SVM L2 on Ethereum: Bullish or Bearish SOL? with Neel Somani, Founder, Eclipse

Solana on Ethereum? Solana has a virtual machine called the SVM. Proponents say it’s much better than the Ethereum EVM…multi-threaded execution…now it’s coming to Ethereum in the form of an L2. Today on the show, we brought on CEO & Co-Founder of Eclipse, Neel Somani. Eclipse is not only a new L2 on the scene, it’s also an L2 framework, kind of like the OP Stack. It’s a superchain contender. This poses some very interesting questions….who wins? Does this kill Solana? ------ 🎁 Check your wallet with our brand new tool: Claimables https://bankless.cc/GetClaimables ------ 📣 AAVE V3 is Here! http://app.aave.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ----- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:10 Motivations For Eclipse 10:50 Why is the SVM Great? 16:00 How Fee Markets Work? 19:20 Ethereum & Eclipse Pairing 20:25 What Kind of L2 is Eclipse? 23:25 Celestia For Data Availability? 25:30 Security Trade-Offs? 27:30 Transactions on Eclipse 28:00 Economics on Data Availability 33:50 RISC Zero & Eclipse 36:10 Modular Thesis 41:00 Eclipses's Superchain? 44:35 Eclipse Today? 45:20 Winners vs. Losers 46:40 Eclipse vs. Solana 49:00 Bad for $SOL? 52:45 Eclipse Team 53:45 Solana as an L2 55:00 Eclipse Token? 55:45 Future Ecosystems 57:05 Naming This New Tech 58:50 Roadmap 1:00:30 Neel's Bio 1:01:50 Closing & Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES Neel Somani https://twitter.com/neelsalami ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Solana on Ethereum? That is the question we explore on today's episode with a new product release as well. And this is an opportunity to pick into a topic we haven't yet touched on Ethereum, which is a virtual machine that Solana has called the SVM. That's the Solana virtual machine. So proponents have said for a long time that it's much better than the Ethereum EVM. It has multi-threaded execution, lots of bells and whistles that Ethereum doesn't have. And now on today's episode, we're finding out that it is coming to Ethereum in the form of a Layer 2. The Eclipse mainnet is what it's called. That is the Layer 2 that is launching today with the SVM embedded.

• 1:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Eclipse is not only a new Layer 2 on the scene, but it's an entire framework, kind of similar to the optimism superchain network as well. So this poses a lot of interesting questions, as you might imagine, that we are going to dig into today, including who wins? Is this a W for Ethereum? Is this an L for Solana? Or maybe the reverse? What does this mean for the future of our industry? A lot to unpack on today's episode.

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  I would even say that a lot of Ethereum people will say that, yeah, the SVM, the fantastic piece of technology, and it is better than the EVM, especially when it comes to the things that virtual machines do, which is execution. There are some massive questions that this brings to the table, and I'm about to ask them. But first, I want to talk about our friends and sponsors over at Layer Zero, who have a brand new announcement on the scene. This came out of Permissionless. Google Cloud and Layer Zero are partnering together to help thread together 15 different chains across the Web3 ecosystem. So what does Layer Zero do? It passes messages across from chain to chain. What does Google Cloud do? Well, it is the service provider, the oracle, that

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  Does those message that that message passing is the default oracle for layer zero. But if you don't want Google, you are free to also pick your own oracle. You could do, you could just like Google, how Google is the default search browser for many browsers. Google is the default oracle for layer zero. There's a link in the show notes if you want to find out more layer zero dot network. And there, and so that is a call to action there. There's a link to the chance.

• 2:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  There are some big questions on today's episodes, and so we have the the founder of the eclipse layer two. His name is Neil Samani. And he's going to be jumping on the podcast in a minute here, but David, we're going to be unpacking four different protocols. All right. So it's not just Ethereum and Solana. There are a few others as well that are woven into this layer two. So what are listeners in for? What are the big questions to prepare us?

• 3:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the question doesn't stop it. Is this Ethereum versus Solana Ethereum or Solana? Celestia and RISC Zero are also relevant here. And I think one of the questions is like, the big question, if we are investors in the space trying to invest in the future, we want to ask the question, who wins? What are what are these components doing together? And does some of these components win more than others? What does it mean to win? And or am I just using this lens of winning versus losing? Because that's my lens for all blockchain system. And is that even the right lens? So the the first question I think we're going to get get at is, does the Solana VM as an Ethereum layer two? Is that a bigger win for Ether than it is for Sol?

• 3:47David Hoffman?

  The Solana fanboys in my mentions are convinced that this is the Ethereum protocol moving closer to Solana. But the layer two centric take is that all good execution tech will eventually settle on Ethereum liquidity and security. But then what the hell does Celestia have to do with this equation? And what's Rix Zero doing there? So this is not just a question about like the tug of war between these two cooperating, competing protocols, but what does this mean for the modular thesis at large? So some very big questions, and I think I listened to Neil Samani over at the Modular Summit back in ECC and some of his talks around the space, and I think he's got some of the answers. So we're going to ask all of these questions to Neil here in a second. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show

• 4:31David Hoffman?

