EigenCloud Lets You Verify Anything now.
PLUS: Flashbots’ scaling alarm bells, the new stablecoin GENIUS Act, X’s latest ban hammer — and so much more.
Every year Web3 inches closer to becoming the fabric of the next-gen internet, but some milestones feel less like incremental progress and more like a hard gear-shift. The latest comes from one of the ecosystem’s true infrastructure pioneers - Eigenlayer - and it’s a big one.
They've just unleashed the EigenCloud - and we're breaking it all down for you in this weeks issue.
As artificial intelligence and crypto race toward an inevitable collision, the missing ingredient has been a way to trust off-chain computation as easily as we trust on-chain transfers.
EigenCloud may be that final puzzle piece, turning “verifiable behaviour” into a plug-and-play cloud service. For builders, it’s a moment that feels as wild - and as wide-open - as the early days of AWS.
Before we dive into the update, a huge shout-out to Eigen Labs and a massive congratulations on this milestone - always inspiring to build alongside giants in the space.
Let’s get going.
A Deep Dive into EigenCloud
When AWS appeared, startups no longer bought racks of hardware; they rented computing power by the hour and scaled overnight.
EigenCloud applies that same on-demand model to credibility itself. In an age of deepfakes and AI-generated content, the scarcest resource isn’t compute or storage - it’s confidence that what you’re seeing or executing is real.
EigenCloud lets developers rent cryptographically enforced honesty the same way they already rent CPUs, making verifiable behaviour a cloud-native primitive instead of an after-the-fact audit.
What “trust” actually means in 2025
Trust boils down to a single question: Will the system do what it promised, every time, even when no one is watching? Until now we answered that with brand reputation (Microsoft, JPMorgan) or legal contracts (service-level agreements, audits). Blockchains proved you can code trust for simple value transfers - your ETH can’t vanish without a valid signature - but complex logic like AI inference or real-time analytics still lives off-chain where we’re back to “trust me, bro.”
EigenCloud extends code-based trust to those heavier workloads by forcing off-chain operators to lock up collateral and automatically lose it if they cheat.
The three building blocks: EigenDA, EigenVerify, EigenCompute
EigenDA - is the high-speed, low-cost data layer that stores blobs for rollups or apps at up to 100 MB/s on testnet. Validators stake assets so your data can’t be “forgotten” without financial penalty.
EigenVerify - is a programmable dispute court. Any off-chain claim - price feed, AI answer, sensor reading - arrives on-chain backed by stake and enters an optimistic window where challengers can prove fraud. If they succeed, stake is slashed and the honest party wins.
EigenCompute - is a grid of GPU and TEE (trusted-execution-environment) servers bonded by the same staking logic, so you can run GPT-4-sized models or private business code while knowing bad outputs cost the operator real money. Together these bricks let you pick exactly the piece of “verifiability” you need without dragging in a full blockchain stack.
Developer experience: feels like AWS, guarantees like Ethereum
EigenCloud lets devs spin up familiar containers off-chain while tying them to slashing-backed guarantees. Here's the quick DEV POV :
🔹 Your code runs off-chain on EigenCloud operators
🔹 Each operator posts restaked ETH + EIGEN as bond
🔹 Bad output / downtime ⇒ stake slashed via on-chain challenge
🔹 Chain stores only a tiny proof—gas-cheap
AWS-level DX ✔️
Crypto-level trust ✔️
With EigenCloud now providing “trust-as-a-service,” builders can tackle ideas that used to die on the whiteboard. Here's a few examples:
Use Case #1 - Slashable AI agents
Picture an autonomous trading bot powered by a large language model that monitors macro news and allocates portfolio weights. Run that LLM inside EigenCompute so every inference trace is signed, post its decisions through EigenVerify, and hold operators’ stake hostage. If anyone later proves the model produced a hallucinated headline - or the nodes skipped an inference and forged a signature - the stake covers user losses. Suddenly, trusting an AI with money isn’t reckless; it’s a risk-priced service.
Use Case #2 - Oracle-less prediction markets
Traditional prediction dApps rely on bespoke oracle councils or multisigs that can be bribed. With EigenVerify, the “reporter” just runs a container that scrapes an official API (say, FIFA scores) and posts a staked claim. Detect a mismatch? Submit a proof and the reporter’s bond pays out automatically. Markets get fast, cheap settlement without opaque committees, and reporters earn fees only if their feed is consistently honest.
How EigenCloud enlarges crypto’s addressable market
DeFi showed that removing middlemen from money creates billions in daily volume. But most of the global economy - supply-chain audits, streaming royalties, AI analytics - still runs on platforms with contractual trust gaps.
