The biggest restaking protocol on Ethereum by total value locked (TVL), EigenLayer, has announced a $100 million fundraising round led by venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).A Bloomberg story from February 22 states that the venture firm was the lone investor in the investment round.Blockchain Capital sponsored a $50 million fundraising round for the EigenLayer protocol in March.A PitchBook research states that venture capital (VC) funding for companies involved in the cryptocurrency space increased by 2.5% to $1.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023.Since March 2022, there has not been a rise in venture capital investments in cryptocurrency until now.PitchBook claims that the introduction of the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January may have contributed to the increase in venture capital investments in the cryptocurrency space.
Andreessen Horowitz general partner Ali Yahya believes that the collaboration may open up new application avenues. He stated to Bloomberg
“It will enable all sorts of new kinds of applications to be built… People will stake capital in order to gain rewards from new services that get spun up on top of EigenLayer.”
EigenLayer, which was established in 2021, allows stakers and validators to restake liquid derivative tokens for staking, such as Lido Staked ETH and RocketPool’s rETH, in order to validate and secure other networks.To increase yield, these assets can also be used in other decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.With a TVL of $7.91 billion, EigenLayer is now the third-largest Ethereum protocol.DefiLlama data shows that EigenLayer’s TVL increased by 4.30% in the 24 hours before to 2:15 PM CET and by nearly 347% during the previous month.
According to an official announcement, EigenLayer’s TVL began increasing on February 5 after the protocol momentarily lifted its staking cap in an effort to encourage organic development.EigenLayer’s TVL increased by more than 181% during this restaking time, from just $2.15 billion on February 5 to $6.05 billion on February 10.Although a new staking cap was implemented, the project intends to eventually eliminate this cap permanently.With a total TVL of $7.94 billion, restaking protocols rank sixth among all protocol categories on DefiLlama, with EigenLayer accounting for 98% of this total.First place goes to the liquid staking procedure, with a total TVL of $45.7 billion.