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• 5:14David Hoffman?

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• 5:57David Hoffman?

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• 6:41David Hoffman?

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• 7:16David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I would love to introduce you to Neil Samani, the founder of Eclipse, a project working to bring the Solana virtual machine, the SVM, to Ethereum. Today Eclipse has announced their SVM mainnet, the first Eclipse Layer 2 on Ethereum that uses the SVM as its execution engine, but Ethereum for settlement and liquidity. Is that, is that a curveball? Well, it doesn't stop there because Eclipse is also using Celestia for data availability and RISC Zero for fraud proofs. So Solana's execution environment, settling on Ethereum, with ETH as its gas, using Celestia for data availability, and then security offered by RISC Zero fraud proofs. My first big question to you, Neil, is what the hell is that? What is this?

• 8:00David Hoffman?

  Who even allowed you to put all these?

• 8:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  What did you create?

• 8:03David Hoffman?

  What did you create? What is this?

• 8:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love this image. This is amazing.

• 8:07David Hoffman?

  For the Bankless listeners out there, this is the "What the Hell Is This" Family Guy meme for the, for the people listening on the podcast.

• 8:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like Noah on the ark and there's some kind of hybrid animal, like a giraffe, elephant, like, I don't know what that tail that is, but some kind of hybrid animal that's been created, like the platypus.

• 8:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  That is awesome. David, thank you for having me.

• 8:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so Neil, where did this idea to put four different networks together come about? And maybe talk about some of the motivations here.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  So the original idea was just to put Solana on Ethereum. And that was the motivation behind the concept. And what we ran into was just a ton of constraints and things that you'd expect to be true for a virtual machine, because that's how it is in the Ethereum world. So an example is like Chain ID. When you switch your MetaMask wallet to another Ethereum chain or another EVM chain, then they actually have like a well-defined mechanism for doing that. Another example is there's no global Merkle tree for Solana. So the lack of these primitives means that that initial idea was not so easy to implement. So we basically implement, we had to add in Celestia, RISC Zero out of necessity in order to make this possible.

• 9:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, so you had to add Celestia and RISC Zero? Like, it wasn't an option to just do a layer two?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Just pure Ethereum. I think, so it depends on the amount of transaction volume that we end up running. But at our projected amount of transactions, Ethereum DA would just prove to be very expensive. And it would also lack a lot of the benefits of Solana, which is that you're going for scale, meaning that you want the transactions to be really cheap. So right now, it's like the base cost for writing 200 bytes to Ethereum is about 15 cents. So that would, that would be like much more expensive transactions. And that opens us up to a jump from the Solana community, which is like, oh, we're much cheaper than you. By doing it this way, then we can actually be competitive on price too.

• 9:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to get back to why Solana, because that's the big question, why the SVM, right? But before we do, just really quick, yes, data availability is very expensive in today's world. However, there is some hope. We just did, released an episode earlier this week with Dom from ETH Research on BlobSpace and EIP4844, where the cost of data availability for rollups is going to drop quite significantly. Or maybe, let me just rephrase that and say, the availability of data availability is going to be increased massively in the form of these blobs. Does that change the calculus at all for you? Or is it kind of the same? It's still more expensive than something like Celestia?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  It definitely changed the calculus. Yeah, given that it's a fee market, we have to see where that fee ends up landing. So I want it to be live, but yeah, there's great research going on in the Ethereum community for scaling DAA. We're watching it closely and we have ambitions to eventually just be fully on Ethereum and just use that for DA as well.

• 10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, let's talk about the the big thing here. So the Solana virtual machine, the SVM. We've not done an episode comparing the SVM versus the EVM. We've been thinking about doing one. This maybe gives us a little taste of that. Can you tell us what is what is so great about the SVM? Why do people, some people, you know, sing its praises and seem to prefer it for certain things?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  The way to think about it is by starting with the EVM and just understanding the failures of the EVM so far in scaling Ethereum. And I think that if you ask a lot of the researchers in the Ethereum community, scale is pretty much the biggest issue. But it feels kind of redundant for me to be saying that because everyone's talking about it. Yet, the way that they've tried to bring scale to Ethereum is just by taking the EVM and turning it into a rollup effectively. But what's nice about a rollup is that once you've decoupled execution, consensus, settlement, and DA, is that you can make that execution layer, whatever you want. So the issue with the EVM is that it's single-threaded, as it exists right now, meaning that all the transactions get in a single file line, they're executed one at a time. And that means that if there's a big NFT drop, for example, then that's going to really

• 12:00Speaker 02

  spam the network and there's no way to get your DeFi transaction in unless you're competing with all those other transactions that are in line. But what's nice about a parallelized virtual machine is that you can execute those transactions concurrently, given that they're not touching the same piece of state. So that's what the Solana virtual machine primarily brings. And it's the most battle-tested VM in the sense that Solana's been around, as opposed to Move or some other parallelized virtual machines, which are much newer. And that means that you also get the benefits of the existing Solana codebase, any existing libraries that are written for the SVM, and we can take all those and immediately port it to Eclipse. So that's the the main reason to use SVM, which is just scale. And scale is inherently maximalist take for a rollup to claim, because we're basically saying that if you have one SVM, you don't need all these other single-threaded VMs around it.

