This marks the second and final phase of EigenLayer’s first airdrop season. It has become common for crypto protocols to conduct “seasons” of airdrops where they distribute tokens in multiple rounds to maximize community engagement and reward loyal users. By spacing out the token distribution over several phases, protocols can sustain interest and incentivize continuous participation from the community, while also identifying and rewarding genuine long-term supporters.

During the first phase, the EigenLayer community delegated over 88% of their claimed tokens, according to the Eigen Foundation. The second phase targets users who interacted with DeFi and Liquid Restaking Token (LRT) protocols such as Kelp, EtherFi, Pendle, and Equilibrium before March 15. These users can now claim their EIGEN tokens through the official claims site until September 7. Each LRT project involved has specific allocations based on user interactions with the EigenLayer protocol. All season one participants, including those in the second phase, will receive a 100 EIGEN bonus if they didn’t already receive it in the first phase.

The EIGEN token aims to enhance the security and functionality of various digital services by utilizing a unique staking mechanism known as “intersubjective forking.” This mechanism allows the token to secure Actively Validated Services (AVSs) against faults that are not easily provable onchain but observable by honest participants. EIGEN can’t be sold on the market yet, since it’s a “non-transferable” token. It is expected that the Eigen Foundation will enable the selling later this year. On AEVO, a trading platform that allows trading of yet-to-be-launched tokens, EIGEN is trading at $4.40.

EigenLayer is already looking ahead to the second season with details about the next season’s distribution to be released in the coming weeks. The EIGEN token is designed from first principles to empower the EigenLayer ecosystem in a complementary role to ETH restaking. ETH restaking offers a mechanism for penalizing objectively attributable faults, extending Ethereum security to other protocols. The new EIGEN token introduces a complementary mechanism that is designed to specifically address “intersubjective” faults – faults that are not possible to address via ETH restaking alone. Intersubjective faults are instances of misbehavior that cannot be objectively identified onchain, yet any two reasonable observers would agree that a penalty is deserved.

EIGEN achieves this property by providing a mechanism in which the token itself can be forked without forking Ethereum mainnet consensus. If there is a perceived intersubjective fault, a fork can be proposed, and users opt into the version they view as valid. This process, called intersubjective forking, occurs entirely within EigenLayer on the Ethereum blockchain, without relying on Ethereum's social consensus. Furthermore, the protocol provides a mechanism for applications and users to utilize the token without needing to keep track of forks. Intersubjective forking is the key innovation behind the EIGEN token.

Intersubjective forking is designed to happen very rarely. To create a fork, a significant fraction of EIGEN tokens must be committed by a challenger. If social consensus validates the fork, the EIGEN tokens belonging to malicious actors will be penalized in the genuine fork, and the challenger will recoup their commitment within the fork and earn a challenger reward. However, if social consensus rejects the fork, the challenger's commitment is burned. This system creates a powerful disincentive for malicious behavior, as a valid fork would result in significant financial loss for bad actors. EIGEN can be staked to AVSs to provide cryptoeconomic security for intersubjective faults, while ETH will continue to be staked to provide a deep pool of cryptoeconomic security for objective faults. This empowers AVSs to make a much wider range of credible commitments than is possible today, significantly expanding the possibilities of what can be built on EigenLayer.