EigenLayer announces AVS rewards, EIGEN programmatic incentives

The EigenLayer Foundation has announced an upcoming bounty program that will reward investors and operators who secure Actively Verified Services.

According to details in a blog post, the Ethereum (ETH) retaking protocol is also introducing a new incentive program that will offer 4% of the total supply of EigenLayer (EIGEN).

EigenLayer Foundation announces rewards boost program

EigenLayer connects different re-staking protocols and helps bettors and operators secure AVS by re-staking their ETH. In return, they receive staking rewards.

When the new initiatives are launched, it will be the first time that stakers and node operators will receive token-based rewards directly from AVSs via the EigenLayer protocol.

Meanwhile, 4% of supply will be shared with buyers through “reward boost” distributions as part of the new EIGEN program incentive program.

In this case, stakers and operators will receive rewards proportional to the distribution of AVSs. This means that the more AVSs a network participant supports, the more tokens the EigenLayer Foundation will distribute to them.

“The goal of this design is to encourage AVSs to distribute rewards to stakeholders and operators early, thus taking advantage of early EIGEN program incentives and capturing a larger share,” the blog post said.

The program will also benefit new AVSs

EigenLayer plans to support even AVSs that may not yet have the capacity to distribute day one rewards. Stakeholders and operators supporting such AVSs will still receive small EIGEN distributions.

The ‘reward floor’ will exist outside of the main rewards increase to allow each real AVS to allocate some rewards to their stakers and operators. EigenLayer says this should encourage new actively verified services to join the EigenLayer ecosystem.

AVS rewards will be available in the coming weeks, and programmatic incentives will be available in the coming months.

EigenLaye, which launched contracts onto the mainnet in June of last year, has seen over 4.8 million ETH and 108 million EIGEN re-staking. There are 16 launched AVSs and over 300 operators.