• 12:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so one of the reasonings I've heard around the EVM is that while the EVM does execute, because that's what virtual machines do, it was not built for execution. It was built for the Ethereum Layer One, and that has prioritized other properties. And while the EVM has had a ton of just network effects, the open source network effects around the EVM are super, super strong. I think in this day and age, in the year 2023, one of the things we're seeing is that the network effects around the SVM are growing sufficient tailwinds that, Neil, I think what you're saying is that, well, I can feel safe that there is sufficient momentum in the network effects of the SVM codebase that is going to be an alive codebase moving forward into the future.

• 13:31David Hoffman?

  And so it is going to be the execution virtual machine that we can deploy to Ethereum, because if we have a rollup-centric roadmap, we aren't beholden to the EVM on Layer Twos. Is this my interpretation? Is this about right?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And what's cool is that it actually goes beyond just the existence of the SVM per se. It's a bit of a misnomer, because the SVM is actually the Berkeley Packet Filtered Virtual Machine, and that's been in the Linux kernel for like decades. So this is a very old virtual machine, and it has raw support, and it can compile to the bytecode, and there's a few surrounding extensions that are pretty battle-tested as well. So we're taking all this existing wealth of open source code and just repurposing it as an Ethereum wallet.

• 14:10David Hoffman?

  How much better is it, Neil? Like, how can you quantify that?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I would argue it's like orders of magnitude, like 100, 100 times, or something, some ridiculous magnitude or faster, yeah.

• 14:20David Hoffman?

  Okay, so like, if we take a rollup with the exact same stack you're talking about, but rather than SVM, we have the EVM, versus what you're doing with SVM, how much better is yours? You're saying in order of magnitude, like 10x, 100x?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always tough to talk about throughput, because the reality is, it depends on what are the state access patterns, like, everything, let's say, every transaction in the SVM was accessing the same piece of state. Then you actually can't beat sequential, because that's just like the fact about databases, right? You'd have to impose, if it was sequential writes, let's say. So then you have to walk that piece of state to execute the transaction, then do the next one, then do the next. The next one. So you're not saving anything in the sequential case, but assuming they're all touching different pieces of state, which if the crypto thesis is right, we're gonna have all kinds of applications, doing all sorts of different things. And that's effectively what these EVM rollups are mimicking. If you look at OP stack, the reason why people are deploying these, a lot of time they cite dedicated block space.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  But that's exactly what the SPM already solves for them. So our thinking is why fragment liquidity, fragment the user experience, make them switch networks. It's looking like a mess already, but you can you can prevent all that by just keeping it all in the same chain.

• 15:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so one of the, I guess the bull case for the EVM is basically, I don't think anyone really prefers it for its execution prowess and capabilities. They all prefer it because of the network effect. It's because we started with the EVM, a whole bunch of apps were built, and now we could just very easily port those apps to rollups. That's kind of why. And I guess with SVM, it is, you're making the case that it is much like better for just kind of the execution layer type thing. And you're still taking advantage of some of the network effect that Solana has built as well. I want to ask a question here because I'm not sure I fully understand this, but about like kind of different fee markets and resourcing.

• 16:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  How does that work? So is it the case inside of your rollup that if there is a big NFT drop or some sort of app that is consuming a large quantity of the block space inside of Eclipse? Is that somehow isolated or segmented? Or is there some kind of bifurcation of resources between another layer? Localized fee market is. Yeah, this is, this is a term that I have not fully understood, but I know our friends on the Solana side really purport this as one of the main virtue of actually Solana is like these localized fee markets. Tell us about that.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's critical. And if you've looked at Arbitrum lately, fees still spike substantially on rollups if they're single threaded. And that's because of that exact reason that you're mentioning, the global fee market. If GMX gets a bunch of activity, then everyone suffers as a result. But economically, that's not actually really the way that it should be because there's this negative externality to GMX being imposed on all of the other apps. But really, it should be constrained to that one app. So it's as if you took all these global fees and you just concentrated it on the one app that's actually causing on the on the hotspot or a state hotspot. Uh, as as some of the folks on the salon aside will describe it as. Uh, and you just, uh, everyone else can just keep like merrily happily, uh, walking along and they can execute on other cores. So it's it's really a property of the scheduler within the validator.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Cause in every validator, you have to somehow decide what order am I going to process transactions? And they're saying everything that's accessing this piece of state is going to all go on a single core and everyone else can use the other cores and and there's no contention on those.

• 17:41David Hoffman?

