Ethereum Restaking Project EigenLayer Set to Unlock Tokens at $6.7 Billion Valuation

Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer’s token will soon be unlocked for trading, nearly five months after the first tokens were airdropped to early users.

The Eigen Foundation, the organization behind the restaking protocol, said on Twitter (aka X) that EIGEN will be unlocked late Monday at 9pm PT, aka 12am ET Tuesday.

Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, today said that it would list the token to be traded in pairs with other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Tether, by tomorrow. Bitfinex also announced that it would also be one of the first major exchanges to list the token tomorrow.

EIGEN will launch with a total supply of just above 1.67 billion tokens, though a dynamic supply (akin to Ethereum) means that the supply will ultimately grow in time. Futures contracts for EIGEN are trading at a price of $4.03 via Aevo as of this writing, putting the estimated fully diluted valuation (FDV) of EIGEN at over $6.7 billion.

Those behind the project made EIGEN available to ecosystem partners and the protocol’s community via two major airdrops this year. In total, approximately 200 million EIGEN were distributed via those two drops, representing the expected initial circulating supply for the token.

EigenLayer is a project that allows users to stake across multiple blockchains. In the world of crypto, staking is the process of pledging digital assets to a network to keep it running. Users earn rewards for doing so.

DeFiLlama data shows that the total value locked into the project stands at nearly $12 billion. Top crypto networks like Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cardano all require users to stake their holdings to function. 

EigenLayer, which runs on Ethereum, wants to make it possible for crypto users who stake ETH to use the same staked assets on other protocols securely. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward