EigenLayer announces AVS rewards, EIGEN programmatic incentives

The EigenLayer Foundation has announced an upcoming rewards program that will reward stakers and operators for securing Actively Validated Services.

According to details in a blog post, the Ethereum (ETH) restaking protocol is also introducing a new incentive program that will offer 4% of the EigenLayer (EIGEN) total supply.

EigenLayer Foundation announces rewards-boost program

EigenLayer links different restaking protocols, and stakers and operators help secure AVSs by restaking their ETH. In return, they receive staking rewards.

When the new initiatives launch, it will be the first time the stakers and node operators get token-based rewards directly from AVSs via the EigenLayer protocol.

Meanwhile, 4% of the supply will be shared with recipients through “rewards boost” distributions as part of the new EIGEN programmatic incentives program.

In this case, stakers and operators will receive rewards proportional to AVSs’ distribution. What it means is that the more AVSs a network participant supports, the more tokens the EigenLayer Foundation will distribute to them.

“The goal of this design is to incentivize AVSs to begin distributing rewards to stakers and operators early, to benefit from and obtain a larger share of the early EIGEN programmatic incentives,” the blog post read.

Program to also benefit new AVSs

EigenLayer plans to support even AVSs that may not yet have the capacity to distribute rewards on the first day. Stakers and operators supporting such AVSs will still receive small distributions of EIGEN.

The ‘rewards floor’ will be available outside the main rewards boost to allow every genuine AVS to allocate some rewards to its stakers and operators. EigenLayer says this should encourage new actively validated services to join the EigenLayer ecosystem.

AVS rewards will launch in the coming weeks, while programmatic incentives are scheduled for the coming months.

EigenLaye, which launched its contracts to the mainnet in June last year, has seen over 4.8 million ETH and more than 108 million EIGEN restaked. There are 16 launched AVSs and over 300 operators.