Introducing Eclipse Mainnet: The Ethereum SVM L2

Eclipse Mainnet is a general-purpose L2 that combines the best pieces of the modular stack:

• Settlement: Ethereum – Eclipse will settle to Ethereum and use ETH as its gas token.
• Execution: Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) – Eclipse will run the highly performant SVM as its execution environment.
• Data Availability: Celestia – Eclipse will post its data to Celestia for scalable data availability (DA).
• Proving: RISC Zero – Eclipse will use RISC Zero for ZK proofs of fraud (without intermediate state serialization!)

Leadership 

Vijay Chetty, CEO of Eclipse Labs, has over a decade of experience in the cryptocurrency industry, including leadership roles at Uniswap Labs, dYdX Trading, and Ripple Labs, Vijay Chetty has been instrumental in spearheading growth, along with developing investor and partner networks for notable DeFi protocols, and will do the same at Eclipse.

Execution: Solana’s Speed & Scale

Eclipse Mainnet will adopt Solana’s best-in-class execution environment. This brings tremendous advantages:

Optimized Parallel Execution

The SVM and its Sealevel runtime famously enable parallel transaction execution. Transactions that don’t touch overlapping state can be executed in parallel rather than sequentially.

This allows the SVM to directly scale with hardware as processors continue to add more cores at lower cost. 

Local Fee Markets

Most fee markets today are global, meaning that one hot application increases fees for all users of the chain. One NFT mint shouldn’t render the chain useless for everything else. Solana’s amazing work on local fee markets solves this cross-app state contention. In its current implementation, the scheduler prioritizes transactions without conflicts, allowing conflict-free transactions to go through with lower fees. 

Settlement: Ethereum’s Security & Liquidity

As with today’s major rollups, Eclipse Mainnet will settle to Ethereum. Ethereum settlement recognizes the importance that Ethereum-native assets will likely play in Eclipse Mainnet’s DeFi and NFT economies. ETH is the best decentralized money that most users clearly prefer, so we will also use ETH as our gas token. Longer term, fee abstraction will enable users to pay in any token of their choosing (e.g., USDC). There are no plans for Eclipse Mainnet to have its own token at this time.

Data Availability: Celestia’s Bandwidth & Verifiability

Eclipse Mainnet will utilize Celestia for data availability (a.k.a. data publishing or data publication). Celestia has been a long-standing ecosystem partner of Eclipse.

Celestia is expected to be the first DA layer to launch with DAS in production. Overall, Celestia’s DAS light node support from day one, crypto-economic security properties, and highly scalable DA throughput make it the clear choice for Eclipse Mainnet today.

Why Eclipse, Why Ethereum, Why Now

Today’s rollups don’t take full advantage of the latest technology that’s needed to scale to the masses. Early rollups largely prioritized EVM-compatibility and/or optimizations for more efficient ZK-proving. More recently though, we’ve seen unbelievable progress which obviates the need to make those tradeoffs that early rollups chose, and indeed puts them at a disadvantage:

• Highly performant parallelized VMs (e.g., SVM)
• DA scaling with DAS light node support (e.g., Celestia)
• Advances in proof infrastructure to make it practical anywhere (e.g., RISC Zero)
• Increased portability of code (e.g., Neon and Solang) and users (e.g., MetaMask Snaps) across ecosystems

Eclipse has the massive benefit of hindsight. We get to learn from the limitations that other chains have faced then cherry-pick the best pieces to scale for the long-term.

We’ve always appreciated the simplicity of Solana’s vision. One highly optimized shared state machine with the scale to support the majority of valuable use cases. This is often viewed as incompatible with a rollup-centric roadmap, but that is simply not the case. We want to combine the best of both worlds.

Ethereum is the intellectual, social, and economic center of crypto. Its Achilles’ heel has been scaling. DA scaling is still in the works, and the existing L2 execution environments can’t compete with newer innovations like the SVM. We fear that the Ethereum ecosystem would be caught flat-footed by any sharp increase in activity as it stands today. Single-threaded EVMs and constrained DA would quickly lead to a resurgence of high fees, except this time on rollups.

We believe Eclipse Mainnet is the obvious solution: uniting Solana’s performance with the security, verifiability, and network effects of the rollup-centric roadmap.

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