Blockchain Infrastructure Project Eclipse Raises $15m To Build ‘Universal Layer-2’

Eclipse, a blockchain scaling project, has raised $15 million in pre-seed and seed funding at a nine-figure valuation.

Eclipse’s $9 million seed round was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, a crypto venture capital firm started by former Binance executives. Other participants in the round included Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Crypto and CoinList.

The platform’s earlier $6 million pre-seed round was led by Polychain Capital and included participation from Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, The House Fund, and Accel.

Eclipse is a customizable rollup provider that is compatible with multiple layer-1 blockchains. The platform enables developers to deploy their own rollup powered by the Solana operating system, using any chain for security or data storage.

Rollups, a category of layer-2s, help blockchains scale by increasing a chain’s throughput, which allows applications to handle more transactions in a given time frame.

“We’re like a universal layer-2,” Eclipse co-founder Neel Somani told CoinDesk. “Solana, Sui and Aptos are fast, but they don’t offer enough throughput to enable on-chain anything too computationally intensive, like machine learning.”

Eclipse, Somani says, will open the door for more “proactive use cases” for crypto.

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Eclipse plans to launch a public testnet on the Cosmos ecosystem in early 2023, and also has plans to support Aptos’ Move language in the future.

"Eclipse paves the path for Solana's runtime to communicate with Cosmos chains through Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)," said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and an angel investor in Eclipse.

"As major corporations and governments begin entering the blockchain space, Eclipse is essential infrastructure to facilitate their use cases, such as Web2-scale consumer and financial applications," said Niraj Pant, General Partner of Polychain Capital.

With the new fundraise, Somani and co-founder Sam Thapaliya plan to hire Rust developers and business development staff to grow the project’s ecosystem.

Eclipse has also forged partnerships with several ecosystems, including Celestia, EigenLayer, Oasis Labs, Polygon, Cosmos, and NEAR.