Mixed EIGEN Feelings | Bankless

Buzz and discontent. In today’s flat market, EigenLayer’s announcement of their new EIGEN token has certainly stirred the pot, though not entirely in the way many might have hoped.

As Crypto Twitter digests the latest news, sentiment appears strongly mixed, leaning more towards the downside, with Ethereum’s price seemingly unaffected by the day’s developments.

At 1PM EST, the EigenLayer team released the whitepaper for EIGEN, a token with many unique design features like “Work Token Models” and “Intersubjective Forking.” Impressed with the token’s planned role in the protocol, many in EigenLayer’s community took to Twitter to congratulate the team and explain EIGEN’s nuances.

However, not all feedback was glowing, with many frustrations being aired out relating to the token’s initial nontransferability, its anti-VPN claims flow, and the rewards, or lack thereof, allocated to protocols used to farm points. 

DeFi protocols, like Pendle, known for driving engagement with EigenLayer, found themselves left out of the first airdrop round. This decision prompted much pushback online as farming opportunities provided by these protocols drove significant amounts of deposits to EigenLayer. 

Furthermore, the VC-centric EIGEN allocations have many frustrated. With immediate vesting activated, more than a few regular EigenLayer users have expressed feeling they are getting the short end of the stick, with the protocol in the end farming them rather than vice versa. 

Overall, the planning for the first EIGEN drop, happening on May 10th, looks to have caused much discontent in the space. Given the attention span of crypto, though, this sentiment could quickly flip when its price starts to go up or the tokens become transferrable. So it goes.

In the meantime, the most important things to pay attention to from today’s announcement are the innovations around EIGEN’s token design. Dive into them all here!