EigenLayer plans to launch its own EIGEN token after triggering a remortgage frenzy

EigenLayer, the recollateral agreement that has taken in $15.7 billion in deposits, released a white paper on Monday confirming plans to launch the EIGEN token, which is likely to be one of the most anticipated reward events for users of the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem this year.

According to a blog post published by the Eigen Foundation, the agreement's backers, the non-profit organization, said the total supply of EIGEN tokens is about 1.67 billion, of which 45 percent will be allocated to the EigenLayer community. The 45% is divided into three subgroups - Mortgage Incentives, Future Community Projects, and ecosystem development - each with 15%. "The total supply of EIGEN at launch was 1,673,646,668.28466 tokens," the foundation revealed. "This number is the result of encoding 'open innovation' onto a classic telephone keyboard."

Crypto traders have been speculating for months about whether EigenLayer would launch its own token, and have been pouring deposits into the protocol before it goes live, hoping to reap the rewards of early adopters. EigenLayer is at the heart of a new trend of "re-collateralization," which allows pledged or "locked" ether (ETH) on the Ethereum blockchain to be repurposed to protect other networks or protocols. The project is led by Sriram Kanan, who created it in 2021 when he was an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington.

EigenLayer went live earlier this month, but has yet to enable most of the core features that make the project compelling, including its reward system and all-important "punishment" mechanism. In a blog post on Monday, the Eigen Foundation wrote that in the first "quarter" of the "mortgage release," the team described a planned token release that will have 5% of the token supply distributed to users based on their mortgage activity on March 15, when the Ethereum block number was 19437000. Claims for these EIGEN tokens will open on May 10 and close 120 days later.