Eclipse: The first SVM Layer2 that combines Ethereum security, Solana high performance, and Celestia DA narrative.

YBB Capital

2024-03-01 18:55

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Eclipse has successfully completed a pre-seed funding round of $6 million led by Polychain, and a seed funding round of $9 million co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, bringing the total funding amount to $15 million.

Original Title: "Eclipse: The First SVM Layer2 Combining Ethereum Security, Solana High Performance, and Celestia DA Narrative"

Source: YBB Capital Researcher Ac-Core

Eclipse founder Neel Somani, who previously worked as a software engineer at Airbnb and a quantitative researcher at Citadel, established a startup called Eclipse based on Solana in 2022. The company has received support from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Polygon, and other individuals/institutions to build a Rollup blockchain compatible with Solana and Polygon.

According to CoinDesk's report on September 28, 2022, Eclipse has successfully completed a $6 million Pre-Seed round of financing led by Polychain and a $9 million Seed round of financing jointly led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with a total financing amount of $15 million. In addition, Eclipse has also received a development grant from the Solana Foundation to support Rollup driven by the Solana Virtual Machine.

Eclipse founder Somani leveraged his network and proximity to Solana's Chicago headquarters to successfully create a unique chain using Solana's virtual machine. His vision is to enable developers to deploy Rollups powered by Solana's virtual machine, and plans to launch a public testnet on the Cosmos ecosystem in early 2023, as well as support Aptos' Move language in the future.

Solana co-founder and Eclipse angel investor Anatoly Yakovenko commented: "Eclipse paved the way for Solana to communicate with Cosmos through inter-blockchain communication (IBC)."

Polychain Capital partner Niraj Pant commented: "As large enterprises and governments begin to enter the blockchain space, Eclipse is an important infrastructure for facilitating use cases such as Web2-scale consumer and financial applications."

Eclipse Architecture

According to official explanations, Eclipse Mainnet is the first general L2 built around SVM on Ethereum. It combines the essence of a modular stack and aims to become the fastest and most universal Layer2 driven by SVM on Ethereum. The project architecture uses Ethereum as the settlement layer and is used for the official embedded verification bridge; Celestia serves as the data availability layer; RISC Zero is used to generate zero-knowledge fraud proofs; and finally, Solana's SVM is used as the modular Layer2 project for overall execution. The following will provide a detailed explanation based on official explanations.

Settlement Layer - Ethereum: Eclipse will settle on Ethereum (i.e. on the embedded verification bridge on Ethereum) and use ETH as its gas consumption, and fraud proofs will also be submitted on Ethereum;

Execution Layer - Solana Virtual Machine (SVM): Eclipse will run a high-performance SVM as its execution environment, which is a fork of the Solana Labs client (v1.17).

Data Availability Layer - Celestia: Eclipse will publish data to Celestia to achieve scalable Data Availability (DA);

Proof mechanism - RISC Zero: Eclipse will use RISC Zero for ZK fraud proof (without intermediate state serialization);

Communication Protocol - IBC: Connects with non-Eclipse chains through Cosmos' cross-chain communication standard IBC.

Cross-chain protocol - Hyperlane: Eclipse and Hyperlane collaborate to introduce Hyperlane's permissionless interoperability solution into a blockchain based on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM).

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Settlement Layer: Obtaining Security and Liquidity of Ethereum

Eclipse, like other Ethereum Rollups, uses Ethereum as the settlement layer. This process requires Eclipse to directly incorporate the verification bridge on Ethereum into Eclipse. Its nodes need to check the correctness of the verification bridge and the correct transaction ordering, in order to provide users with Ethereum-level security.

L2BEAT defines Layer2 as "a chain that obtains its security either completely or partially from Ethereum Layer 1, so that users do not have to rely on the integrity of Layer2 validators to ensure the security of their funds." The Eclipse verification bridge can perform final validity and anti-censorship even in some failure scenarios, allowing users to force their transactions to be completed through the bridge and use Ethereum as transaction gas for burning, even if the sequencer crashes or starts censorship on L2.

Execution Layer: Obtaining Solana's transaction speed and economies of scale

To improve efficiency, Eclipse Mainnet uses Solana's execution environment, using SVM and Sealevel (Solana's technology solution for building horizontal scaling, ultra-parallel transaction processing engine for horizontal scaling across GPUs and SSDs). Compared to EVM's single-threaded operation, the advantage is that it can be executed without designing overlapping state transactions, rather than executing in sequence.

Regarding EVM compatibility issues, Eclipse Mainnet and Neon EVM collaborate to allow developers to use Ethereum tools and build Web3 applications on Solana. According to official data, its throughput can reach up to 140TPS, which is higher than that of single-threaded EVM. EVM users can interact natively with applications in Eclipse Mainnet through the "Snaps" plugin in the MetaMask wallet.

Data availability: Using Celestia's bandwidth and verifiability properties

Ecilpse Mainnet will use Celestia to achieve data availability and establish a long-term partnership. This is because Ethereum is currently unable to support Ecilpse's target throughput and fees, even after the EIP-4844 upgrade, which can provide an average of about 0.375 MB of Blobs space per block (the limit for each block is about 0.75 MB).

According to official data, using ERC-20 transactions based on Rollup expansion, calculated at 154 bytes per transaction, the total TPS of all Rollups is about 213TPS. For Compression Swap, calculated at approximately 400 bytes per transaction, the TPS of all Rollups is about 82TPS. Compared to the 2MB blocks introduced by Celestia, after network proof stability and more DAS (related expansion explanations see below) light nodes are added, Blobstream is expected to increase to 8MB.

Eclipse believes that, with the support of Celestia's DAS lightweight node, Celestia is the best choice for the current Eclipse Mainnet, considering the balance between the security of the encrypted economy and the highly scalable DA throughput. Even though there is currently a view that using Ethereum DA is the orthodox Layer2, the project team will continue to pay attention to the progress of DA expansion after EIP-4844. If Ethereum can provide larger scale and higher throughput DA for Eclipse, the possibility of migrating to Ethereum DA will be re-evaluated.

Proof Mechanism: RISC Zero Fraud Proof (No Intermediate State Serialization)

The proof method of Eclipse is similar to Anatoly's SVM fraud proof SIMD (see GitHub extension link 2 for details), which is consistent with John Adler's view of avoiding the high cost of state serialization. Therefore, in order to avoid reintroducing the Merkel Tree (hash tree) into SVM, early project parties tried to insert Sparse Merkel Tree into SVM, but updating the Merkel Tree for each transaction would have a huge impact on performance. If Merkel Tree is not used for proof, existing general Rollup frameworks (such as OP stack) cannot serve as the basis for SVM Rollup, which requires a more creative fault proof architecture.

The charm of modularity lies in the decoupling benefits of components, which enables innovation at every layer of the stack, allowing optimization of each module to amplify the optimization of other modules. Perhaps in the future, the development process of modularity may generate a large number of competitive choices for developers and users.

Reference article

【1】https://blog.celestia.org/introducing-blobstream/ Introducing Blobstream: Delivering Modular DA to Ethereum

【2】https://mirror.xyz/eclipsemainnet.eth/0Q9NufkOPaRfCwi0yFj-_D4eONgscqpr00HGgYCwkHA?ref=twitter Exploring Eclipse's Canonical Ethereum Bridging and Verification System