Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has invested an additional $70 million in Ethereum's largest restaking protocol, EigenLayer, to support the launch of EigenCloud, a new platform offering "verifiability-as-a-service" for developers. The investment follows a16z's $100 million Series B in Eigen Labs in February 2024, and underscores its commitment to the project through its Crypto Fund IV. EigenLayer currently secures over $12 billion in restaked assets, and the new EigenCloud platform allows developers to build trustless, verifiable applications that operate off-chain while anchoring trust and payments on the Ethereum blockchain. Companies like Securitize will use EigenCloud to verify asset pricing data for BlackRock's $2 billion BUIDL fund. The platform introduces new services such as EigenVerify for dispute resolution and EigenCompute for off-chain execution, alongside existing AVSs like EigenDA for data. By transforming verifiability into a programmable cloud primitive, EigenCloud is targeting sectors like AI, media, betting markets, and enterprise software, as it aims to unlock a new wave of crypto-native and Web2-integrated applications. "EigenCloud will enable the next generation of disruptive, mass-market crypto apps, closing the gap between what developers want to build onchain and what blockchains allow them to build," said Sreeram Kannan, CEO of Eigen Labs, in the release. The alpha rollout includes performance upgrades, dispute tooling, and a developer roadmap for phased access.
