ELIP-019 - Delegation Manager Upgrade

Upcoming Protocol Upgrade: DelegationManager (ELIP-019)

Author(s) ELHAJIN (amin), Nadir Akhtar (Eigen Labs)
Created July 21, 2026
Proposal ELIP-019
Status Draft

This is advance notice of an upgrade to the DelegationManager contract that we expect to execute in less than two weeks, tracked as ELIP-019.

What’s happening

We’re preparing a narrowly scoped, security-sensitive upgrade to DelegationManager. Per our standard practice for upgrades of this nature, we are not disclosing implementation detail ahead of execution. A full technical writeup — the change, our design rationale, and how we carried out the upgrade — will follow this post once ELIP-019 has been executed.

What you need to do

Nothing. No action is required from stakers, operators, or integrators before, during, or after the upgrade.

Delivery process

The upgrade ships as a proxy-implementation upgrade to DelegationManager, using our standard three-phase process: an initial on-chain preparation step, a multisig queue, and multisig execution after the standard 10-day timelock.

This is the same three-phase shape used for prior DelegationManager upgrades.

Protocol Council approval

Before this upgrade was queued, members of the Protocol Council reviewed ELIP-019 and the delivery process described above, and provided signed approval.

Each Council signer produced an off-chain signature over a fixed endorsement message using the same key that controls their seat on the Protocol Council Multisig:

I endorse the bug fix upgrade of the DelegationManager to pre-computed address 0x6a8BEd4062C895130E2d09bA442D3eCEAd5Df6c2 for ELIP-019

The message commits the Council to both the proposal and the exact address the new implementation will occupy. That address is pre-computed via CREATE2 with a salt that embeds the Protocol Council Multisig address and commits to the pinned release bytecode — only the Council can deploy to it, and any different code would land at a different address. Endorsing the address is therefore equivalent to endorsing the code that will live there. (The target address is public on-chain once the upgrade is queued, so nothing sensitive is disclosed here ahead of execution.)

Verify the signatures yourself

Anyone can independently check a Council signature using foundry’s cast:

cast wallet verify \
--address <COUNCIL_SIGNER_ADDRESS> \
"I endorse the bug fix upgrade of the DelegationManager to pre-computed address 0x6a8BEd4062C895130E2d09bA442D3eCEAd5Df6c2 for ELIP-019" \
<SIGNATURE>

The message must match exactly as written above — same casing, spacing, and address checksum, with no surrounding quotes or extra whitespace. The Council signer addresses and their signatures are published below:

Address Signature
0x9229C290F60F303884073F28EB8E81F9B82506d5 0x7f6970cab965e536f404519fbdb0e0395a83010cbc62e82882973953298515f1423d0fcb654b40666e69aff081ac9b1740d10eac729649faf119a5381020c8781c
0xc5280E368648b0e192b355c7d8330593bA7af700 0xf4a43629c3d90422a875ef55c3339dab282a0a6b306995a1d8581329f3806d765515c4ce085ba65d52216f7d760a378191fcfe0db281f36b0bc27061943afaf51b
0x10d6CE86113D00CcF071D02C5289e420a14C963F 0xd11592955feebfbdc88ac428d3214cc2f3b47f1531afb6223465a24548695bf524d04060032015cf0438cdd93fab36f7aee09d294b86bb724f375c3c437fc25d1b
0xAe4ABA6838d4622aF1AD024EB351eA4D4FDE22B3 0x5f77391aadf7d865b6143ab9d935dd7221b71b2e4525ae2d2c73a2ad390af9035d4d27072924b76c9d00096961e19edbb9aeab858b881d7011ca49c93aa888021b

What’s next

Once the upgrade has queued and executed, we’ll publish the companion post covering ELIP-019 in full: the change itself, why we approached it the way we did, and how the upgrade was carried out. We’ll link it here.

Questions are welcome in the replies.