Permissioned AVS Enrollment vs. Permissionless AVS Enrollment: Launch Strategy

Whitelisted Operators Only: Enroll only pre-vetted, high-reputation node operators (e.g., Figment, Chorus One, institutional stakers). This drastically reduces slashing risk and ensures predictable performance from day one. Critical for financial AVSs handling high-value transactions or bridges like Lagrange or AltLayer's rollup stacks.

Bypass the Queue: Avoid the public staker free-for-all and potential congestion of permissionless enrollment. Enroll your curated set of operators and launch immediately. Ideal for enterprise pilots, consortium chains, or MVPs where speed and controlled testing (e.g., Espresso Systems' sequencing) are paramount before a public rollout.

Tap the Full Restaking Pool: Open enrollment to all ~200,000+ EigenLayer restakers, accessing the entire $15B+ restaked TVL for security. This creates a credibly neutral, maximally decentralized security base. The default choice for public goods AVSs, new L1/L2 security layers, or protocols like EigenDA seeking censorship resistance.

Network Effects from Day One: Every new restaker on EigenLayer is a potential operator for your AVS, creating a virtuous growth cycle. Enables seamless AVS stacking (e.g., an operator running EigenDA, Eoracle, and a rollup simultaneously). Essential for middleware and oracle networks like eoracle that benefit from widespread, integrated adoption.

Curated Operator Set: Enables hand-picking top-tier node operators (e.g., Figment, Chorus One) with proven infrastructure and slashing history. This ensures high SLA guarantees (>99.9% uptime) and reduces initial security risks. Critical for high-value financial AVSs like restaking-backed bridges (e.g., Omni Network) or oracle services requiring deterministic performance.

Streamlined Governance: Bypasses lengthy, open governance proposals for parameter changes or upgrades. The core team can rapidly iterate and coordinate with a known set of operators. Ideal for MVPs and early-stage protocols (e.g., a novel ZK coprocessor AVS) that need to test economic assumptions and technical specs before a public launch.

Credible Neutrality: Any qualified operator can join, preventing capture by a single entity or jurisdiction. This is foundational for base-layer security services and public goods. Protocols like EigenDA leverage this for data availability, where trust minimization is non-negotiable. Aligns with Ethereum's credibly neutral ethos.

Unbounded Stake Scaling: Security scales with open market demand, not a committee's capacity. As more restakers delegate, the Total Value Secured (TVL) grows organically, creating a stronger cryptoeconomic barrier. Essential for mass-market AVSs aiming for maximum slashable stake (e.g., a decentralized sequencer set competing with centralized alternatives).

Rapid Bootstrapping & Decentralization: Open enrollment allows any operator to join, accelerating the growth of the AVS's security pool. This is critical for protocols like EigenDA or Omni Network that require a large, geographically distributed set of operators to achieve censorship resistance and high throughput from day one.

Unvetted Operator Risk: The AVS accepts the entire spectrum of EigenLayer operators, including those with minimal track records. This exposes the service to potential slashing events from incompetence or downtime, requiring robust fault proofs and slashing conditions to mitigate, increasing initial protocol complexity.

Controlled Security & Reliability: The AVS team can curate a whitelist of high-performance, reputable operators (e.g., Figment, Chorus One, Blockdaemon). This ensures predictable performance and is essential for early-stage AVSs handling high-value transactions or complex computations, like a ZK-proof verification service or a cross-chain bridge.

Centralization & Scalability Bottleneck: A gated model limits the total stake securing the AVS and creates a single point of failure—the curator. This can be a strategic liability for AVSs aiming for credible neutrality or those, like a high-frequency oracle, that need to scale security elastically with demand.