decrypt.co
For years, blockchain developers have faced a frustrating limitation: their applications could only verify what happened on the blockchain itself.
Everything else, from AI computations to real-world data, remained trapped in a trust vacuum. Now, EigenLayer believes it has cracked the code.
The Ethereum restaking protocol announced on Tuesday that venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz has invested an additional $70 million to launch EigenCloud, a platform that extends blockchain's verification capabilities to any application, whether on or off-chain.
“EigenCloud turns that momentum into a unified platform,” Eigen Labs CEO Sreeram Kannan told Decrypt. "Anyone building on any blockchain can deploy verifiable applications without needing to be a blockchain expert.”
One of the ways the EigenCloud platform does this is by helping developers know “how correctness is enforced through programmable slashing, custom settlement modes, and flexible operator selection,” Kannan explained.
The investment from a16z's Crypto Fund IV follows the firm's previous $100 million Series B round. With over $12 billion in total value locked, EigenLayer has become Ethereum's largest restaking protocol since its mainnet launch two years ago.
The new platform addresses a fundamental limitation in blockchain development: the inability to verify complex off-chain computations while maintaining blockchain-level trust guarantees.
Over time, EigenLayer envisions the platform as something that could transform verifiability "into a programmable, economic primitive" that could operate "where trust and correctness matter most," it said in a statement.
Breaking barriers
EigenCloud introduces three core components: EigenVerify for dispute resolution, EigenDA for data availability, and EigenCompute for execution.
The new components allow developers to build applications that handle tasks outside the blockchain while preserving cryptographic verification.
The platform operates through EigenLayer's network of Autonomous Verifiable Services (AVSs), with over 200 services currently live or in development.
AVSs are decentralized off-chain modules that leverage EigenLayer’s shared, restaked Ethereum security to run custom, verifiable tasks, such as oracles, bridges, data availability layers, and middleware.
Those services utilize the protocol's approximately $12 billion in restaked assets to secure around $2 billion in application value.
Financial services firm Securitize plans to use the platform to verify asset pricing data for BlackRock's $2 billion BUIDL tokenized fund, marking one of EigenCloud's first enterprise implementations.
Asked about slashing risks with AVSs, Eigen Labs’ Kannan told Decrypt that EigenLayer is “built with systemic resilience in mind,” while acknowledging slashing as a "core enforcement mechanism that economically incentivizes truth.”
In this case, Kannan argues that the implementation of slashing is “isolated” to individual AVSs.
Slashing refers to the penalty mechanism where a portion (or all) of a restaker's assets can be forcibly taken (slashed) if the operator they delegate to acts dishonestly or incorrectly while running an AVS.
Such events “do not spill over between AVSs or to the Ethereum base layer. This compartmentalization ensures that failures are localized and containable, rather than systemic,” Kannan said.
"EigenLayer is surmounting the technical bottlenecks of blockchains to enable a new category of applications," Ali Yahya, who led the investment for a16z, said.
The platform targets use cases across AI verification, prediction markets, medical records, and traditional web services requiring verifiable computation.
By enabling off-chain compute services backed by EigenLayer's restaking mechanism, developers can build applications that were previously impossible within blockchain constraints.
Developers can access an alpha version starting Tuesday, featuring performance upgrades for EigenDA and limited access to EigenVerify services.
Broader availability is planned for later this year, with additional dispute resolution modes and automated infrastructure management tools in development.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair