EigenDA: Bringing Cloud Scale Compute To Crypto

The DA is the first ever AVS to be launched on EigenLayer, but what sets it apart from the rest?

When EigenLayer officially launched its mainnet last week, it did so with the simultaneous launch of the first ever AVS to go online: EigenDA

Since then Node Operators have been working to gather the minimum required 92 ETH in order to validate on this service. As of the time of writing operators, including Cosmostation, are already validating on the AVS.

But before we dive deeper here… What is data availability?

DA refers to guarantees that the data needed to verify a block in the blockchain is actually available to all network participants.

It is an essential component of blockchains as it allows for full validation of the chain’s history and current state by any participant. Without this participants might not be able to independently verify the legitimacy of txs and blocks. And this in turn could give rise to fraud or censorship within the network.

TL;DR — Data Availability ensures trustlessness, facilitates decentralization, and improves security.

Now, let’s look at EigenDA

EigenDA is a data availability store made by EigenLabs and built on top of EigenLayer using the Ethereum restaking primitive.

The data availability AVS essentially stores rollup txs until their computed state is finalized on the rollup bridge.

And who is it for?

Well, it’s for rollups that are looking for in cost-effective, hyperscale throughput.

Cool… but how does it work? ​

In order to understand what’s going on under the hood here, it’s important to note the following three EigenDA components:

• Operators
• The Disperser (untrusted)
• Retrievers (untrusted)

- EigenDA operators

… are third-parties that are running the EigenDA node software and are responsible for storing blobs associated with valid storage requests. These are requests where fees are paid and the provided blob chunk is verified against a provided commitment and proof (KZG-based).

If the verification is successful, then the operator stores the blob and signs a message and sends it back to the disperser.

Cosmostation is a proud EigenLayer operator and can be delegated to via this link.

- The EigenDA disperser

… is an untrusted service that interacts between EigenDA clients, operators, and contracts.

Essentially EigenDA clients will make dispersal requests to the disperser, which then encodes the blob, calculates the encoded blob’s special commitment, and generates a proof for each chunk.

The disperser then sends chunks, commitments, and proofs to operators. The operators in turn send back signatures, which are then aggregated by the disperser and uploaded to Ethereum, in calldata form, to the EigenDA contract.

- The EigenDA retriever

… is able to query operators for blob chunks and verify that these are accurate. This is on top of being able to reconstruct the original blob for the user. EigenDA clients may also host the retriever via a sidecar.

High Level Explainer: How It Works

Below is a graph that details the data flow through EigenDA. ​

1. The rollup sequencer creates a block with txs and sends this batch of txs as a blob to the EigenDA disperser sidecar.
2. The disperser then encodes the blob into chunks, generates a commitment and proofs for each chunk, and forwards these chunks to EigenDA Operators. The Operators send signatures confirming that they received the chunks, and are storing it.
3. The disperser then aggregates the received signatures, and registers the blob onchain by sending a tx to the EigenDA Manager contract.
4. The EigenDA Manager contract verifies the aggregated signature and stores the result onchain.
5. Once the blob has been stored offchain and registered onchain, the sequencer posts the EigenDA blob ID to its inbox contract in a tx.
6. Before accepting the blob ID into the rollup’s inbox, the inbox contract consults the EigenDA manager contract whether the blob was certified available. If it was, the blob ID is allowed into the inbox contract. If not, the blob ID is discarded.

What sets EigenDA apart?

While still prominent… Data Availability is no longer the new shiny narrative, which means that projects in this space will need to differentiate themselves from each other in order to succeed. Having said that, EigenDA has a lot going on for it over its competitors:

• It is scalable.
  Effective DA layers need to be a sufficiently scalable. But this poses a problem as decentralization, a core tenet of blockchain projects, works against scaling. On the flipside EigenDA’s architecture is such that decentralization IS scaling. It does this by scaling horizontally where the more operators there are on the network, the more throughput the network enables. It currently it provides 10 MB/s of write throughput… 5x more than its nearest competitor.
• It is secure.
  EigenDA has launched with billions of dollars of economic security and is decentralized through hundreds of operators that are registered in EigenLayer. It is their delegated stake that imposes an economic cost to misbehavior.
• It is decentralized.
  Inspired by Danksharding, EigenDA blob writes are registered with contracts on Ethereum. Ethereum L2s using EigenDA avoid any trust assumption on another chain’s light client, which can be fooled by dishonest validator sets.

EigenDA’s data availability specs compared to others

Data Availability Rate is how often you can reliably access information in a system. A high rate means data is almost always available.

Node Bandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. It measures how much data can be sent over a specific connection in a given amount of time.

Cost cutting

Setting that aside, EigenDA also works to cut general DA costs by reducing: the capital cost of staking (less opportunity cost by leveraging EigenLayer security), operational cost (via erasure coding), and congestion cost (via high data throughput & bandwidth data reservation).

Customizable

EigenDA is designed in such a way that Rollup Clients can be flexible in the parameters they set. This is thanks to EigenDA’s modular architecture. Adjustable parameters include: safety/liveness tradeoffs, staking token modalities, erasure coding, payment tokens accepted, etc.

Roadmap

Looking ahead EigenDA is has its sights set on enabling even higher data throughput rates going as high as 1 GBps, which could lead to the inclusion of bandwidth-intensive apps like multiplayer gaming and video streaming.

Cosmostation in Ethereum

Cosmostation empowers blockchain businesses by providing secure solutions and invaluable infrastructure legos essential for scaling and onboarding users onto blockchain networks. Securing blockchain networks requires continuous operational oversight and since 2018, Cosmostation has been providing a suite of robust solutions that enables businesses to contribute to blockchain network security and visibility without the overhead of managing infrastructure.

Since its inception Cosmostation has served over 500,000 users and has US$ 1.5 bil. in AUM, across 70+ chains. This is alongside its proud role as an Ethereum operator and Cosmos genesis validator, with 99% of uptime and no slashing events. Cosmostation’s experience in the Ethereum arena includes working with EtherFi, Obol, SSV, and the Lido DVT Module.

Mintscan

Cosmostation

With this in mind, consider delegating your restaked ETH to one of the most trusted node operators in the space right here!

https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator/0x3303fda11d6bafe0833d6a6c44c2b8edbab92e4d

Mintscan

Moreover, Cosmostation offers its own blockchain explorer, Mintscan. It provides insightful interactions with chain data across various networks and also features a user-centric design, with transparency placed at the core of its ethos.

Mintscan