Another Ethereum L2, understand Eclipse, which just completed $50 million in financing

Written by: 0xjs@金财经

Another player has come to the crowded Ethereum L2 battlefield.

On March 11, 2024, Eclipse, an Ethereum L2 solution using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), announced the completion of a US$50 million Series A financing, co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, making its total funding amounted to US$65 million.

What innovative features and highlights can it bring to Ethereum L2? This article briefly describes it.

Eclipse: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Eclipse combines the best parts of the modular stack:

Settlement: Ethereum< - Eclipse is settled on Ethereum (i.e. the built-in verification bridge will be on Ethereum) and uses ETH as its Gas token.

Execution: Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) - Eclipse will run a high-performance SVM as its execution environment.

Data Availability: Celestia - Eclipse publishes its data to Celestia for scalable data availability (DA).

Proof: RISC Zero - Eclipse will use RISC Zero for ZK fraud proof (no intermediate state serialization required).

Ethereum Settlement

The Eclipse mainnet’s verification bridge on Ethereum will be built directly into Eclipse. Eclipse nodes will determine the "canonical chain" through this bridge. This bridge forces Eclipse to perform correct ordering. The Eclipse node must also run an Ethereum full node. The bridge will validate all Eclipse transactions and prevent invalid states from being committed. Additionally, it will be survivable and censorship-resistant under certain failure conditions, allowing users to force inclusion of their transactions via the bridge even if the sequencer fails or starts censorship at L2.

Eclipse recognizes the importance of Ethereum's native assets, so Eclipse will use ETH as the Gas token. There are no plans for the Eclipse mainnet to have its own token.

Eclipse chooses Solana VM

A virtual machine is a software that can run programs. Specifically, the virtual machine executes the smart contracts of the blockchain. Why did Eclipse choose to use Solana VM?

• Performance: EVM blockchains such as Ethereum have only one program running at any given point, which is called "single-threaded" . The Solana virtual machine is a highly parallel runtime that, if you have multiple cores, can run multiple programs simultaneously, significantly increasing throughput.

• Safety: Some languages, such as Rust, make it easier to prevent many bugs that Solidity cannot. For example, Ethereum smart contracts are vulnerable to so-called reentrancy attacks.

• Community: Popular blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana have fostered thriving developer communities around EVM and SVM respectively. This means better tools and developer support compared to newer virtual machines like Move VM or Fuel VM.

• Ease of use: Languages ​​like Solidity are easier to code, and not all bytecode supports compilation from Solidity.

In summary, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is chosen to run the Eclipse mainnet. But programs built for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) using Neon EVM can also be supported. In the future Eclipse will add other bytecode formats based on dApp requirements. You can even use existing tools for EVM (such as Truffle or Remix) or tools for SVM (such as Solana CLI or Seahorse Lang).

Eclipse uses Celestia to provide DA

Ethereum’s current bandwidth does not support the target throughput and fees of the Eclipse mainnet. This remains the case even after EIP-4844 (aka "Proto-danksharding"), which provides an average of ~0.375 MB of blob space per block (with a limit of ~0.75 MB per block).

• For ERC-20 transfers with basic compression (~154 bytes per transaction), this equates to ~213 for all rollups TPS.

• For compressed exchange (~400 bytes per transaction), this equates to ~82 TPS for all rollups.

In comparison, Celestia will launch 2 MB blocks later this year. Blobspace is expected to increase to 8 MB shortly after launch once enough Data Availability Sampling (DAS) light nodes are online and the network is stable. DAS light nodes have two key functions:

• Allow users to self-verify whether Eclipse block data is available

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Helps safely scale the entire network because as more DAS light nodes come online, the DA layer can safely increase its throughput.

Celestia’s DAS light node support from day one, crypto-economic security properties, and highly scalable DA throughput make it a clear addition to today’s Eclipse mainnet choose. Eclipse also intends to monitor Ethereum’s progress on DA scaling following EIP-4844. If Ethereum provides Eclipse with greater scale to benefit users, Eclipse will evaluate the possibility of migrating to Ethereum DA.

Fraud proof uses RISC Zero

Eclipse mainnet deploys optimistic rollup, but zero-knowledge rollup is being developed in parallel.

For optimistic rollup, the "sequencer" sorts the transactions and publishes the resulting state root along with the bounty to Ethereum layer 1. A "validator" can re-execute the transaction, and if there is disagreement about the outcome, the validator can challenge the state root through "settlement". If the validator is correct, the reward will be awarded to the validator.

Eclipse uses RISC Zero to create ZK fraud proofs without intermediate state serialization.