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

The $9 million seed round was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, and follows an earlier $6 million in pre-seed funding.

AccessTimeIconSep 27, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 4:18 p.m. UTC

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.

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.

DISCLOSURE

Please note that our privacy policy, terms of use, cookies, and do not sell my personal information has been updated.

The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period. CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG.

CoinDesk - Unknown

Tracy is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS and some NFTs.


Learn more about Consensus 2024, CoinDesk’s longest-running and most influential event that brings together all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3. Head to consensus.coindesk.com to register and buy your pass now.