  So Neil, this is really just a statement, uh, uh, the design philosophy of Eclipse is just a statement that it's a bullish statement on the growth of the SVM. Network effects. So maybe in this day and age, if you were like Optimus or Arbitrum, you're going for this thing called Ethereum equivalence. Just then they are making a a statement that, hey, we are bullish on the growth of the EVM network effects. And the, I mean, network effects of different virtual machines can grow independently. It's not an either or. But what you're, the philosophy of Eclipse is saying like, hey, there's the SVM network effects are going to grow, they're going to grow a lot. Uh, we want to take that and couple it into whatever the value is of being a part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Uh, that's why I like synopsis synopsis of this.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd even argue that EVM network effects have proven to be not so important. And I think it made a lot of sense initially, a few years ago, when you had Polygon and BSC launching. But if you look at the types of apps that were deployed there, you get like sushi swap, which is effectively a fork of Uniswap. And now I recognize they deployed even to like Ethereum, but those are the types of apps you often get. And it's rare that those apps are actually not new. Whereas by bringing the SVM to Ethereum, I think we're actually going to see not new applications in the Ethereum ecosystem. Just given that there's a lot of apps that just couldn't exist without parallelism. Central limit order bugs being a great example. We've seen a lot of decentralized physical infrastructure networks on Solana, so we can bring those to Ethereum as well. Uh, apps like that, I think, uh, are are going to be more interesting to me rather than porting apps that already exist.

• 19:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Certainly. Okay, so that was the execution environment of the Eclipse project. Remember, when we live in the modular world, that there are different modules. So there's a few others that we're going to go to. I want to go to the Ethereum module next. Ethereum is directly enshrined in the Eclipse tech stack. The Ethereum bridge enforces the correct ordering for Eclipse transactions. Can you talk about the significance of this? Like, what is Ethereum providing to Eclipse? What is the Ethereum module doing here?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what this means concretely is that an Eclipse full node includes an Ethereum full node. So an Eclipse full node is also watching Ethereum. It's looking at that bridge, and that bridge has significance in how the protocol operates. Meaning if the bridge gets rolled back, the bridge gets reordered. This all influences the Eclipse full node, and it will also get reordered or will also get rolled back. So that's what it means. And there's a second, more subtle aspect, which is that we use Ethereum for gas, or we use Ether for gas. And that's an important fact because that increases the moniness of ETH. And we could have, we had the option to deploy our own token and use that for gas instead. But we recognize that everyone in the Ethereum ecosystem already uses ETH. There's a ton of it, and people are looking for things to do with that. So we wanted to keep that intact and use it for gas for our chain, too.

• 20:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So how similar is, this is what makes Eclipse a Layer 2. How similar is it to other Layer 2s that we know today versus kind of different? So one categorization, is it an optimistic Layer 2, or is it sort of a ZK Layer 2? That might be one way to look at it, but there are probably others. Can you classify it with respect to the existing players that people know about?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  What's weird is because the Solana VM settlement is so different from EVM Layer 2s, the terminology might have to change a little bit, and I have some thoughts on that later. But in general, I would describe this as, this is an optimistic rollup that uses some zero-knowledge technology, or uses some zero-knowledge proof in the optimistic settlement. So that's what the rollup is as it exists today. And moving forward, there's a route where we could actually become a full zero-knowledge rollup.

• 21:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  An optimistic rollup because there is some sort of fraud-proof window?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're not using kind of like ZK to do sort of all of the, you know, all of that side of things. There's a...

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't prove every single transaction.

• 21:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. Okay.

• 21:34David Hoffman?

  Okay, so we have, so this is a layer two, an eclipse node and contains an Ethereum node, which is the bridge. Ethereum enforces correct ordering for Eclipse by proxy of all of this. That means this means that like the assets on Ethereum, the liquidity on Ethereum have a direct and open pipe into the Eclipse ecosystem. Does this mean that Eclipse gets Ethereum for security? Or is that the fraud proof element of this?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  So, security can be thought of as safety and liveness. So the fault proofs are basically providing execution safety. So if something gets executed incorrectly, then the fraud proof will prevent that from being settled to the bridge. And users should really look to that bridge if they're figuring out what's the last correct state of this chain. That's, that's the truth. And that's the canonical chain. Whereas the full node, yeah.

• 22:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  There is like this trustless bridge type concept then.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yes, that's a critical part of the protocol. Yeah, yeah.

• 22:32David Hoffman?

  And of course, like the main pull for being on Ethereum in the first place is I'm assuming just it's the most secure decentralized chain with all of the liquidity and all of the assets. Like that's the, the simple cases or anything else to add to this?

• 22:44Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly what you'd want for settlement. Yeah.

• 22:47David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. Okay. I feel like that checks the Ethereum box relatively quickly unless you have anything to add, Ryan.

• 22:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I'm just, it's fascinating to me, this decision. I'll just make a comment to use ETH for kind of gas rather than a native token. And we, we might come back to that. But of course, I'd imagine you have to, like Eclipse has to pay taxes denominated in Ether, right? You guys are at the end of the day, buying some block space from Ethereum. So that element certainly makes sense. Yeah, and I'll just comment, that's a interesting design decision and certainly, you know, one that is commendable, I think in many ways.

• 23:24David Hoffman?

