Eigen Labs Motivated EigenLayer-Related Projects to Airdrop Tokens to Its Employees

• Eigen Labs employees collected $5 million in airdrops from projects launched in the EigenLayer ecosystem.
• These airdrops have engendered conflicts of interest doubts, with many asking if Eigen Labs and Eigen Foundation do not favor projects that do not airdrop tokens to their employees.

The firm behind the EigenLayer protocol, Eigen Labs, gave out wallet addresses of its employees and those working for its nonprofit vertical, Eigen Foundation, to projects deployed within the EigenLayer ecosystem. These projects routed millions of dollars in their native tokens to these wallets during their airdrop campaigns.

As this information came out, many have criticized Eigen Labs’ actions due to conflict-of-interest issues. Eigen Foundation provides grants to selected projects operating in the EigenLayer ecosystem, and airdropping wallets to its employees has garnered tremendous concern.

These airdrops amounted to at least $5 million (when token prices were soaring), split across numerous employee wallets. Eigen Labs has been accused of sending a list of wallet addresses to at least one project while the others requested the firm for the addresses, with some claiming they did so because they felt the pressure to.

Cessiah Lopez, crypto research fellow at VentureESG, a nonprofit, and assistant researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre, said, “Eigen Labs and its Foundation are stated to be ‘credibly neutral,’ implying a responsibility to avoid any appearance of bias or preferential treatment.” They emphasized how this could be a situation that seems concerning but is not actually.

EigenLayer – The Hottest Protocol Coming Out of the Ethereum Ecosystem

EigenLayer is one of the most spoken-about projects launched in 2023, bringing its restaking utility to ensure better security for protocols bootstrapping their validation mechanisms. Since its launch, it has raised over $100 million in venture capital funds and exhibits over $15 billion in total value locked (TVL). Numerous projects have built on it to harness security resources from Ethereum, including data availability layers, oracles, and more.

Some of these projects airdropped their native tokens to Eigen Labs. Ether.Fi sent over $3.5 million worth of tokens, AltLayer over $1.5 million, and Renzo over $400,000 at peak token prices. While these massive amounts rightfully raise doubts about Eigen Layer favoring projects sending money to its employees, projects are known to airdrop funds to whose technology and ecosystems they rely on as a thank you.

Regardless, Eigen Labs and Eigen Foundation have now banned airdrops for their employees.