Author: Chris Burniske Source: placeholder Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance
In 2017, two years after the mainnet launch, Ethereum's smart contract environment attracted global attention and became the foundation for publishing and operating open source protocols and organizations. Contracts written in Solidity were executed via the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and initial coin offerings (ICOs) became a hot topic, with developers and users experimenting with the possibilities.
During the 2018-2020 bear market, EVM solidified its dominance as new smart contract environments were launched as standard on Ethereum. Some of the most notable examples to emerge from that era are Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and Polygon, which have all launched their own integrated smart contract environments powered by EVM.
Given the integration design of that era, these alternative EVM networks went through the heavy lifting of building entirely new validator sets to support their EVM versions, rather than leveraging Ethereum’s existing decentralized hardware ecosystem. Ask anyone who has coordinated the release of a highly decentralized validator set and they will tell you that building and maintaining it is no easy task. This heavy lifting has slowed the popularity of these alternative EVM environments, but nonetheless they have grown into ecosystems with their own ecosystems of developers, users, validators, etc.
In 2021, one year after the launch of the mainnet, Solana rose to fame and provided an alternative execution environment for EVM through the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) . Contracts written in Rust are executed through SVM, and transaction speed and cost benefit from SVM’s modern design. At first, progress was slow. A whole new set of developer tools is required to support SVM, although it does benefit from prior knowledge of Rust. Once it became clear that SVM was a powerful complement to EVM, developer tools and activity around Solana began to snowball.
Fast forward to 2024, Solana is now widely regarded as Ethereum's most reliable Supplement, its fees, users and DEX transaction volume are comparable to or even exceed Ethereum. Just as EVM began to proliferate outside of Ethereum after Ethereum's widespread success was recognized, we also see SVM begin to proliferate outside of Solana as SVM's own success is realized. But the proliferation of SVM occurred after a cycle, the modular era of blockchain design.
In the modular era, SVM no longer needs to integrate the network and its own set of validators to surpass Solana, but can instead execute the first 2 (L2) and then plug-and-play its preferred consensus and data availability solution, outsourcing a lot of the heavy lifting of decentralized hardware. Given the smaller amount of effort required, we expect that SVM will spread faster than EVM initially, and that the two virtual machine standards will compete with each other in terms of developer mindshare, number of users, and total value.
In this evolution process, we believe that the SVM L2 that deserves the most attention is Eclipse, which is the fastest L2 for Ethereum. Eclipse chose Celestia for data availability and Ethereum for consensus and settlement. These design choices mean Eclipse will enable extremely fast and cheap transactions via SVM, while leveraging Celestia's leading data availability layer to publish transaction data in an affordable and easily verifiable way. By choosing Ethereum to settle its executed transactions, Eclipse provides an easy way for Ethereum assets and users to experiment with SVM applications.
One way to think about intra-layer design choices is that the lower the stack, the more we need small machines to verify the truth. By “small machines” we mean a set of requirements that are broadly implementable, allowing almost anyone to verify the truth if they wish, thereby avoiding collusion. As long as these small machines publish and verify "truth," large machines can run higher in the stack, achieving higher performance but not sacrificing decentralization where it matters. Interestingly, this design means that Eclipse can achieve transaction throughput exceeding that of Solana L1, giving it its own diverse ecosystem.
That's the technical side; on the social side, Eclipse's design choices have other interesting consequences. First, since it runs SVM, developers who may feel intimidated or excluded by large protocol teams can try Eclipse on Solana as a greenfield SVM. At the same time, because Eclipse uses Ethereum for settlement, it will be able to easily access Ethereum's large existing asset base and inherit the reorganization protections supported by Ethereum. Solana application builders may be interested in launching their applications that already exist on Solana to attract these users and assets, while Ethereum users may be attracted to try out the SVM environment on their home turf. One could even think of Eclipse as a Solana embassy for Ethereum nations.
Eclipse has been developing SVM L2 for Ethereum longer than any other team. It is also the first team to launch the mainnet and is led by industry veterans. Led by Vijay Chetty, who previously led business development and growth at dYdX before doing the same at Uniswap. Vijay’s experience with some of the most successful cryptocurrency applications makes him well-suited to understand the needs of application developers. At the same time, he is also accompanied by Terry Chung, David Lin and Nathan Cha, who lead strategy, engineering and growth, respectively. As the first team to launch SVM L2 on Ethereum, Eclipse is expected to become the leader in this category
Olive
Coinlive 
decrypt
Beincrypto
Cointelegraph
Bitcoinist