Sreeram Kannan is the founder of EigenLayer, an Ethereum staking collective leveraging trust, hyperscaling blockchains, and unleashing open innovation. 

In this highly technical episode, we dive deep into proof of work vs. proof of stake, staking, restaking, Ethereum throughput, and permissionless innovation.  

Sreeram kicks off the episode by introducing and explaining fragmented trust networks. One of the amazing value propositions for blockchain technology is that it allows permissionless and trustless innovation - any developer can join the ecosystem and start creating. But this trustless technology is only valuable if the core infrastructure innovators around the world decide to actually utilize it. To help them do so, Sreeram created Eigen Layer with the intention of lowering their barrier to entry into the Ethereum ecosystem.

We discuss the ways in which Eigen Layer enables restaking and Sreeram walks us through the actual process of native staking. He explains how he foresees the Eigen ecosystem growing and shares a few of the possibilities Eigen enables. We discuss the importance of increasing Ethereum’s bandwidth and Sreeram shares how Eigen Layer can help this initiative. 

We also explore risk mitigation and all of the ways in which the folks over at Eigen are tackling the issue of security, with decentralization not only being a core value of the Eigen team, but its main value proposition. To close out the episode, Kathrine and Ash recap the discussion and break down some of the more intellectually challenging topics discussed.