Eigen Labs lays off 25% of workforce to focus on EigenCloud: report

$Eigen Labs, the core development team behind Ethereum restaking project EigenLayer, has laid off roughly 25% of its workforce to shift focus to EigenCloud.

Blockworks reported Tuesday that $Eigen Labs laid off 29 employees or about a quarter of the workforce. The project has confirmed the news with The Block.

"This morning, I shared plans for a restructuring of the company, streamlining our operations, and concentrating our efforts on building and scaling EigenCloud," $Eigen Labs CEO Sreeram Kannan said Tuesday in a post on X. "Unfortunately, this means saying goodbye to brilliant colleagues who’ve contributed to the project with passion, integrity, and vision."

$Eigen Labs' layoff comes after a16z crypto purchased an additional $70 million worth of $EIGEN tokens to help support the launch of EigenCloud last month.

EigenCloud, which launched last month, integrates key services — including EigenDA for data, EigenVerify for dispute resolution, and EigenCompute for execution — into a unified, programmable platform. Essentially, the platform aims to allow developers to create trustless Web2 applications with blockchain-level verifiability, according to the team.

"As difficult as these changes are, they sharpen our focus as a company and ensure our teams are structured to sustainably pursue a single, ambitious goal: to build the world’s first verifiable cloud platform," said Kannan.