Ethos, a blockchain project being developed as a “validated service” on EigenLayer, works with various liquid retrieval protocols to allocate ether stakes for the security of Cosmos chains, building commitments of $4 billion.
Protocols such as EtherFi, Puffer, Renzo, Swell and Kelp have committed to allocate ether under their control to Ethos via EigenLayer – demonstrating an early use case for the development of the EigenLayer ecosystem.
As one of the first actively validated services on EigenLayer, Ethos will leverage re-staking and validation via EigenLayer to secure Cosmos ecosystem chains using existing ether stakes.
The launch of Ethos is expected to coincide with the launch of the EigenLayer mainnet, which is expected in the second quarter of this year and is currently in the testnet phase.
“Ethos is a security coordination layer that allows Cosmos chains to easily spin up a validator network, leveraging the economic security of re-staked ETH,” an Ethos spokesperson told The Block.
EigenLayer enables the depositing and “restaking” of ether from various liquid staking tokens, with the aim of allocating these funds to secure third-party protocols such as rollups, oracles, data availability platforms or similar services. Ethos will be one of the beneficiaries of this realignment process.
In the Eigen ecosystem, EigenLayer will reuse ether deposits from stakers and repurpose them to power other protocols at launch. This redeployed ether can be delegated to AVS operators supporting Ethos, who then assign this deployment to a chosen group of guardians within the Cosmos ecosystem to validate the Ethos Layer 1 chain, also known as the ‘Guardian chain’. Stakers in this case are LRTs who make their ether stakes and receive rewards in native tokens from Ethos-secured chains.
EigenLayer security is extended to Cosmos
With over $12 billion in ether received from stakers, EigenLayer’s significant staking contributions come primarily from liquid staking providers. These can be reallocated to actively validated services such as Ethos, strengthening or redeploying the common security framework, deterring potential attacks through economic security.
Shared security via opt-in allows Guardians to co-validate or delegate to secure different Cosmos chains, spreading the security of redeployed ether throughout the ecosystem. Chains powered by Ethos – using the Guardians – can create a decentralized network of trust or increase their economic security.
Ethos users include projects like Sommelier, a DeFi app chain in the Cosmos ecosystem, which aims to use Ethos for security purposes. Sommelier mainly deals with dynamic DeFi vaults, with a total value of almost $70 million. Infinity Chain, another user, is a general-purpose blockchain with an EVM execution environment developed on the Cosmos SDK.
