Introducing Eclipse: Building Customizable, Modular Rollups with the Solana VM

Today, we announced that Eclipse has raised a $9 million seed round co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, following a $6 million pre-seed round led by Polychain.

The current fastest chain cannot meet the throughput requirements of web2 applications. The only way to scale is to run more chains in parallel. But even the best chains we have today have to make tradeoffs as they try to be fast, decentralized and low cost all at the same time.

What we are missing is a way to leverage the best parts of each ecosystem to build our own Lisk without worrying about security. Eclipse allows you to build customizable and modular rollups using the Solana VM on any chain. Next, we will even support the Move language.

We're excited to start using Celestia as our data availability layer. Eclipse is a project in Celestia's Modular Fellows program, and we've spent several months iterating on Eclipse's design with Celestia.

Why Eclipse?

Eclipse tools will allow you to easily deploy your code as a customizable rollup, so each development team doesn't have to be their own protocol designer, saving development cost and time. This allows you to scale to support the next generation of high-throughput web3 applications.

Eclipse modular solution

We have received a grant from the Solana Foundation to build a Solana VM rollup and bring inter-blockchain communication to dApps deployed to Eclipse.

Before working as a quant researcher at Citadel, I was a software engineer building the commodities group's distributed computing systems. Before that, I worked as a software engineer at Airbnb, and during my brief stint at Oasis Labs, I published research on differential privacy with Prof. Dawn Song. My co-founder Sam Thapaliya previously created the streaming payment protocol Zebec on Solana, one of the most widely adopted applications; Zebec is a perfect use case for the Eclipse architecture.

timeline

We've got support for over 50 protocols ready to deploy to Eclipse, including Zebec, Notifi, and Friktion.

We expect the public testnet to go live in early 2023. This will be an Optimism-style rollout where we run all the nodes ourselves, with no settlement enabled. This way, you can start using Eclipse Chain right away as we further build out the new honest settlement layer.

We are actively expanding our team and looking for talented Rust engineers and business development reps, especially those who have worked at other L1s and rollups.

vision

Eclipse will enable the first customizable and modular rollups, enabling the next billion users to access web3 with high-performance applications running on their own chains.

In addition to angel investment from Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana and a token swap with Celestia, we also received investments from Polygon Ventures, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, Galileo (Jack Zampolin and David Feiock from Cosmos) and Big Brain (Solana). We look forward to working with these ecosystems to support them with data availability.