EIGEN Claim Kicks Off | Bankless

Free Money? Claims on EIGEN, the most anticipated airdrop of 2024, opened earlier today for the majority of eligible first-round recipients! What peculiarities come with this drop, and what can you actually do with your EIGEN?

Eligible EigenLayer users for the phase one, season one distribution had been able to see their allocations in the claims portal for nearly two week but were unable to take custody of their tokens until today at 10 AM PST.

Many users had been understandably upset by EigenLayer’s claiming restrictions that prohibited access to residents of specific nations and VPN users, but methods to circumvent the frontend-imposed restriction have made the rounds on Crypto Twitter, highlighting the frivolity of EigenLayer’s ban in the first place and calling to light the unfortunate fact that US regulators will likely still try to establish jurisdiction against any token issuer conducting a permissionless airdrop.

The initial outcry that the minimum EigenLayer allocation was insufficient to compensate for gas caused the EigenLayer Foundation to distribute an additional 100 EIGEN to all addresses that had interacted with the application prior to the April 29 “stakedrop” announcement.

Despite EIGEN’s current $9 trading price on pre-market perpetual platforms like Aevo leaving this minimum allocation at a generous $900, holders will be unable to cash out as the EIGEN token is expected to be non-transferable until EigenLayer ships a mainnet complete with live actively validated services (AVSs) and operator slashing this September.

Until then, there is literally only one thing to do!

After claiming their EIGEN, recipients can stake their allocation and delegate it to EigenDA, the proprietary EigenLayer data availability solution that leverages the network’s restaked capital to provide enhanced capital efficiency as opposed to competitors like Celestia.

Users who had previously restaked ETH to an EigenDA operator will have their EIGEN automatically delegated to the same operator once staked, meanwhile, users who have not previously delegated to an EigenDA operator will have to undertake this action for themselves.

While EigenDA will be the only AVS allowing users to restake EIGEN upon the feature’s launch, it is anticipated that additional services will soon opt in, enabling stakedrop recipients to generate returns from their allocations by positioning for additional airdrops from AVSs, even though they are unable to directly monetize the drop at this time.