdrops in our ecosystem and Eigen Labs employee participation in those airdrops. We’ve written a community update on what happened, why it happened, and steps we’ve taken. 

We want to make clear that we have no knowledge or evidence of any employee at Eigen Labs pressuring any team to unduly benefit the Eigen Labs corporate entity or its employees. If anyone has evidence that there was any improper behavior from any members of the Eigen Labs team, please reach out to [email protected].

We also want to point out that we had already mitigated any incentive misalignment, or even the appearance of, for Eigen Labs employees by changing our policy back in May so that Eigen Labs employees did not receive future airdrops. 

What Happened

Projects in the EigenLayer ecosystem airdropped to Eigen Labs employees. Each airdrop was also sent to multiple other projects and individuals. To our knowledge, Eigen Labs was not treated differently and nor was there any coercion or preferential treatment from Eigen Labs to any of the teams. For example, AltLayer specifically mentioned Eigen Labs and that they airdropped to dozens of other projects. Some Eigen Labs individuals have claimed, sold, or staked these airdrops, and many chose to do so out in public using ENSs or publicly identifiable addresses. 

Why It Happened

Crypto companies have multiple tools (co-marketing, investments, treasury swaps, airdrops, etc) for business development and partnerships. Companies in the EigenLayer ecosystem are no different. In order for ecosystem participants to reward each other, our view was that team-sourced contributor lists were superior as a distribution mechanism to widely-used alternatives such as Github contributions, which can be heavily Sybilled, as well as exclude non-developer contributions. Therefore, we helped source contributor lists for a variety of projects from the EigenLayer ecosystem that these projects used for their airdrops.

Steps We’ve Taken 

At Eigen Labs, we are building credibly neutral core infrastructure for Ethereum. We recognize that the community’s trust in our neutrality is critical and many months prior to this article, we had already taken several steps to significantly improve the transparency in our process for community airdrops. 

We realized that airdrops to employees may create misaligned incentives and updated our internal policies in May so that if projects wanted to airdrop to Eigen Labs in the future, it could only go to the company. We realized this is an important issue for the broader EigenLayer ecosystem so in June we created the EigenLayer Ecosystem Network, which was inspired by the Protocol Guild. This network enables projects to list their company addresses so that any project that wishes to airdrop tokens can do so to companies on the list. This creates a mechanism for cross-project alignment using crypto-native tools without any mis-aligned incentives. 

Crypto is powerful because it can create strong incentive alignment across multiple actors. However, getting these incentives right requires continued experimentation, feedback and learning, to which we remain steadfastly committed. As we evolved from a small early-stage project earlier this year to a more central position in the ecosystem, we have commensurately made several improvements to both our products and processes. We want to assure you that we are continuously listening to the community to improve transparency and trust. We view the role of EigenLayer as building the coordination layer for our ecosystem participants to create stronger partnerships and mutually synergistic interactions, and will continue to march ahead towards our goals with your support.