This morning, I had a rather abstract discussion with Vitalik about the idea that 'if you start trusting your validator set to do things beyond the chain's control, then this property won't hold.' A lot of friends found it hard to understand, so I’ll break down the concepts and logic here. First, Vitalik wanted to express that a 51% attack isn’t as catastrophic for a blockchain as people might imagine. Even if a single entity controls a majority of nodes, they can only operate within the established rules of the blockchain itself. At most, they could reject certain blocks, but they wouldn’t be able to directly modify your assets. Even if nodes make mistakes, they would still be penalized according to the blockchain’s rules. In other words, you trust the blockchain itself, not the individual node operators. But then Vitalik raised a more challenging issue: what happens if these nodes aren’t just serving the blockchain but are also doing other things? In this case, they wouldn’t necessarily follow the established rules of the blockchain anymore, and they could act however they want. It’s like if all the employees of a company were loyal to a particular executive. As long as those employees are working full-time within the company, they still have to follow the company’s rules, preventing the executive from acting recklessly. But if those employees also start working for a subsidiary company while receiving two paychecks, the original company’s rules wouldn’t apply to them anymore, and they could act without restraint. So, I raised a question: isn’t this exactly what Restaking projects like Eigenlayer are doing? Employees (nodes) are essentially earning two paychecks (Ethereum staking + third-party AVS). Vitalik’s response was straightforward: 'That’s precisely why Eigenlayer relies on its own token for subjective slashing standards.' What he meant was that Eigenlayer does indeed face this issue. Ethereum mainnet’s slashing standards are objective because they’re written into the chain. So, nodes operating on Ethereum’s mainnet still have to follow these objective standards, and any issues would result in slashing their $ETH. However, for AVS operations outside of Ethereum, those aren’t under Ethereum’s jurisdiction. Therefore, Eigenlayer has established its own subjective standards to manage these operations, and any issues would result in slashing Eigenlayer’s own tokens. In other words, these employees earning two paychecks have to follow the rules of both the parent company and the subsidiary. It’s not like they can act recklessly outside of the system. To sum up, Vitalik’s response to this phenomenon is: there’s nothing that can be done, and it’s up to Eigenlayer to self-regulate.