EigenCloud

EigenCloud's predecessor, EigenLayer, was founded by University of Washington professor Sreeram Kannan in 2022, closing a $14.5M seed round that August.

In March 2023 EigenLayer raised a $50M Series A led by Blockchain Capital at a $500M valuation, establishing the Ethereum restaking paradigm.

In February 2024 EigenLayer closed a $100M Series B led by a16z crypto; that April, EigenLayer and EigenDA went live on Ethereum mainnet.

In October 2024 EigenCloud's EIGEN token became transferable and listed on Binance and Coinbase, with a Season 1 airdrop of 113 million tokens.

In April 2025 EigenLayer activated on-chain slashing on mainnet, letting restaked assets impose real economic penalties on misbehaving nodes.

In June 2025 Eigen Labs rebranded the platform as EigenCloud, a verifiable cloud, with a16z buying $70M of EIGEN and new primitives EigenVerify and EigenCompute.

In July 2025 Eigen Labs cut about 25% of staff to focus on EigenCloud; in 2026 it advanced Darkbloom, a decentralized AI inference network.

In September 2026, EigenLayer officially rebranded to EigenCloud, pivoting to a "verifiable cloud" (EigenDA/EigenCompute/EigenAI) and lifting EIGEN about 23% in a week. ELIP-12 was approved on March 12: a 20% fee on subsidized AVS rewards, and 100% of cloud service fees after operator costs, flow into an EIGEN buyback contract, but as of October the buyback has not materialized at scale; monthly protocol revenue was only about $5.3 million (February 2026 data).

Unlock pressure persists: 39.5 million EIGEN unlocked on September 1, with investor and insider tranches of about 4%-5% of circulating supply each month through October 2027. The restaking sector is shrinking: TVL is down about 77% from its August 2025 peak to roughly $5.5 billion; Polychain redeemed 131.8 million EIGEN in May, and leading LRT ether.fi disabled slashing exposure in August in a de facto exit.

On January 23, 2026 it shipped EigenAI deterministic inference with under 2% overhead; AgentKit followed on March 26, running agents inside TEEs that sign their outputs, with nine agents live by April. Project Darkbloom on April 15 routes inference to idle Apple Silicon through an OpenAI-compatible API and claims costs 50–70% below major clouds, and on April 29 Intel and Google Cloud joined on verifiable agent trust.

In May it proposed ELIP-12: a 20% fee on AVS rewards and all infrastructure revenue after operator costs directed to buying back and burning EIGEN, turning an inflationary token into a fee-driven one. Agentic.Market launched May 16. Restaked TVL fell from $19.5 billion in late 2025 to about $8.9 billion by March 2026 after the Kelp DAO incident triggered some $5.4 billion of withdrawals; EIGEN bottomed at $0.1484 on April 5 and traded between $0.21 and $0.30 in June, more than 90% below its December 2024 high of $5.65.

EigenCloud's Future strategy and roadmap: EigenCloud's pivot answers the restaking valuation problem: with AVS demand too small to justify emissions, it recast itself as a verifiable cloud, charging callers directly through EigenDA, EigenCompute and EigenVerify, then routing all infrastructure revenue after operator costs into a buyback contract under ELIP-12, including 20% of subsidized AVS rewards. The model resembles cloud billing rather than staking yield, since revenue tracks calls instead of locked stake. It holds roughly nine-tenths of the restaking market, with Symbiotic and Karak together below one-tenth, but its real rivals are confidential computing from centralized clouds and ZK proof networks. Success depends on enterprises paying separately for verifiability rather than treating it as a security narrative.

EigenCloud grew out of EigenLayer and was founded by Sreeram Kannan. He completed his undergraduate degree in India, earned a PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then became an associate professor at the University of Washington. He introduced restaking in 2021, published the EigenLayer whitepaper and founded Eigen Labs in 2023, and in 2025 assembled the EigenCloud team while keeping oversight of research.

Alan Curtis is COO. He co-founded and led Rio Network, which worked on liquid staking and node operations, and joined after the company merged into Eigen Labs in 2024, now owning business development and institutional partnerships. Engineering is split into protocol, verification services and developer platform groups, research is published jointly with universities, and each group reports to the CTO or COO.

Arjun Bhuptani has joined EigenCloud as Head of Yukon project in September 2026. He is the founder of Connext Network and co-creator of Moloch DAO, with a background in physics. His role will focus on leading the Yukon initiative within EigenCloud's verifiable cloud platform.