Re:Staking Weekly #20
Standing by Verifiable Services with Robert Drost, Celo’s L2 Transition, Sreeram’s Take on EigenLayer’s Focus, and New AVS Integrations
Welcome to Issue #20 of Re:Staking Weekly! 👋
We start this week with an interview with Robert Drost, Ph.D., the CEO and Executive Director of the Eigen Foundation, who oversees roughly half of the EIGEN token supply. Robert is not your typical crypto degen. He comes from a multi-decade run at Sun Microsystems after earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, later founding his own networking startup, and eventually joining ConsenSys. Some might argue that Robert is too traditional, but I’d say he carries the lived experience of Silicon Valley — and, by extension, the history of computation itself. His firm belief in verifiable services is a strong dose of confidence in where we’re headed.
Also in this issue: Celo’s L2 transition, Sreeram’s take on EigenLayer’s focus, new AVS integrations, and more.
Let’s get into it! 🚀
Standing by Verifiable Services | Robert Drost, CEO of Eigen Foundation
Robert Drost isn’t your typical crypto executive. He’s not selling you coins, shouting from Twitter, or pivoting every quarter. With a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and a career spanning Sun Microsystems, ConsenSys, and founding high-performance networking startups, Drost brings a level of technical sobriety that’s rare in the space.
Today, he serves as CEO and Executive Director of the Eigen Foundation — the independent governance entity behind the EigenLayer protocol — overseeing roughly half of the EIGEN token supply. Together with Eigen Labs, the engineering arm led by visionary founder Sreeram Kannan, Drost is focused on something far more ambitious than another DeFi yield machine: building the foundational layer for a verifiable, trustless internet infrastructure.
1. The Verifiable Cloud
“The next generation of applications — not just crypto apps — will be verifiable by default.”
At the core of Robert’s thesis is the idea of a Verifiable Cloud — an architectural evolution that moves us from centralized, opaque cloud services to transparent, incentive-aligned infrastructure.
What I appreciate most is his clarity and firmness in his stance: EigenLayer isn’t a decentralized AWS alternative. Instead, It’s aiming to offer something better — something inevitable. In Robert’s view, we shouldn’t be thinking about competition with legacy infra; we should be expecting its deprecation. EigenLayer replaces centralized trust with cryptographic verification.
2. Four Flywheels of Growth
In Drost’s framing, EigenLayer’s core unlock is mapping the crypto paradigm — shared trust and consensus at the L1 — onto general-purpose software systems. The mission is to absorb $2 trillion of Web2 software revenue into Web3.
Of the four flywheels that represent EigenLayer’s growth strategy, the first two are already spinning. The latter two are now in active development — backed by a $150M+ war chest and an FDV of $1.5B worth of EIGEN tokens.
Security Supply – EigenLayer is already over-provisioned in ETH security.
Operator Marketplace – A decentralized marketplace where infrastructure providers compete to serve protocols.
AVS Ecosystem – The buildout of Autonomous Verified Services across verticals (compute, AI, APIs, etc).
Consumer Layer – A unified surface for identity, data, and assets — real usability for end users.
3. Governance Without Speculation
As head of the Eigen Foundation, governance is a major part of his job description. Drost's focus is shaping the EIGEN token around one core utility: off-chain forking.
Off-chain forking is one of EigenLayer’s most interesting innovations — and one whose importance few people truly grasp. It enables AVSs to fork independently during operator disagreements without the need to fork Ethereum itself. This model retains fundamental crypto-native guarantees while decoupling execution from L1-level coordination.
At the same time, the token is also used for growth. The Foundation has minted half the token supply to drive the aforementioned four flywheels — split roughly into thirds: airdrops for community alignment, strategic partnerships to strengthen the AVS ecosystem, and public goods initiatives to support broader Web3 infrastructure.
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News Bites
This week’s major news: Celo, a prominent L1, is transitioning into an Ethereum L2 and will use EigenDA as its data availability layer. Read Kydo’s analysis on why L2 migration is poised to become a major trend.
Watch this short clip of Lagrange CEO Ismael explaining why EigenLayer is the most effective way to bootstrap new decentralized infrastructure and applications.
Unmarshal, a new data indexing infrastructure focused on the AI vertical, announced its integration with EigenLayer this week.
Sreeram sets the record straight on whether EigenLayer has pivoted.
ZEX, a decentralized exchange bringing centralized exchange performance, is now live on testnet. ZEX is built on Zelluer — a fast-finality consensus and sequencer network secured by EigenLayer.
AVSs built with the Othentic stack can now be monitored and analyzed directly in the Othentic Hub.
Dextr, a decentralized and MEV-resistant order-matching network, is now live on testnet. It leverages EigenLayer’s economic security to secure its off-chain infrastructure.
In this a16z interview, EigenLayer CEO Sreeram shares his journey into crypto and the story behind founding EigenLayer.
That's it for this week's newsletter! As always, feel free to send us a DM or comment directly below with your thoughts or questions.
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See you next week and thanks for reading,