Eclipse Raises $50 Million in Series A Funding for Modular Blockchain Development

According to Blockworks, modular blockchain Eclipse has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round led by Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing its total funding to $65 million. Other investors such as Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, and Fenbushi Capital also participated in the round. Blockchain modularity refers to the different design layers of a blockchain stack, including execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability. Unlike blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, which carry out these activities with the same set of nodes, modular blockchains divide these functionalities into separate specialized layers. Neel Somani, the founder of Eclipse, believes that there are no layer-2s on Ethereum today built for scale. He said that Eclipse aims to be the most performant layer-2 by incorporating low-hanging fruit at the execution layer to provide a superior user experience on Ethereum. Eclipse is built using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) for execution, Celestia for data availability, and Ethereum for settlement and consensus. Although the Dencun upgrade is approaching, which will make data posting more affordable through the introduction of EIP 4844, Somani notes that Eclipse will continue to use Celestia for data availability for the time being. Somani also highlights the advantages of publishing all transactions onto a data availability layer, even for zk rollups, as it ensures transparency and allows anyone to quickly verify if a zk proof system has been tampered with or compromised. Eclipse plans to launch its mainnet in Q2 of 2024 and has already released a devnet and testnet version of its protocol. Several dapps, including NFT marketplace Rarible, oracle infrastructure Pyth Network, and lending protocol Solend, are testing its infrastructure. After the mainnet launch, Eclipse plans to sponsor hackathons, accelerators, and organize community events for its users.