Extended disclosure: As mentioned in my last response I am now an advisor to the EigenFoundation. I feel the community deserves transparency so here we go :)

1. The advisorship comes with a significant EIGEN token incentive which could easily be worth more than the combined value of all my other assets (mostly ETH). We're talking millions of dollars of tokens vesting over 3 years.
2. I pledge to reinject all advisorship proceeds towards worthy projects within the Ethereum ecosystem, either as investments or donations. I also stand ready to end the advisorship at any time, e.g. should EigenLayer go in a direction I deem to be against Ethereum's interests.
3. I am picky with advisorships (having likely turned down over 100 so far) and I didn't accept the EigenFoundation advisorship lightly. Sreeram first talked about an advisorship in March 2023 and the whole process took discussions over one year.
4. The advisorship happened on the condition that my mandate be limited to researching restaking risks and that I not be included on marketing material.
5. Given my focus on restaking risks you can expect my default public stance to continue to lean critical of EigenLayer. I will try to make my criticism constructive, advocating for mitigations to risks like the erosion of solo validators and the intersubjective overloading of Ethereum consensus.
6. By being an advisor I hope to have a front-row seat to restaking issues and steer EigenLayer from within. As a researcher I feel I did too little too late with regard to liquid staking. This is an opportunity to not repeat the mistake with restaking.
7. Competing restaking platforms provide healthy diversity and I will gladly share insights and bounce ideas with competitors like Karak and Symbiotic.
8. Some people may ask if EigenLayer is trying to systematically "bribe" or "corrupt" the EF. Nowadays the EF is a large organisation with 300+ people. To my knowledge 3 EFers have a formal relationship with EigenLayer entities: one as an early EigenLabs investor, and two as recent EigenFoundation advisors. EFers are some of the highest integrity people I know and I don't see the 1% of EFers formally involved with EigenLayer compromising their morals.
9. Having interacted a bunch with Sreeram I believe he is in our space for all the goods reasons. He has a razor sharp mind and a genuine desire to build something meaningful—what he calls the "Open Verifiable Digital Commons". Sreeram's outstanding character was key to accepting the advisorship.
10. I want to highlight that I'm advising in an individual capacity. This is more than just a legal detail: I live my work life first and foremost as an Ethereum researcher, not as an EF researcher. I try to stay a free and independent thinker and serve the interests of Ethereum even if it sometimes means breaking the mould of expectations that comes with being an EF researcher.
11. I do acknowledge that accepting the EigenFoundation advisorship inevitably comes with downside risk beyond my personal reputation. I hope the above shows that it is at least a considered move with calculated risks.

Can you give your thoughts on EigenLayer?

Restaking plausibly is to Ethereum what AI is to humanity: a wonderful paradigm-changing tool in the short- and medium-term which may be powerful enough to introduce systemic risks that ultimately lead to our demise. My research interest is in better understanding those risks and searching for mitigations—the equivalent of AI alignment for restaking. How do we ensure restaking sustainably supercharges Ethereum without undermining it?

I see two categories of restaking risks: chronic and acute. Chronic is the slow but pernicious type, exemplified by a potential erosion of the solo validators. In AI-land this would be the equivalent of resourceful corporations—with zettabytes of training data and gigawatts of compute—slowly but surely using their AI edge to entrench themselves within society and erode meaningful individual sovereignty. Acute is the fast yet catastrophic type, exemplified by a major infrastructure breakage or market meltdown large enough to tear the social fabric—think of The DAO but involving $5T not $50M. In AI-land the equivalent could be having a rogue AI getting access to nuclear launch codes and starting WW3.

One direction I'm excited about is fully decoupling execution proposing from validation. This means having Ethereum validators no longer propose EVM blocks, an extreme form of proposer-builder separation (PBS). Until recently the leading proposal was execution tickets (ETs) but Barnabé may have discovered an even better design I call execution auctions (EAs). By decoupling proposing from validation it is no longer possible for native restaking to overload proposing. All proposing duties and yield (including MEV) is quarantined. Ideas like based preconfirmations which overload L1 proposing would no longer require validators to be involved and are fundamentally safer with ETs or EAs.

Another direction I'm excited about is economic stake capping, e.g. discouraging (or preventing) more than 1/4 of all ETH to be staked by having an issuance curve that goes to zero (or negative) as the amount of ETH staked approaches the cap. This will obviously limit the size of the natively restaked economy and the corresponding blast radius if things blow up. Maybe more importantly, stake capping lowers the cost of money to a minimum and prevents the chronic overcompensation of staking. If staking is by default at best financially net neutral, stakers will need to provide more than just brute force economic security for staking to be rational. The good news is that stake decentralisation is one of the most promising potential staking differentiators. Solo validators that provide "refined stake" have already done extremely well relative to institutional "crude stake" thanks to airdrops that disproportionately reward solo validators. I hope we can develop more tools to identify, engage, and reward decentralised stake. See for example proof of location ideas by Witness Chain.

A third direction I want to highlight is intersubjective slashing. The EIGEN token design is all about offering a solution to the problem of overloading "objective" tokens like ETH with intersubjective risk. The EIGEN token is a sponge that promises to mop up intersubjective risk. Intersubjective tokens are a great match for fundamentally intersubjective services like DA and oracles, and act as pressure valves in case of 51% attacks. I could also see intersubjective tokens being valuable to derisk objective AVSs while bugs are being rooted out: if unintended slashing happens (either accidentally or maliciously) the social layer can simply fork the intersubjective token. Maybe we should encourage AVSes to cap their usage of ETH collateral (say, at 1M ETH) until they have formally verified slashing conditions and clients. On that note, I am increasingly bullish on formal verification tools like Lean soon reaching a maturity inflection point. The EF is launching a $20M zkEVM formal verification competition this year and I hope it can serve as a template for the wider Ethereum ecosystem.

A final direction I've been thinking about is generalised PBS to increase the decentralisation of AVS operators. The goal is to limit the need for trusted delegation and instead make use of trustless generalised builders. Such builders would do the sophisticated heavy lifting (e.g. devops and algorithms) yet compete in a ruthless permissionless market which drives the mast majority of restaking rewards to unsophisticated AVS operators.