In a significant boost to its ambitions of building a highly scalable and composable layer 2 solution for Ethereum, Eclipse Labs has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by prominent crypto investors Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing Eclipse’s total capital raised to an impressive $65 million.
The funding will allow Eclipse to forge ahead with development of its novel Ethereum layer 2 leveraging the high performance of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). By integrating the SVM with Ethereum’s deep liquidity pools, Eclipse aims to deliver a differentiated layer 2 offering optimized for scalability while maintaining verifiability with Ethereum’s base layer.
“Eclipse integrates the high-performance SVM with the deep pools of liquidity on Ethereum, while maintaining the hard constraint of verifiability,” explained Neel Somani, founder of Eclipse Labs. “Ethereum needs a single, scalable, composable layer-2 capable of handling 99% of use cases.”
In addition to Placeholder and Hack VC leading the $50M raise, other high-profile investors participated including Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, Fenbushi Capital, Flow Traders, GSR, Apollo Global Management, and OKX Ventures. However, Eclipse did not disclose their latest valuation.
The fresh capital will supercharge Eclipse’s roadmap as they target a mainnet launch for their layer 2 network in Q2 of this year. The team has already rolled out devnet and testnet versions, with plans to onboard prominent decentralized apps like Rarible, Pyth Network, and Solend upon mainnet deployment.
Eclipse’s bold vision is to create the preeminent “highly composable Ethereum Layer 2 chain” capable of absorbing the vast majority of demand and use cases from Ethereum’s ecosystem. The startup believes the potent combination of Solana’s high throughput virtual machine with Ethereum’s deep liquidity could catalyze widespread layer 2 adoption.
If successful, Eclipse’s SVM-powered layer 2 could alleviate some of the scalability bottlenecks that have plagued Ethereum, especially amid surging demand driven by DeFi, NFTs, and other novel use cases. However, they’ll face stiff competition from numerous other layer 2 solutions like Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Starknet and more.
The significant $50 million war chest from marquee investors is a major validation of Eclipse’s approach and technical vision. But executing on that vision to launch a production-ready layer 2 by Q2 will be a daunting challenge that the startup will now be well-capitalized to tackle. The race to scale Ethereum is heating up.