By making “provable honesty” a drop-in cloud service, EigenCloud lets any SaaS, marketplace, or AI startup adopt blockchain-grade guarantees without hiring protocol engineers. That moves crypto from a finance sandbox to the backbone of digital commerce, a market worth trillions rather than billions.
Why this moment matters
We’re entering an era where AI decisions will handle wealth, medical data, and critical infrastructure. At the same time, public skepticism of digital evidence is peaking. Commoditising verifiability - letting builders bolt it onto any workflow as easily as they add cloud storage - could be the difference between a trustworthy AI-enabled economy and one paralysed by fraud paranoia.
EigenCloud is the first platform that turns that vision into a practical SDK rather than a research paper.
Bottom line: EigenCloud does for trust what the original cloud did for servers - it turns a messy, expensive prerequisite into an on-demand utility. In a world run on AI and blockchains, that’s likely one of the most important commodities of all.
MEV Eats the Scale
In other news, we revisit MEV - and well, MEV bots are no longer a side-quest.
They’re the raid boss. In the last 90 days, searchers have hoovered up so much profit that even fresh L2 capacity is getting throttled before it reaches mainnet - an observation Flashbots is now making publicly.
Ethereum, Solana, and every major rollup just punched out fresh TPS records—but Flashbots’ new analysis warns that MEV is devouring those gains almost as fast as they ship. In short: scaling is working, yet users still pay up, because bots are hijacking the extra blockspace to run increasingly wasteful arbitrage hunts.
There’s now so many blobs of bogus traffic. MEV-driven spam - the on-chain equivalent of high-frequency market scanning - now burns through ~40 % of Solana’s blocks and well over half the gas on OP-Stack rollups. Bots brute-force hundreds of trial runs per real arbitrage, clogging mempools that ordinary wallets never see. Result? A hidden tax baked into every swap, mint, or bridge.
“Just add more TPS” has stopped working. If MEV becomes the primary bottleneck, scaling becomes an arms-race against algorithmic traders who will happily fill every new lane of blockspace the second it opens. From November 2024 to February 2025, Base boosted raw throughput by 11 M gas/s (about three Ethereum mainnets of capacity), yet almost every extra unit was inhaled by spam - while those same bots paid barely 10 % of total fees. As long as searchers must “write to read,” they’ll flood blocks, raising baseline fees and forcing nodes to process mountains of dead-end calls. Two addresses already generate 80 % of all Base spam, proving the market is both concentrated and inefficient.
So why should you care? Because until networks replace today’s gas-guzzling “spam auction” with explicit, privacy-safe ordering markets, every sharding win or DA upgrade just funds a bigger bot war - leaving the rest of us to foot the bill.
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Midwest Blockchain Conference
It’s the student conference. Midwest Blockchain Conference (MBC) returns this December—bigger, louder, and sharper than ever—bringing together 500+ builders from 70+ universities across three continents to collide with the real-world crypto economy. Think of it as the talent flywheel for Web3: students meet hiring protocols, alumni link up with VCs, and entire clubs tap into the engine room of opportunity.
Hosted at Michigan Ross, MBC isn’t a vibe - it’s a pipeline. Last year’s attendees landed at Coinbase, Gemini, Galaxy, and beyond. This year? Expect all that plus live music, after parties, and merch you’ll actually want to wear.
Early bird tickets are now live ($10 student / $25 industry).
Job & Internship Opportunities
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Pump.Fun Gets Pumped… Off X
Account nuked to zero. Meme-coin launchpad pump.fun and its pseudonymous founder Alon woke up to permabans on X this week, following a flood of on-platform promotional bots. Traders screamed censorship; critics clapped back that the project’s copy-paste token factory was asking for spam filters. Either way, expect CT engagement to nose-dive until a new megaphone appears.
In other hopeful news, the Senate just passed the GENIUS Act, the first federal bill aimed at regulating stablecoins, with overwhelming bipartisan support. It’s a signal to markets: stablecoins are no longer edge-case fintech experiments - they’re being baked into the core of global payments infrastructure.
The world’s biggest platforms are paying attention. Uber’s in the “study phase” of using stablecoins to move money cheaper and faster across borders. Shopify just rolled out USDC payments via Coinbase and Stripe, letting merchants skip FX fees and get paid in seconds onchain. From Congress to checkout, the stablecoin thesis is going mainstream.
And for builders? That means a new canvas. Less volatility. More utility. It's time to put our heads down and build.
We’re sorry for missing the last few weeks - it’s been a bit chaotic on our end. But rest assured: impeccable things are brewing in the background. From new collabs to big drops to a few surprises we can’t share just yet… we’re cooking. Stay tuned.