Andreessen Horowitz invests $100 million in restaking project EigenLayer
Quick Take
- Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested $100 million in Ethereum restaking project EigenLayer.
- Andreessen Horowitz’s blockchain-focused investment fund a16z crypto led the Series B round announced on Thursday.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested $100 million in Eigen Labs, the core development team behind the Ethereum restaking project EigenLayer, Bloomberg first report reported on Thursday.
EigenLayer later announced the investment in a blog post, with Ali Yahya, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz’s blockchain-focused investment fund a16z crypto, confirming it had led the Series B round.
"We're excited to partner with [EigenLayer founder] Sreeram [Kannan] and the whole team on building a platform that unlocks a new dimension of open innovation on top of Ethereum," Yahya said.
EigenLabs previously closed a $50 million Series A funding round in March 2023, led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Polychain Capital, among others. The Block reported EigenLabs was seeking to raise $50 million at a $250 million post-equity valuation and a $500 million token valuation at the time.
The news comes despite venture funding declining around 85% from a peak of $13.5 billion in Q1 2022, according to The Block Pro’s deals dashboard.
Venture funding. Image: The Block Pro.
What is EigenLayer?
EigenLayer’s protocol allows users to re-stake validators' ether stakes natively or via liquid staking tokens, allocating those funds to economically secure third-party protocols.
"We believe that, by further unbundling cryptoeconomic security from the EVM, EigenLayer has the potential to unlock 100x faster innovation on technologies like consensus mechanisms, novel virtual machines, decentralized oracles, bridges, and networks with specialized hardware in the same way that Ethereum unlocked 100x faster innovation at the application logic level by introducing smart contracts," Yahya added.
The initial phase of Eigenayer’s protocol was rolled out on the Ethereum mainnet in June 2023, allowing users to deposit LSTs from three staking projects: Lido, Rocket Pool and Coinbase. The protocol has since expanded to additional LSTs, including Stakewise’s sETH, Mantle’s mETH, Frax’s sfrxETH, Ankr’s ankrETH and Binance’s wBETH.
Earlier this month, EigenLayer hit around $6 billion in total value locked as its uncapped deposits window drew to a close. It is currently close to hitting $8 billion in TVL, according to DeFiLlama data.
Updated with additional details from EigenLayer and a16z crypto.
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