  So I think the, the, this part in the conversation, I think is that really relatively easy to people, for people to wrap their heads around, take this whole lot of virtual machine, put it inside of a layer two, settle on Ethereum, but we got some extra curveballs. Celestia for data availability. So now we're bringing in the Cosmos ecosystem. So why not Ethereum for data availability? Why not now? And then also, why not Ethereum for data availability, even considering post 4844 proto Dank sharding? Like, what's the thought process behind Celestia for data availability?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  So Celestia, when it goes to mainnet, will be the most advanced, scalable block space that exists right now for making transactions available. So that was the, and the reason for that is, one, if you just look at the amount of bandwidth available on Ethereum, you can pretty much upper bound the amount of transactions that can be posted by like a few hundred transactions right now. And then, of course, the thing that I don't want to ever like bet against research. So that's why I don't want to write off saying like, oh, we could never use Ethereum for DA. Because, you know, research happens in like this exponential way. But, but as it exists, it's just a little bit too constrained. And that's exactly what Celestia has been solving for. And Mustafa actually wrote the original data availability sampling white paper. And he co-authored that with Vitalik.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  And what they're basically doing is, as a user, you can verify yourself whether a block is being withheld. And the more users are doing that, the more block space Celestia can provide. So that's their path to winning, which is that there's this critical network effect around the more people that are using Celestia, the more secure it becomes and the more scalable it becomes. And for that reason, Celestia might just always be ahead of whoever's the next best in DA.

• 25:01David Hoffman?

  So even with proto dank sharding 4844, and then even with full dank sharding, given the fact that Celestia achieved some sort of critical mass of adoption, there's a world where Celestia can even outpace full dank sharding because full dank sharding has a lot of scale. But what you're saying is like, well, jury is still out as to the race between Celestia versus full dank sharding as who can provide the best bandwidth.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like one of Celestia's biggest advantages right now is that they're about to be live. And no one else is there right now.

• 25:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Is there a trade off in your mind, Neil, about, you know, on kind of security here? So in this entire episode, we've, we've called what Eclipse is doing a layer two notably, rather than a roll up. And this is because there's some recognition, I think, in kind of the Ethereum community in general that, hey, in order to be called an Ethereum roll up, you actually have to do not only your settlement consensus on Ethereum, but also the data availability layer, right? The DA on Ethereum as well. And so that's like, you know, Dankrad posted this and, you know, I think it certainly, this idea has some merit. And the idea there is, in order to be given the title of an Ethereum roll up, then you gotta be doing every, all of both of those layers on Ethereum. And so the, the notion that this is, you know,

• 26:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Comes with increased security is certainly present there. Do you see that as a trade off? Or is that not something that you are worried about for Eclipse? Or is Eclipse just optimizing, you know, somewhere else on the on the trade off landscape?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  So it is technically a trade off. I will say that we're doing everything we can on Ethereum just to start, but the trade off is back to those properties of safety and liveness. So in order to create a fault proof, you of course need to have access to those transactions. You need to run them all yourself, need to identify which one was invalid. And in order to do that, you have to look at whatever layer one those transactions were posted to. So if they were posted to Ethereum, then you haven't really added any additional trust assumptions that Ethereum is behaving correctly. But if you post a Celestia, theoretically, the Celestia validators could collude. They could they could sign off and say, yeah, we got the block, but then they just don't give it to. So to me, that threat is unrealistic in practice. We could have like theoretically made this into a Valium or something like that, where we post the blocks to some centralized DA

• 27:14Speaker 02

  or some DAC or something. And that I would say is a very different point in the security spectrum, because the DAC really could conclude. That's not that many entities that would be required to say, we're going to withhold the block. Whereas a full out one blockchain with slashing, that's a little bit harder to imagine.

• 27:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  And let's talk about the other side of this equation. So the benefit of this and how you've laid this out is how cheap are transactions going to be on Eclipse?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  So it's hard to say for sure, because DA is always a fee market. So because Celestia is not live, we need to see where that fee market lands. But based on our projections, it's going to be comparable to Solana.

• 27:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Comparable, okay. And how, what are Solana transactions going for these days, guys?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  It's like

• 27:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:00David Hoffman?

  So I want to talk about the economics that are created as a result of this choice. So settlement and liquidity come from Ethereum, Ether as gas. There are economic tailwinds behind Ether there. Celestia for data availability, instead of using Ethereum for data availability. So Celestia is capturing some of Ethereum's value capture, if you will. How can we think about who is splitting the pie here between Ethereum and Celestia? When you choose to use Celestia for data availability?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  So I think it's a difference between moneyness and quote unquote value flow. So if you look at the cost of a transaction, the majority of it typically does go to DA. Uh, in the case of no congestion, if there's congestion, then a lot of it will go to the execution layer. Uh, similar, that's what causes the fee spike said, I was referring to an arbitrum with their global fee markets. So, so that value of course goes to last year. Of course, the cost of operating last year is much higher. So as far as what's the validated profit, it might end up being like even close to zero. I, after you've accounted for all the costs of their bandwidth. But, uh, given that ether is used for, uh, gas, then we're all like transacting things and ether we're denominating our NFTs and ether. I, I think that's probably the bigger piece of value accrual for a token in my opinion. Uh, so that's, that's how I, uh, how I think about it.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  And then of course, there's the critical dependence on Ethereum, uh, for security. So just given the fact that we're just posting to Ethereum periodically with the state root, well, it's not really state root, but with commitments. Uh, that's, uh, that, that's a, that's one fourth source of value flow onto Ethereum.

