The Architecture of Verifiable SaaS: Designing for Trust and Transparency with EigenLayer

Verifiable building blocks.

Video also available here.

When developers build an app today, there are a countless web services and APIs to make their job 10x easier than in the past.

AWS makes it simple to deploy and scale critical infrastructure like databases, web servers, file storage and more. Vercel makes launching a website simple – just push your code to GitHub. AI services like OpenAI enable AI integrations in just a few lines of code.

While in some cases it makes sense to build some of these services from scratch, the majority of developers instead piece together their application using existing services, databases, and APIs, which enables them to focus on their own differentiating features and accelerate their competitive advantage.

At AWS we called this “undifferentiated heavy lifting” - tasks that are necessary for app infrastructure, but don't contribute to a product's competitive advantage.

In web2, we are already living in this abstracted world. While founders are continuing to launch new valuable SaaS and managed services, there is rarely a circumstance that I’ve encountered where I was blocked from building the thing I wanted to build due to the fact that it wasn’t possible with the tools at my disposal.

While these developer platforms have simplified traditional application development, similar levels of abstraction are ease are not yet available in web3, so how can we achieve this?

We need to make it simple to build new verifiable services.

Developer platforms and the evolution of blockchains

Great developer platforms unleash innovation by providing abstractions and tools for developers to more easily build and deploy applications as well as onboard users.

AWS is a developer platform that has enabled much of the SaaS that makes building software today so much easier.

Other examples of developer platforms are Vercel, which makes it 10x easier to build and deploy web applications, and the App Store which provides a straightforward way for mobile app developers to build and launch mobile applications.

Vercel is an evolution of the cloud in that was built by abstracting cloud services so that the developer can focus on building and launching their application instead of managing low level infrastructure.

Blockchains have also evolved since the early days of application-specific networks like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Namecoin.

Ethereum was the first smart contract blockchain. Before Ethereum, developers had to literally fork or build their own blockchain from scratch if they wanted an application with new or different features than what existed before.

Ethereum was the first developer platform for building decentralized applications.

The breakthrough of allowing app developers to inherit Ethereum’s security was transformative, empowering developers to concentrate on building essential features for their applications and unleashing a new wave of innovation.

Verifiable SaaS

Since then, the foundation of almost every crypto app is the smart contract — and from there you are working within the constraints of that virtual machine, network, and ecosystem, depending on where you choose to deploy.

But smart contracts impose strict resource limits, offer fewer available libraries, restrict arbitrary API calls, are immutable, and enforce higher security standards among other limitations, making it significantly harder than programming within the constraints of a traditional web server.

To extend these boundaries, developers can interact with verifiable off-chain services asynchronously, by emitting events from within the contract, picking them up offchain, then sending the responses back onchain in a callback.

This technique allows more flexibility, enabling services like oracles, coprocessors, and other off-chain compute to be brought on-chain.

A developer platform for verifiable services

The challenge has been the high barrier to entry for building these verifiable offchain services, as it requires securing a new network in addition to developing the system itself. Creating something new or custom is usually unfeasible for developers.

This has led to a much smaller number of available verifiable services when compared to the vast ecosystem SaaS products for traditional application developers.

What if we could extend a network’s security outside of the constraints of the underlying virtual machine to secure and power a developer platform for easily building arbitrary verifiable services?

This is the core innovation of EigenLayer.

Like Ethereum and smart contract blockchains extend security from the underlying network to apps deployed there, EigenLayer extends security from Ethereum to provide security for any verifiable network, removing the restrictions of any specific virtual machine.

By decoupling major components of the network like data availability, zk verification, storage, compute, and more, onchain apps are finally scaling to achieve the low latency and high throughput required for a polished UX, and even elevate the overall experiences that users expect from web2 apps.

EigenLayer provides the foundation for this new ecosystem of verifiable services, accelerating this new paradigm and unlocking the next wave of permissionless innovation.