Incentives Committee Update #1

Incentives Committee
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Introduction to Incentives Committee & Our First Actions

As announced in December, the EigenLayer ecosystem is maturing from its bootstrapping phase. As such, EIGEN’s tokenomics and incentive scheme must evolve to ensure the network is rewarding actual value creation.

The Incentives Committee outlined in ELIP-12 is now live. You can find its charter below as well as a summary of the first set of actions being made to evolve EIGEN’s programmatic incentives.

Incentives Committee’s Mandate

The Committee’s mandate is to dynamically ensure every EIGEN emitted serves the protocol’s growth.

  • Mission: To transition the network to productive staking.

  • Role: Overseeing the deployment of incentives to high-quality participants and AVSs that contribute to the verifiable cloud economy.

  • Membership: Currently managed by Eigen Labs personnel, with a roadmap toward decentralized governance as the ecosystem matures.

We have published our Incentive Committee Charter for awareness.

First Actions: Reducing Programmatic Incentives

The Committee’s first strategic actions are aimed at reducing and redirecting programmatic incentives.

Effective March 19, 2026 programmatic incentives will only be sent to stake supporting productive AVSs. This means two things:

  1. Unproductive or passive stake will no longer be eligible for programmatic incentives.

  2. Incentives paid to ETH and EIGEN stake will be rightsized, ETH incentives will be reduced by 50% and EIGEN incentives will be reduced by 75%.

Note: At the beginning, all ETH incentives will be directed towards EigenDA. In future updates, other fee-paying AVSs may be eligible for ETH incentives proportional to their rewards paid.

Any excess tokens emitted according to the Protocol Council’s current emission schedule will be burned by the Incentive Committee and removed from circulation entirely. After a monitoring period, the Incentive Committee may recommend a permanent reduction in net emissions to be considered by the Protocol Council.

Implementation Impacts

This change should make it easier for productive AVSs to attract allocations from stakers by eliminating incentives for idle, undelegated stake. The primary impact will be felt by idle stakers who have not yet delegated their stake to an Operator who is actively maintaining EigenLayer infrastructure. Users can take the following actions:

  • For Stakers: To remain eligible for optimal rewards, you are encouraged to delegate to Operators supporting EigenDA, which can be viewed under “Registered Operators” on app.eigenlayer.xyz. If you are already delegated to an operator running EigenDA no specific action is needed at this moment.

  • For Operators & AVSs: No manual technical action is required. However, AVSs are reminded that under the new charter, only fee-paying AVSs will be eligible for future ecosystem incentives. As a starting point, Operators should run EigenDA to be eligible for incentives.

Changes to Incentives Allocation

The Incentives Committee has analyzed the expected impact to ETH and EIGEN incentives when these changes go live on March 19th. Assuming a fixed operator participation, the impacts would reduce EIGEN payouts by approximately 1,515,195 EIGEN/week, however many variables affect this calculation.

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Next Steps

The Incentives Committee will monitor the impacts of these changes on our ecosystem and continue to refine the incentives program as needed. The committee is committed to providing transparency on its actions and expected outcomes, will continue to post updates on its Forum page.

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Full support from the ETHGas team on restructuring incentives around productive AVS - in particular, those involved with EigenDA.

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Great to see ELIP-12 moving from proposal to execution with the Incentives Committee taking decisive first actions.

The shift from rewarding passive stake to rewarding productive stake is exactly the kind of structural change we at Catalysis think the ecosystem needs at this stage. Cutting incentives for idle, undelegated stake and rightsizing ETH/EIGEN emissions sends a clear signal: value accrual should follow actual contribution, not passive positioning.

A few observations from our side:

On the emission reductions (50% ETH / 75% EIGEN): This is a meaningful recalibration. The burn mechanism for excess tokens is a welcome addition — it creates a credible deflationary backstop while the Committee monitors ecosystem response. The fact that a permanent emission reduction may follow signals long-term discipline around token supply management and helps create an environment where fee-generating AVSs like Catalysis can compete on real yield rather than emission-driven returns.

On productive AVS eligibility: Starting with EigenDA makes sense as a baseline, but the framework for what qualifies as “productive” will become increasingly important as eligibility expands. AVSs like Catalysis, which generate fees through active risk underwriting and where slashing is intrinsic to the security model, represent a distinct class of productive stake. These systems use restaked capital to provide financial guarantees or insurance and generate real yield from that activity. Recognizing such AVSs within future incentive eligibility would be a strong signal of ecosystem maturity.

On restaker and LRT confidence: Targeted incentives during early adoption remain important, as delegating to slashing-enabled AVSs introduces real capital-loss risk. Removing incentives for idle or undelegated stake should help redirect capital toward fee-generating AVSs like Catalysis and help build restaker and LRT confidence as the ecosystem transitions toward truly productive capital.

Overall, we think this reinforces the direction we’ve been advocating for: less subsidy for idle capital, more rewards for productive participation, and a framework that evolves alongside the diverse range of slashing-enabled AVS models emerging across EigenLayer.

We at Catalysis are building DeFi’s first vault-native risk coverage and we remain excited to contribute as the eligibility framework expands to new classes of fee-generating AVSs.