Great analysis — this paper does a better job than most at naming
the concrete risks: operator collusion, unintended slashing exploits,
and compounding systemic exposure when validators simultaneously secure
Ethereum and multiple AVS.
One thing that’s missing from the ecosystem is a real-time monitoring
layer for exactly these scenarios. That’s what we’ve been building with
QUEST — a macroprudential oracle that computes a Grey Zone Score
(gross_slashing_loss / (cl_rewards + burned_eth)) from live Beacon chain
data every epoch.
The Grey Zone is the precise condition this paper warns about: MEV and
consensus rewards outweigh slashing losses in the short term, so protocols
like Lido stay out of Bunker Mode — while slashing debt accumulates silently.
As EigenLayer scales and operators secure multiple AVS simultaneously,
that blind spot gets larger, not smaller.
We have a live dashboard, a public API, and every epoch snapshot
persisted on IPFS + Filecoin as a verifiable audit trail:
https://quest-orcin-sigma.vercel.app
More context on the grant proposal we just posted:
Happy to discuss how QUEST fits into the AVS security stack.