By
Bena Ilyas
June 6th, 2024
Hudson Jameson, vice president at Polygon Labs, appreciated Drake’s transparency, along with David Wong, the co-founder of zkSecurity, who termed Drake’s post “next level transparency”.
Justin Drake, a known Ethereum researcher, was announced as the new advisor for Eigen Foundation, an entity supporting the EigenLayer protocol and community.
In a post on social media platform X, Drake revealed the incentives he received following his new role at the Eigen Foundation. Drake highlighted the importance of transparency in the community and cited it as the reason for his reveal.
Drake received incentives in the form of EIGEN tokens for his advisorship. The incentives potentially surpass the value of his current assets, which include primarily Ethereum (ETH). These EIGEN tokens will be locked for three years while also amounting to millions of US dollars.
In an attempt to calm the public, Drake offered to return all incentives from his advisorship to the projects in the Ethereum ecosystem that are working on something meaningful either through investments or charity. Drake said that if his duty at the Eigen Foundation can in any way or another collide with the Ethereum community, then he would terminate the advisorship.
Drake’s Role in the Eigen Foundation
Drake stated that his role at the Eigen Foundation focuses solely on researching restaking risks, and he will not be included in marketing materials. This focus will allow Drake to maintain a critical perspective on EigenLayer, advocating for risk mitigations such as preventing the “erosion of solo validators and managing the intersubjective overloading of Ethereum consensus.”
He talked about a case where the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and Eigen Foundation crossed paths and a conflict of interest arose while pointing out that the EF is a large organization with over 300 employees, and only a small fraction are formally involved with EigenLayer, adding:
“To my knowledge 3 EFers have a formal relationship with EigenLayer entities: one as an early EigenLabs investor, and two as recent EigenFoundation advisors. EFers are some of the highest integrity people I know and I don’t see the 1% of EFers formally involved with EigenLayer compromising their morals.”
In his advisory capacity, Drake remains an independent thinker and an Ethereum researcher. While he acknowledged the potential risks to his reputation, Drake emphasized that his reveal would demonstrate that accepting the advisorship “is at least a considered move with calculated risks”.
In an extended post, Drake also shared his thoughts on the broader implications of restaking for Ethereum. He likened restaking to artificial intelligence (AI), suggesting that while it can be a powerful tool for enhancing Ethereum, it also introduces systemic risks.
He identified two primary categories of restaking risks: chronic, such as the slow erosion of solo validators, and acute, like major infrastructure failures or market meltdowns. Drake proposed several directions for mitigating these risks, including decoupling execution proposing from validation, economic stake capping, and intersubjective slashing.
Hudson Jameson, vice president at Polygon Labs, appreciated Drake’s transparency, along with David Wong, the co-founder of zkSecurity, who termed Drake’s post “next level transparency”.