Ethos works with liquid restaking protocols to secure Cosmos chains via EigenLayer

Ethos, a blockchain project under development as a "validated service" on EigenLayer, is working with various liquid restaking protocols to allocate ether stakes for the security of Cosmos chains, accumulating commitments of $4 billion.

Protocols such as EtherFi, Puffer, Renzo, Swell and Kelp have committed to allocating ether under their control to Ethos via EigenLayer — showcasing an early use case for the EigenLayer ecosystem's development.

As one of the initial actively validated services on EigenLayer, Ethos will leverage re-staking and validation via EigenLayer to secure Cosmos ecosystem chains using existing ether stakes.

Ethos's launch is scheduled to coincide with the EigenLayer mainnet launch, which is expected in the second quarter of this year and is currently in the testnet phase.

"Ethos is a security coordination layer that enables Cosmos chains to easily bootstrap a validator network, leveraging the economic security of restaked ETH," a spokesperson from Ethos told The Block. 

EigenLayer allows for the deposit and "re-staking" of ether from various liquid staking tokens, with the aim to allocate these funds to secure third-party protocols like rollups, oracles, data availability platforms or similar services. Ethos will be one of the beneficiaries of this restaking process.

In the Eigen ecosystem, upon its launch, EigenLayer will repurpose ether deposits from stakers and restake them to bolster other protocols. This re-staked ether can be delegated to AVS operators supporting Ethos, who then assign this stake to a chosen group of guardians within the Cosmos ecosystem to validate the Ethos Layer 1 chain, referred to as the "Guardian chain." Stakers, in this case, are LRTs providing their ether stakes and receiving rewards in native tokens of Ethos-secured chains.

EigenLayer’s security to be extended to Cosmos

With over $12 billion in ether received from stakers, EigenLayer's considerable stake contributions primarily come from liquid staking providers. These can be reallocated to actively validated services like Ethos, enhancing the common security framework or restaking, thereby deterring potential attacks through economic security.

Opt-in shared security allows Guardians to co-validate or delegate to secure various Cosmos chains, spreading the security of re-staked ether throughout the ecosystem. Chains powered by Ethos — utilizing the Guardians — can either establish a decentralized trust network or augment their economic security.

Ethos users include projects like Sommelier, a DeFi app chain in the Cosmos ecosystem, which intends to use Ethos for security purposes. Sommelier mainly engages in dynamic DeFi vaults, boasting nearly $70M in total value locked. Infinity Chain, another user, is a general-purpose blockchain with an EVM execution environment developed on the Cosmos SDK.