A16z leads a $70 million investment: Understand what EigenCloud is in one article.

Author: Viktor Bunin, Coinbase protocol expert; Translator: Jinse Finance xiaozou

Congratulations to the EigenLayer team on the official launch of EigenCloud! From multiple perspectives, this can be considered the holy grail of the perfect integration of on-chain and off-chain computing paradigms. This article will specifically study its core essence, let us explore it together.

1**, Core Issue: The crypto world is verifiable but has not achieved full programmability**

The core ability of blockchain lies in verifying and ensuring computational correctness, but this capability is applicable only to on-chain information. Once off-chain data is involved, the trust model fails, and it must rely on oracles to bring extremely limited information on-chain. This model can support some applications such as stablecoins, DeFi, and NFTs, but it becomes inadequate in complex scenarios that require integration with the real world—these scenarios often involve invoking standard libraries, initiating API requests, and other typical "Web2" development operations.

2**, Solution: Build a Verifiable Cloud to Enhance Cryptographic Programmability**

EigenCloud allows developers to migrate rich application logic to verifiable off-chain containers, retaining only the most basic consensus enforcement logic on-chain, while leaving the front-end and other non-verifiable infrastructure in the existing public cloud. The token logic always resides on-chain, while the application logic is primarily moved off-chain (while maintaining verifiability).

3**、EigenCloud Application Scenarios and Value Examples**

TrustedAPICall -- API requests for isolated Web2 data can now directly trigger on-chain token logic. Users can prove any Web2 data characteristics in their private login information, breaking the Web2 data silo and achieving seamless migration of users to the blockchain.

Autonomous AI Agent -- Leveraging the original production rights characteristics of blockchain and the programmable capabilities of EigenCloud, fully on-chain AI agents can act without human authorization: they can hold assets, enter into contracts, incur debts, and even create DAOs.

Enterprise Compliance Assurance -- Combining familiar cloud tools with blockchain-level audit trails to provide enterprises with a verifiable and low-friction path to compliance and settlement.

4**、EigenVerify and EigenCompute will launch supporting EigenCloud in 2025

EigenVerify ensures the correctness of the computation process, while EigenCompute encapsulates the entire EigenLayer ecosystem into a developer-friendly toolkit.

5**, Gradual Analysis of the Collaborative Operation Mechanism**

Containerized deployment to EigenCompute: **Developers create containers that house application logic for scaling the token logic of any blockchain. The containers are then deployed to EigenCompute, a platform that streamlines the matching process between suitable stakers and operational nodes.

EigenLayer****Ensuring Computational Security: Computational tasks are executed by a set of EigenLayer operating nodes and are secured through a portion of the staking capital specifically allocated by stakers for this application. The computation results, accompanied by signature certificates, will be transmitted to the target blockchain. On-chain contracts can choose to immediately invoke these results with unique economic security or wait until the challenge period ends to obtain higher security (similar to optimistic rollups).

EigenDA** achieves data availability:** Compute data records to the Data Availability layer (DA), and any observation node can independently verify the computation process through EigenDA.

EigenVerify Challenge Verification: If a challenge is initiated, the original computation will be verified through the EigenVerify service—this service is specifically designed to re-execute computations for verification purposes. If the initial node group is determined to be bad nodes, their staked assets will be slashed and allocated to the application party.

Token Fork Protection EigenDA and EigenVerify: **If the majority of EIGEN stakers that protect EigenDA or EigenVerify behave poorly and cause process contamination, the EIGEN token will trigger a fork. This will penalize the staked assets of poor stakers and operating nodes, ensuring system integrity without solely relying on the credibility of the majority committee. Anyone can initiate a fork by destroying a specific proportion of the native EIGEN token and receive a larger amount of EIGEN tokens after the fork as a reward, thereby ensuring sufficient incentives to trigger a fork.

Applications**/**Chain Fork Enhancements for Security: Applications, services, or chains built on EigenCloud can choose to pre-commit and synchronize forks with EIGEN tokens. This ensures that on the correct forked chain, the results of applications and services always remain in a complete state.

6**, Conclusion**

It is important to emphasize that this is not a brand new concept. Many projects have attempted different versions of similar solutions for its application, but none have become widespread. The fundamental reason is that users still need to maintain absolute trust in application developers. EigenCloud is the first attempt to provide this functionality as a service, and it currently has over $12 billion in staked capital to provide security for the protocol.

Now more than ever, verifiable computation is needed: it will drive the on-chain of global assets and provide immutable guarantees to users, regulators, and partners. Congratulations again to the EigenLayer team for this achievement, looking forward to the mainnet launch!