A new unified cloud platform promises to accelerate crypto's app era, dramatically expanding what's possible in decentralized finance (DeFi).

Eigencloud — backed by a $70 investment from Andreesen Horowitz — offers something novel: an Ethereum development infrastructure that makes ‘virtually anything verifiable on-chain.' Just as AWS once unleashed SaaS and the cloud economy, Eigencloud's arrival potentially unlocks a huge array of DeFi use cases.

By blending Web2 flexibility with Web3 verifiability, the aim is to help dApp developers get over their trust issues. The question is: can it really work and scale?

The final bridge between FinTech and DeFi?

Eigen Labs CEO Sreeram Kannan said EigenCloud "will enable the next generation of disruptive, mass-market crypto apps, closing the gap between what developers want to build on-chain and what blockchains allow them to build."

By expanding the programmability of crypto, Kannan says Eigencloud could make "virtually anything" verifiable on-chain, opening the door to dApp opportunities like fully on-chain gaming, on-chain insurance, more powerful prediction markets, and even "verifiable" AI.

In an echo of how AWS changed the startup economy, EigenCloud aims to spur dApp innovation by allowing developers to access technical services without staking loads of native tokens.

It slashes startup costs and gives new projects the flexibility to use mainstream assets like Ethereum (ETH) and reduce dependence on token issuance.

It seems very similar to the period in the mid-2000s when AWS launched, and server costs began to fall.

Trust is the missing link

EigenCloud's unique selling proposition is based on the verifiable compute thesis, where heavier computing operations can be outsourced from one machine to another for efficiency. It adds mechanisms to ensure trust, for example, verifying that the outsourced machine sends back a complete and error-free result.

To that end, EigenCloud embeds two new primitives, EigenCompute and EigenVerify.

EigenCompute gives developers a container-based environment that removes some of the operational complexity from setting up the external operators. Similar to serverless platforms like AWS Lambda, developers can use it to create custom logic with fewer steps. EigenCloud handles the trust coordination and execution.

EigenVerify introduces a new verification-as-a-service model. Developers can use its pre-built verification modules and write them directly into new dApps, removing the need to create new trust frameworks from scratch. This has the potential to shorten development timelines and accelerate time-to-market.

An AWS Model for the Decentralized Web

The thing that sets EigenCloud apart is its ability to offer verifiability for off-chain processes, mimicking what L1 chains can do on-chain. This gives developers more freedom to build Ethereum applications that use external data or other off-chain resources without compromising integrity.

Key to all of this are the platform's verifiable service composition and cross-chain support features. These enable Ethereum dApps to communicate with actively validated services (AVS), using APIs for things like payment or user authentication. EigenCloud says all three can operate across any L1 or L2, extending the capabilities of new applications.

Once again, the AWS cloud infrastructure analogy seems apropos. SaaS developers leverage AWS' pre-built solutions for storage, compute, and identity management, which can be easily added to new cloud applications. EigenCloud is aiming to bring the same kind of modular development tools to the blockchain.

AVSs, which undergo continuous validation to ensure their security, integrity, and efficiency, are crucial to verifiability.

EigenCloud allows them to be slotted into new dApps like Lego blocks. Rather than requiring each AVS to have its own custom interface, they can simply plug into a shared framework.

Standardization smoothes the way for developers and brings more reusable components into play.

The Take Away

When AWS launched in 2022, it was an interesting side project. Amazon engineers were complaining about the inordinate amount of time they were spending building and maintaining e-commerce infrastructure. ‘The cloud' hadn't even been coined as an industry term.

Today, AWS is the bedrock of the digital economy and a $107 billion cash cow for one of the world's biggest companies. Could Eigencloud follow a similar path?

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