## How EigenLayer Works The three main participants are: - service builders - operators - stakers Up until now, we referred to service builders as "service," and operators as "protocols". Services are called AVS, Actively Validated Services, and they are basically decentralized services built on Ethereum that provides custom validation mechanisms of off-chain operations. Let's say that we have AVSs, decentralized services that want some kind of economic security. Service builders are the developers of these AVSs. Operators are people who are willing to run the services that these AVS developers wrote. Operators will first register with the EigenLayer protocol as operators, and register to run these AVSs. Then we have stakers, those that will lock their staked ETH or LST into the EigenLayer protocol, and then delegate these tokens over to the operator. After they acquire ETH and stake it into the Ethereum protocol or obtain one of these LSTs, if they obtain a LST such as rETH or stETH, then they simply deposit into the EigenLayer protocol. If they were to provide ETH, then they will first run a validator and then stake ETH to the EigenLayer protocol. Once the LST or the staked ETH is controlled by the EigenLayer protocol, they can now delegate their stake asset to an operator. They're picking operators to use their stake asset to run one of these AVSs to earn rewards. The rewards for running these AVSs are sent to the EigenLayer protocol, and both the operator that run these AVSs and the staker who has provided the economic security, can claim these rewards.