• 29:28David Hoffman?

  Okay. So you're posting data to Ethereum. It's not a blob in 44. It's just, it's kind of, is, is it called data? It's in the call data field.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Uh, so the data that we post to Ethereum is, uh, that state root is actually into a smart contract.

• 29:42David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, I keep saying state root because that's how, what it is for an Ethereum roll, for an EVM roll up. But because there is no global mercury for our roll up, uh, it's, it's not quite that. Instead, it's like a commitment to what the output of the transactions are.

• 29:55David Hoffman?

  Okay. So previously when we think about these things and, um, uh, what we will call normal roll up land, like optimistic roll ups, layer optimism arbitrum. They, we, we talk, we, the, the meme that Ryan and I say is that layer two is buy Ethereum block space. Um, but that's less true with Eclipse because you're buying Celestia block space for a data availability. Um, but you're still buying some block space because you're doing something. You're updating the state of, uh, a smart contract, the, the eclipse smart contract on the Ethereum layer one. Like I, I, I know like rough numbers are always hard to ask for, but how do you like, how much gas is that? Basically, how much are you paying Ethereum is the question I'm trying to get at.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, one other like critical place for paying gas is for all the bridging. Anytime someone puts money into Eclipse or takes it out, uh, it's like a hash time lock contract the way it's written right now. So that that costs money there anytime. I mean, that's true for any asset. Uh, if you wanted to force inclusion, so it's hard to ask. I mean, that depends on what's the gas price for Ethereum and

• 30:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  What was the price of getting up a block space? So it's hard to estimate that.

• 30:57David Hoffman?

  But compared to, compared to like an optimistic roll up today, that's, you know, I don't know. The last I looked at this, all of the roll ups, um, in general were like, uh, consuming 200 to 500 ETH per day or something like this. Um,

• 31:11Speaker 02

  For DA.

• 31:11David Hoffman?

  It's going to be a fraction of that. Yeah, mostly.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  So if you look at it like optimism, like OP stack, if you, I, I think it's worth separating the DA cost and the settlement cost. And the DA cost is, is the vast majority of that, of that 200 ETH you were mentioning. Uh, and then settlement is yeah, maybe like one tenth of that, if, if even it's, settlement's actually a small fraction of it in terms of just raw cost. But I, I don't know if that's even what's valuable for, I, I don't want to ever say like price of anything, but I, I think the reason why Ether is so valuable is because we use it to pay for so many things. And that, that's the, that's the fundamental benefit of it. It's going to play a critical role in our ecosystem.

• 31:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah. One of the models that we say for the layer two, um, for, um, 4844 for proto dank sharding and full dank sharding is that Ether is making, Ethereum is making a trade off with its own layer twos where it is extracting less rent from them by producing extremely cheap data availability for these layer twos. Uh, so it doesn't have to consume that much gas to post blobs. Um, and it, the trade off is that while it doesn't charge much to be a roll up post 4844, it gets to be money in all of these networks. And so I guess extending that logic, um, Celestia gets to capture the value flows. It was what you're saying. I, that's why you say it flows. I'm assuming it's less. It gets to capture the value flows, the bulk of the buying of the block space.

• 32:32David Hoffman?

  But Ethereum, Ether still gets to be retained as like the money of, um, of Eclipse. Am I, am I on track here?

• 32:40Speaker 02

  I think that's the right way to think about it. Yeah.

• 32:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's fascinating about this conversation is because I feel like we've been trying to describe the animal that Noah has just brought on the arc over the last like, you know, 15, 20 minutes and how long we've been talking. What's so fascinating about this, and I love it, by the way, is because I think this is going to break crypto Twitter's brains. Because do you know how we're all always so divided in terms of tribes, right? And here's Neil saying, I've got this, this layer two called Eclipse. And by the way, ETH is money. Solana has the best virtual machine. Celestia is the best data availability layer. And by the way, it's not an optimistic roll up or a ZK roll up. It's something in the middle. Right? You're just good. Like, I don't know if everyone's gonna love you, or you're

• 33:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  just gonna piss everyone off. But I know you're gonna confuse a lot of people with this approach. And it makes me so happy, honestly.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it, too. And it's gonna force people to also think a little bit more about like, what are the security assumptions? What are they? What do they actually like about each blockchain? I think that's a really good reevaluation, especially in the roll up landscape. There just hasn't been enough innovation, in my view. Like, all the EVM rollups kind of look the same. And I'm glad to push the frontier on that.

