Why Eigenlayer?

What is EigenLayer?

Eigenlayer is a highly anticipated protocol that helps Ethereum scale by allowing new consensus mechanisms and rollups to be deployed on Ethereum. The protocol is secured by ETH restaking.

This introduces features and security properties to Ethereum, such as data availability layers, rollups, oracles, and the Gasp omnichain zk-rollup. EigenLayer allows Ethereum users to use staked ETH to secure those services.

What is L1-grade Liquidity?

Gasp introduces a novel, but simple idea to cross-chain value exchange which we believe is critically important: Don’t add new risks!

Our research team has published an article describing the omnichain zk-rollup, a protocol that ensures that each token stays as secure as transactions on its native ecosystem. It was very important for us to avoid new security assumptions like bridge risks, multi-sigs, MPC, etc.

This means that when you have a trading pair like ETH↔BTC, each token will be as secure as the ecosystem where it originates from. This has not been done before. Liquidity is secured by L1-grade security. We call this L1-grade liquidity.

Why EigenLayer?

ZK-rollups by themselves are not powerful enough to ensure the validity of cross-chain swaps. They can only attest to transactions within a single L1, but not transactions between them, such as an ETH↔BTC swap. To realize our vision of building an exchange protocol that allows L1-grade liquidity, we require a trustless source of truth attesting to the honest behaviour of the protocol facilitating cross-chain swaps itself. In other words, we need Ethereum to vouch for Gasp. Eigenlayer makes this possible.

Gasp on Eigenlayer will make cross-chain atomic swaps as easy as calling a smart contract on Ethereum or any other connected chain.

Testnet Rollout

Gasp recently celebrated its ‘feature-complete’ milestone for the original roadmap, offering features like gas-free swaps, MEV-minimization, algorithmic buy-and-burn, liquidity gauges, and third-party liquidity incentives. All these features will be available on the Gasp mainnet right after the launch. The final version of Gasp will allow users to securely trade all tokens from all chains. With the upcoming introduction of on-chain limit orders, Gasp is also primed to become the settlement layer for cross-chain order flow auction settlement.

“DeFi today is very inconvenient and risky and the crypto industry is not yet ready to serve a billion users. Gasp solves this! Our vision is to build an omnichain liquidity protocol that allows you to trade all tokens from all chains. Eigenlayer will provide Gasp with the strong economic security that is needed to deliver our vision.”, says Peter Kris, co-founder and CEO of Gasp.

The Gasp team has already launched the first Eigenlayer testnet which is accompanied by community initiatives to recruit new network validators, operators, restakers, and testnet users.