Summer Fellowship 2026

Eigen Labs is building a protocol called EigenLayer that provides crypto-economic security as a service to novel distributed applications such as rollups, bridges, and oracles. Typically these projects are designed to be secured by their own token. However, because it is difficult to bootstrap the value of a new token, this often leads to situations where projects lack sufficient capital to strongly secure their networks.

With EigenLayer, projects come to Ethereum for staked security in place of or in addition to their own token. Stakers in the Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) network opt in to “re-stake” their Ether through EigenLayer to crypto-economically secure these projects. The projects and their users pay fees back to re-stakers in exchange for stronger security guarantees.

EigenLayer makes it possible for developers to build new blockchain networks and protocols that launch with high crypto-economic security, without the need to bootstrap a large amount of value into their own token prior to launch. We believe this modularization of crypto-economic security unlocks new possibilities for open and permissionless innovation.