Eclipse Labs, a San Francisco, CA-based software firm contributing to the development of the first Ethereum layer-2 using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), raised $50M in Series A funding.
The round, which brought the the total amount to $65M, was led by Placeholder and Hack VC. Other participants included Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, Apollo-managed funds, Fenbushi Capital, and strategic checks from Flow Traders, GSR, Auros, and OKX Ventures. Various researchers and builders participated as angel investors, including BarnabƩ Monnot (Ethereum Foundation), John Adler (Celestia Labs), Austin Federa (Solana Foundation), ZachXBT, and Meltem Demirors.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and development efforts.
Founded by Neel Somani, Eclipse is building an Ethereum Layer 2 using the Solana Virtual Machine, so that developers get benefits of dedicated throughput with none of the downsides.
The Eclipse Labs team comprises Vijay Chetty, former Uniswap and dYdX Head of BD and Growth; David Lin, former VP of Engineering at the zk-L1 development company Discreet Labs; and ex-Citadel quant Neel Somani.
Since its mainnet architecture announcement in September 2023, Eclipse Labs has released Devnet and Testnet versions of the Eclipse protocol. Leading dApps from the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems are anticipated to deploy to Eclipse Mainnet, once publicly available, including NFT marketplace Rarible, oracle infrastructure Pyth Network, and Solana borrow-lend protocol Solend.
On the horizon is Eclipse Mainnet, on track for a Q2 launch. Top developers and projects deploying to Eclipse Mainnet will be offered ecosystem grants alongside engineering and marketing support. Eclipse Labs intends on sponsoring hackathons and accelerators, in addition to community-building events targeted toward users who interact with Eclipse Mainnet.
Commenting on the news, Neel Somani said: “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.“
FinSMEs
12/03/2024