Imagine developing a Rollup leveraging Solana low fees and Parallel execution, Cosmos IBC Composability, and Ethereum Security 🤯

Build your own rollup with Eclipse.

Eclipse is a customizable infrastructure platform that enables the development of customized rollups. In their own words:

Your fully-configurable, composable infrastructure platform supporting a blockchain designed just for you — with no compromise on security, reliability, or convenience.

What is the thesis behind Eclipse?

As rollup solutions become easier to develop, more and more apps that need full customization on the execution layer will go fully on-chain in the form of rollups, rather than L1.

Why?

Because L1s are monoliths that are very hard to develop.

By deploying a rollup on Eclipse they can save on those issues and benefit from customizability, low gas fees, and shared security.

Furthermore, the more L1s develop, the more the overall security of the sector is weakened as there is only a finite number of validators securing these systems.

On the other hand, the development of more L2 leads to “Sustainable scalability”, since Rollups increase economic activity and fees, incentive others to join and strengthen the decentralized base of L1.

Do you still L1 bro?

How does Eclipse work?

Eclipse separates three key concepts:

• Consensus
• Data Availability (DA)
• Execution

.. and allows projects to make trade-offs by dividing up these concepts or properties into modules.

Eclipse itself is a settlement layer that enables the creation of a custom execution chain by selecting the desired consensus and DA layers, which can be combined to create the best combination for the specific use case. Rollups will plug into it and have the ability to choose where they are settling down through their DA layer.

Eclipse takes the benefits and core properties from different ecosystems: the Cosmos IBC to provide customizability, the Solana Virtual Machine to provide low fees and parallel execution, and Rollups to increase the security of Ethereum, and lets projects choose the best combination!

On Eclipse you can create your modular rollups, and decide based on:

• Performance: whether you want to have parallel transactions for higher performance, with Sealevel, the Solana Virtual Machine, or if you do not want to support parallelism, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
• Security: which programming language? For example, Rust and Move can protect against many bugs that Solidity does not.
• Community: Ethereum and Solana have fostered thriving developer communities around the EVM and SVM, with better tooling and developer support compared to newer virtual machines like the Move VM or Fuel VM.
• Ease-of-use: languages such as Solidity are easier to code in, while Rust is typically considered more difficult to code in.

Eclipse currently supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solana Virtual Machine. Nevertheless, that’s not properly the same VM used on Ethereum:

Their implementation of the EVM is 10 times faster than Optimism by leveraging the parallelism in the Eclipse virtual machine.

What is Data Availability?

In the process of confirming whether a transaction is correct, Light clients can relax their trust assumption by sending block headers to multiple full nodes. The honest full nodes need access to the blocks of transaction data to generate the required proofs in case of an invalid block header.

Data availability layers take in blocks of transaction data and provide this assurance via data availability (DA) proofs.

DA Layer Modularity

Many of the DA layers are not live, with many having testnets.

Currently, Eclipse supports Celestia, Eigen DA, and Avail.

• Celestia, which “invented the concept of modular blockchains and enables probabilistic sampling to provide proof of data availability”
• Avail, which “provides KZG commitments as the data availability proof — longer to generate but can provide stronger guarantees on DA”
• EigenLayer (Eigen DA), which “leverages the existing stake used on Ethereum”
• Ethereum, “which will eventually support data availability sampling (DAS) via various upcoming improvements”

Eclipse supports Celestia, Eigen DA, and Avail, and we will offer additional options as applications make requests.

What is the end vision for Eclipse?

To provide a chain-agnostic settlement layer for all virtual machines and programming languages.

How do settlement and DA work?

Nodes in the Eclipse settlement layer run light client for Celestia.

Eclipse is designed to handle settlement without relying on any L1 blockchain.

It is a Celestia sovereign rollup that is only used for bridging and passing proofs. A sovereign rollup allows a light blockchain client to “pass the last block header it saw to all of the full nodes that are connected to”, to see if they accept it as valid. If an honest full node disagreed with the header (proof), then the light node can produce evidence that the header is indeed invalid.

It does not execute any smart contract as that happens in dedicated separate chains.

Who builds on Eclipse?

DApps, Consumer Apps, and Gaming apps may need customization on the execution layer. Instead of developing an L1 from scratch, they can develop a Rollup, saving on some of those issues.

Eclipse is aligned with the Cosmos ecosystem and provides a settlement layer for all types of virtual machine-supporting languages.

Food for Thought

Can someone build on top of Eclipse directly?
No, it’s a restricted execution layer.

Rollups are still seen as an Ethereum concept and are anchored to Ethereum, but they are a feasible alternative to customize the execution layer without launching a new L1.

Eclipse leverages the Solana Virtual Machine due to some inherent beneficial properties such as the parallel execution of transactions and a local fee market.

They take the Solana Virtual Machine out of the Solana consensus Layer, then they build optimistic rollup capabilities and a settlement IBC layer for interoperability, compatible with the Solana VM.

Pretty cool, they basically work as a Rollups-as-a-service company allowing you to develop customized rollups leveraging the benefit of the Solana VM, combined with Ethereum security and IBC interoperability.

Give me parallelized execution and interoperability.

If we assume the future is going to increasingly look like more and more rollups on top of L1 blockchains, Eclipse will lead the dawn of this new era!