• 33:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we ask this last piece? So RISC Zero is being used for fraud proofs, I believe. And our first exposure to RISC Zero was just a couple of weeks ago. And this may be an indication of how fast this space is moving. So I only just learned about your project yesterday, Neil. And, you know, that's how much is going on at, you know, at the moment, which is a very exciting time for building in crypto. But what is RISC Zero doing for Eclipse? How is it helping you?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so to take a step back, RISC Zero is a very ambitious ZK VM. And in general, ZK VMs have been very constrained. It's like, they just want to prove some bespoke program. They want to prove a virtual machine that's restricted to crypto, like the EVM. But RISC Zero took a ordinary virtual machine, which is Risk 5, and they're ZK proving any Risk 5 program. And what's cool about that is that Risk 5 has been around before blockchains. But there's also that there's so much stuff written for Risk 5. So you could just take these existing Rust programs, or whatever you want, compile it to Risk 5, which almost everything does, and run it there. So what's weird is that the Solana virtual machine doesn't use risk five by code. But what we've effectively done is we take a BPF by code, which is the Solana VM by code.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  We output risk five by code, we prove that compilation. And then we executed it within risk zero. And this way we can prove that the execution of a transaction was done correctly. And we can say, these are the outputs, and here's a little small piece of proof to show that it was actually correct. And that's what we use risk zero for. So the reason why it's relevant for our fault proofs is that if you want to say that something is fraudulent, rather than re-executing that transaction on Ethereum, which should be very difficult, given that the SVM uses pre-compiles and stuff that doesn't exist in Ethereum. Instead, we just generate the ZK proof and we just pass it to Ethereum. We say, here's all the proof that it was executed incorrectly.

• 35:46David Hoffman?

  And notably, one of the most, the popular optimistic rollups on Ethereum, Arbitrum just got their fraud proofs. Optimism still TBD, which means base still TBD. And then in comes Eclipse with like, oh yeah, we've got like this super ambitious ZK fraud proofs. Here we go. We're already, we're already ready for them. And yeah, it's live. It's kind of nuts.

• 36:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Surprising.

• 36:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And I think maybe like Ryan talked about all these different tribes that are now confused here. I think that if there's one thing that is definitely the absolute winner here, if assuming that, you know, Eclipse is, achieves its division that it wants to achieve, is the modular thesis, which actually doesn't, isn't any one tribe. There are many handful of tribes that are all modular, like Ethereum is a modular network. Celestia is a part of the Cosmos modular ecosystem and it was providing a module of data availability. So no one tribe works, but the idea of modularity, I think is unlike categorically taking the dub here. Would you agree with that, Neil?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Definitely. Yeah, this is a very modular maxi type of that sentence even makes sense. Given the modularism isn't really like a maximalist.

• 36:53David Hoffman?

  It's almost oxymoronic. Yeah.

• 36:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  I actually, I recently read anecdotally of Solana being described as a single shard maximalist. It's the first time I've heard this. So, so maybe there's a counter to the modular maximalist.

• 37:08David Hoffman?

  Well, they just really, really want to rebrand away from monolithic.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, calling it integrated now. They had the no sharding podcast. Actually, someone on my team wrote a really good response, Sydney, against the whole integrated blockchains piece. And there's all sorts of things that you can basically only achieve in the world. So that that was the premise of it.

• 37:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sovereignty being the big one. Yeah, that was a good piece. I didn't know she was on your team. Okay, so there are a few more things that we want to talk about. This is not just a layer two. This is not just a single network, but Eclipse also is coming with its framework. So just like the OP stack or Arbitrum Orbit or the ZK stack, Eclipse has a framework that is bringing to the table, which means there can be multiple Eclipse chains. But a question that comes to mind is like, well, I thought if we're using the Solana virtual machine, I thought we just needed one execution environment. So I want to ask you about that. And then also there's a roll up as a service component of Eclipse, the company. And so that is another vertical that I want to talk about. And then I want to get to ultimately, Neil, the the big question of who wins here?

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  Who wins? We have four different projects in various loose competition, cooperation with each other. I think everyone kind of wants to know the punchline is like, all right, who, even though we are definitely growing the pie, somebody's taking a larger piece. So I want to unpack that conversation as well. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. MetaMask portfolio is your one stop shop to manage your crypto assets and to tap into DeFi all in one place. And the most important part of that experience, buying crypto, obviously. MetaMask portfolio's buy feature enables you to purchase crypto easily without going through centralized exchanges. Designed with you in mind, you can fund your wallet directly in just a few clicks with convenience and simplicity. What happens when you press the buy button?

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• 41:00David Hoffman?

  And we're back. And now we're going to open up the topic of the Eclipse Superchain. Should I call it Superchain, Neil? Or is there a different word that you have for this?

• 41:08Speaker 02

  I almost feel like it's an anti-superchain, because superchains imply many chains that are all being connected. Whereas I feel like it should all be on this one chain. So.

• 41:18David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the Eclipse mainnet that launched today is, is the chain that you're saying, well, we don't need more of these things, just use this one.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are cases where it makes sense to have your own chain, and it comes down to things like ownership. If you want to be able to fork and upgrade it at your free will. But in general, most applications, I feel, pretty much belong on a shared chain. And that just arose from the fact that we've deployed a lot of app-specific chains. We actually got to see those unit economics firsthand. We were the ones paying the cost. And we were just like, this doesn't seem to make sense, given the value of the transactions that are being run up on the chain.

• 41:52David Hoffman?

  So I'm confused here. So is Eclipse going to be just one chain, or like a?

