One of the most anticipated projects in Q2 this year is Eclipse.
The project is committed to developing the first Ethereum Layer 2 using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). In March this year, it announced the completion of a $50 million Series A financing round, led by Placeholder and Hack VC. So far, Eclipse’s total financing amount has reached $65 million.
Other notable participants in the round include Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, Apollo-managed funds, Fenbushi Capital, and ParaFi Capital. In addition, the round includes strategic support from Flow Traders, GSR, Auros, and OKX Ventures. Various researchers and builders participated as angel investors, including Barnabé Monnot (Ethereum Foundation), John Adler (Celestia Labs), Austin Federa (Solana Foundation), ZachXBT, and Meltem Demirors.
“Eclipse aims to be the fastest Layer 2 for Ethereum, leveraging the best of the modular stack available today,” said Neel Somani, Founder of Eclipse Labs. “Ethereum needs a single, scalable, composable Layer 2 capable of handling 99% of use cases. Other L2 ecosystems are optimized only for full EVM compatibility, resulting in a highly fragmented, slow, and undifferentiated L2 landscape. Eclipse integrates a high-performance SVM with deep liquidity pools on Ethereum while maintaining hard constraints of verifiability.”
The Eclipse Labs team includes former Uniswap and dYdX BD and head of growth Vijay Chetty; David Lin, former VP of engineering at zk-L1 development firm Discreet Labs; and former Citadel quant Neel Somani.
“The launch of Eclipse will be the first of many coordinations between Solana and Ethereum,” said Tarun Chitra, Gauntlet founder and GP at Robot Ventures, an Eclipse investor. “Neel and the team have spent a lot of time looking at all the technical and economic approaches to try to get the best of both worlds when using succinct proofs and fees.”
Eclipse Labs has released Devnet and Testnet versions of the Eclipse protocol since announcing the mainnet architecture in September 2023. Leading dApps from the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems are expected to be deployed to the Eclipse mainnet once publicly released, including NFT marketplace Rarible, oracle infrastructure Pyth Network, and Solana lending protocol Solend.
“Previous layer 2 blockchains have suffered from long proving times and limited data availability – thanks to recent advances in Celestia and RISC Zero, it is now possible to build layer 2s as performant as Solana,” said Brian Retford, CEO of RISC Zero and Eclipse angel investor. “Eclipse is a prime example of virtual machine innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem, and we expect Eclipse and its architecture will inspire new developers and enable new and exciting applications across the ecosystem.”
Coming up soon is the Eclipse mainnet, expected to launch in the second quarter. The Eclipse ecosystem continues to grow, thanks in part to targeted initiatives for independent software developers and real users. Top developers and projects that deploy to the Eclipse mainnet will receive ecosystem grants as well as engineering and marketing support. Eclipse Labs intends to sponsor hackathons and accelerators, in addition to community-building activities for users interacting with the Eclipse mainnet.
“Eclipse weaves together the best infrastructure components crypto has to offer by combining the highest performance, battle-tested execution environment (SVM) in crypto with Ethereum’s deep liquidity and established settlement ledger and Celestia’s best-in-class data availability,” said Chris Burniske of Placeholder. “For users, this will look like Ethereum’s fastest L2 in practice, with transaction costs of 1/100th of a cent. For developers, Eclipse represents the continued virality of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Just as we saw the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) become the industry standard in the years following Ethereum’s launch, we expect the SVM to continue to proliferate rapidly, and Eclipse represents the most promising innovation environment for builders to experiment with the SVM outside of Solana itself.”