EclipseLabs—a company contributing to developing the first Ethereum layer-2 with the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)—announced it has raised $50 million in Series A funding co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing its total capital to $65 million. Additional participants in the round include Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, Apollo-managed funds, and Fenbushi Capital.
The funding round also included strategic investments from Flow Traders, GSR, Auros, and OKX Ventures. Several researchers and builders participated as angel investors, such as Barnabé Monnot (Ethereum Foundation), John Adler (Celestia Labs), Austin Federa (Solana Foundation), ZachXBT, and Meltem Demirors.
Eclipse’s Labs team includes Vijay Chetty (former Uniswap and dYdX Head of BD and Growth), David Lin (former VP of Engineering at Discreet Labs), and former Citadel quant Neel Somani.
Since the company’s mainnet architecture was revealed in September 2023, Eclipse Labs has released Devnet and Testnet versions of the Eclipse protocol. Once publicly available, several dApps from the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems like Rarible, Pyth Network, and Solend are expected to deploy to Eclipse Mainnet.
On the horizon is Eclipse Mainnet – which is on track for launching in the second quarter of this year. As the Eclipse ecosystem continues growing, top developers and projects deploying to Eclipse Mainnet will be offered ecosystem grants along with engineering and marketing support. And Eclipse Labs plans to sponsor hackathons and accelerators along with community-building events targeted toward users who interact with Eclipse Mainnet.
KEY QUOTES:
“Eclipse is built to be Ethereum’s fastest layer-2, leveraging the best pieces of the modular stack available today. Ethereum needs a single, scalable, composable layer-2 capable of handling the 99% of use cases. Other L2 ecosystems have only optimized for full EVM compatibility, resulting in a highly fragmented, slow and undifferentiated L2 landscape. Eclipse integrates the high-performance SVM with the deep pools of liquidity on Ethereum, while maintaining the hard constraint of verifiability.”
– Neel Somani, Founder of Eclipse Labs
“Eclipse’s launch will be the first of many harmonizations between Solana and Ethereum. Neel and the team have spent a lot of time researching all of the technological and economic ways to try to get the best of both worlds when it comes to utilizing succinct proofs and fees.”
– Tarun Chitra, Founder of Gauntlet and GP at Robot Ventures, an investor in Eclipse
“Previous layer-2 blockchains grappled with long proving times and limited data availability — it’s now possible to build a layer-2 as performant as Solana due to recent advancements by Celestia and RISC Zero. Eclipse is the prime example of virtual machine innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem, and we anticipate Eclipse and its architecture will inspire new developers and enable new and exciting applications across the ecosystem.”
– Brian Retford, CEO at RISC Zero and angel investor in Eclipse
“In combining crypto’s most performant, battle tested execution environment (the SVM), with Ethereum’s deep book of liquid assets and established settlement, and Celestia’s best-in-class data availability, Eclipse weaves together the best infrastructure components that crypto has to offer. What this looks like in practice for the user is Ethereum’s fastest L2, with transactions that cost 1/100th of a cent. For developers, Eclipse represents the continued viral spread of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Similar to how we saw the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) become an industry standard in the years after Ethereum’s launch, we expect the SVM to continue its rapid proliferation, with Eclipse representing the most promising innovation environment for builders to experiment with the SVM, outside of Solana itself.”
– Chris Burniske of Placeholder
