What is Eclipse? Blockchain Layer 2 with the fastest speed expected

E1hB...qeDH

28 Jan 2024

Eclipse describes itself as a project that "stands on the shoulders of giants" with a design that takes full advantage of the strengths of other blockchains, such as SVM from Solana, Ethereum as an authentication and consensus layer, and Celesta with data availability. The project is expected to be Layer 2 with super fast speed and strong scalability.

Introduce

Eclipseis a Layer 2 scaling solution on Ethereum for general-purpose use. Eclipse is designed with a modular structure to take full advantage of the strengths of other blockchains, it uses Solana's SVM as the execution layer, Ethereum as the authentication and consensus layer,Celestiaworking with data availability, besides Eclipse also uses RISC Zero to create ZK Proofs for verification.

According to the project's definition, they are designing a system that "stands on the shoulders of giants".

Product

Previously, Eclipse focused on building solutions to help deploy custom rollup chains, also known as RaaS (Rollup as a Services). But developers realized that what Ethereum needed was oneLayer 2for general purpose with really great scalability. Because creating strings with lots of customization will only add to fragmentation and reduce user experience. Therefore, Eclipse's current development direction is to become an Ethereum Layer with the strongest speed and scalability.

This is realized by the modular blockchain model with the participation of many blockchains with the best strengths today. In the following section we will learn in detail about its mechanism of action.

Mechanism of action

To leverage the power of blockchains, Eclipse divides work into four main groups:

Execution - Execution
Proving - Creating evidence
Settlement & Consensus - Processing and consensus
Data Availability - Provides data availability

Eclipse architecture

Execution - Execution

Eclipse chooses Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) for the execution layer. This choice comes from its speed, unlike EVM and many other virtual machines that only run single-threaded, SVM'sSolanaAllows transactions to be executed in parallel as long as those transactions are not related to each other. Because of this property, SVM is always ranked among the execution environments with top computing speed.

In addition, Eclipse also supports EVM applications through Neon EVM so that programmers do not have to rewrite the dApp if they need to switch from Ethereum.

Proving - Creating evidence

Eclipse usesZero RISKto create Zero Knowledge fraud proofs. The fraud evidence kit includes:

Commit the input of the transaction
Transaction content
Evidence demonstrates that re-executing transactions will result in different outputs than on-chain results.

Settlement & Consensus - Processing and consensus

Similar to other Layer 2s,Ethereumwill be the blockchain of choice as the processing and consensus layer for Eclipse. This is understandable because until now Ethereum is still the most decentralized and safest blockchain smart contract. The authentication-related tasks handled above will inherit the security of Ethereum. It.

Not to mention, Ethereum is also the most vibrant economy in the crypto market, so placing an authentication layer and bridge on top of this to allow money to flow back and forth will also help Eclipse more easily attract liquidity and users.

Eclipse uses ETH as the gas fee payment token, in the future, the project mentions that users can use other tokens for this (eg USDC).

Data Availability - Provides data availability

Celestia will do the classData Availabilityfor Eclipse. Besides Ethereum mainnet, there are not many DA layer options for Modular projects at this stage.

Celestia is one of the leading and most successful projects in the Data Availability field with nearly 100 projects in the ecosystem. In addition to Celestia, the DA group also has a number of other names such asEigenDA, Avail, Not available.

Using Celestia for the DA layer will help transaction throughput and reduce costs significantly on Eclipse.

Eclipse execution flow

Create transactions: Users interact with Eclipse through the dApp using transactions.
Sorting transactions: Sequencer is the person who receives and arranges the order of transactions.
Block production: After the transactions are sorted they will be fed into the runtime for calculation, the output of this process is a new state of the network. Where Eclipse differs from other rollups is that it does not compute network-wide state, as this would cause congestion contrary to the goal of parallel execution, instead state commit is performed. expressed through state diff. Next, this block is posted to the DA Layer, Celestia, and the status commitments are also sent to the Settlement Layer, Ethereum. Currently the Eclipse team is the only one operating the Sequencer and block generator, they also plan to decentralize in the future.
Transaction settlement: Through DA Attestation (from Celestia) and Validity Proof (from Sequencer), the Ethereum contract will perform basic calculations to ensure that the data is formatted correctly. Next is the probationary period following the Optimistic Rollup mechanism. After this trial period, if there is no evidence of successful fraud, the new status will be updated and stored permanently.

Eclipse execution flow

Above is the entire operating mechanism of the Eclipse network. We will return to the product comments section in the general comments section of this article.

Development team

Neel Somani - Founder: Neel is experienced in the field of software development. Before founding Eclipse, Neel worked in many programming-related positions at different companies including: Citadel, Airbnb, Two Sigma, Oasis Labs.
Vijay Chetty - CBO: Vijay can be said to be the person with the most experience and connections in the cryptocurrency field on the Eclipse team. Vijay used to work at Uniswap Labs as Head BD and then Advisor, before that in BD positions at dYdX, SharesPost, Ripple. Vijay also spent nearly 3 years working at BlackRock as an Investment Associate and 2 years as a Researcher at NASA.

Eclipse's team is quite secretive, so besides the above content, there is not much information about other members.

Investors

Eclipse has had 2 rounds of capital raising with a total investment of 15 million USD.

The Pre-Seed round took place in September 2022 led by Polychain Capital calling for 6 million USD. Other investment funds include Polygon Ventures, Accel, Tribe Capital.
The Seed Round took place in December 2022 led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya. There is also the participation of Coinlist and Infinity Ventures. The amount raised in this round is 9 million USD.

Compared to other Layer 2 projects on Ethereum, the amount of money that Eclipse raises is very small. Maybe there will be more funding rounds in the future.

General comment

Eclipse's idea comes from user experience, creating thousands of independent rollup chains with their own purposes will only fragment liquidity and make the user experience worse, every time they use a rollup they requires many different settings.

From that fact, Eclipse tries to create a Rollup that is powerful and scalable enough to do everything to replace thousands of other rollups. That is also the reason why they chose SVM as the execution environment,Parallel Executionwill be of great help to this vision. Meanwhile, safety still comes from the security layer provided by Ethereum and proof creation technologyZero Knowledge.

The project started operating in the first half of 2022, the development time has been relatively long, perhaps partly because integrating many different blockchains creates technical barriers. However, at present, the project has reached the Testnet deployment stage and mainnet is expected in 2024.

Eclipse mainnet roadmap

Overall, Eclipse is a groundbreaking product that successfully combines many of the most effective modules together. UpdatesDencunof Ethereum will be a good catalyst for the Layer 2 trend and of course Eclipse.

Eclipse's capital call is quite modest compared to other projects in the same category. There may be other rounds of capital from VC or the community in the future. But calling for low capital is also an advantage for small investors because the project will not be overpriced.

Although the project mentioned that there are no plans to issue its own tokens, you can join the Eclipse Testnet to both experience the high-speed layer 2 network and have the opportunity to receive airdrops in the future.

Epilogue

Above is information about Eclipse, the project is expected to be layer 2 with super fast speed. Hopefully this content will help you in your research process.