• 41:56Speaker 02

  So it's a framework. It's, it's our, the Eclipse team is only going to own this one chain as of now.

• 42:02David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Uh, but we do have a roll-up framework that anyone can deploy. You could deploy your own instance of it. Uh, and it's built in such a way that it's easy to do that and even swap out the modules. And we've actually dogfitted it with a few folks as well.

• 42:13David Hoffman?

  Why would you build a framework then? If.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's because we didn't anticipate that it would be so scalable. We thought that it was going to be like a hundred chains or something initially, or thousands of chains. And, and honestly, just through our experience, we realized that it wasn't needed, and it also just wasn't practical.

• 42:31David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the idea here is that there's the Eclipse, the Eclipse maxi take, maybe that we're going to get some Eclipse tribes now. Uh, is that, uh, there will be like ninety-five plus of economic activity on the Eclipse networks on this one dominant mainnet chain. And then there will be a splattering of app-specific Eclipse chains that just want to have their own home base. Not unlike the, um, uh, MakerDAO Rune conversation that got started not too long ago about MakerDAO forking Solana to have its own app-specific chain, things like this.

• 43:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  They could just use this. Rune could just use this framework.

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  Well, I think Rune and, and I think they wanted to make their own Layer One specifically. But for people that don't want to go that far and still want to have some tie to Ethereum, yet still use a Solana codebase, they could use Eclipse. Is this right, Neil?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  So we are chatting with Maker, to be fair. There's a way to get that, but we don't have any, you know, Rian, I'm sure already has a pretty thoughtful vision of what he wants to do. Uh, but, but yeah, that, I, I, I think that's, that's the right way of thinking about it. And in my opinion, it's just that there aren't that many whales that could justify their own chain. I think base is a great example of a chain that makes sense. Base absolutely should have a chain and we can see the results of that. They've generated millions in revenue already. Uh, they haven't even been live for that long, but how many coinbases really exist in the world?

• 43:49David Hoffman?

  Right, right. Yeah.

• 43:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you think there'll be a small number of, um, layer twos then? Not, uh, you know, hundreds of thousands of, of rollups out there and layer twos out there?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  I think we need more scalable rollups. And if we have scalable rollups, then we don't need thousands or, uh, one time I saw someone say, we're going to have millions of rollups. I was like, this is getting truly out of hand.

• 44:11David Hoffman?

  That might, that might have been me. I might've said that.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Well, one reason why I don't like it is just aesthetic reasons. I just think it looks pretty ugly to have a bunch of these like tiny little chains. And then you have to have shared sequencers and you have to like prove the bridging, the liquidity is everywhere. You have dust on every chain. Someone posted a tweet of their Metamask wallet and it was like 40 chains and they're like, can Metamask please have a way for me to search chains? I'm like, this just shouldn't be an issue. It seems like an anti-pattern.

• 44:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, and just, just to be clear on what's shipped today. So what's shipped today, uh, on mainnet? Because you mentioned it's Celestia isn't even on mainnet. So obviously you're not doing the DA with Celestia right now. So what's shipped today on, uh, Eclipse and what can people go do?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  So right now it's, uh, so right now what's live is actually the test set and the mainnet, uh, architecture is announced. So that's going to be shipping later this, yeah, exactly.

• 45:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. So test net now. And then when is, when mainnet? When mainnet?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Uh, I, I don't want to, um, say it publicly yet. So it's, uh, but you can, yeah.

• 45:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Weeks, not months?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Uh, it's on the order of, yeah, it's on the order of weeks. Yeah.

• 45:14David Hoffman?

  Okay. So we flubbed up the intro. Sorry for bankless listeners. I feel wrecked by that. Um, almost a hold your breath amount of time. Uh, okay. So Neil, I want to get to the, uh, who really wins here conversation. Four different protocols all have components of their protocols being used, but not, no one protocol has all of the protocol being used. So how, how do you think about like the winner and losers of, of these, of these systems?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  So I think the most obvious benefit is to Ethereum, right? Given that Ether is being used to denominate everything and it's being used for critical security properties. I think value flow to Celestia is a pretty big win, especially given they're about to be made net. So having a big roll up on there and having some value flowing in is going to be really valuable for them. Solana is the one that's really tricky because there are indirect benefits to broader VM adoption. That's true. There's also risks that are incurred because of course projects could move from Solana to the roll up. Uh, you might have folks that um, that maybe they would have been forced to use Solana before.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Now they can bridge to this, yeah, this trust minimized bridge and stay on Ethereum and you get a lot of the benefits. So that's, that's definitely a question mark. Uh, they have that, you know, that like there's like BCG growth share matrix. There's like a question mark. It's like, we don't know how this is going to turn out. I think that's where I'd probably put my answer um, for, for this kind of thing.

• 46:40David Hoffman?

  One difference between Eclipse and um, Solana is that Solana is, is further down on the decentralization scale. Um, and layer twos famously don't have to be decentralized in order to actually fulfill some of their vision. That's one of the reasons why layer twos are layer twos. Is because of fraud proofs or is or trust bridging, et cetera. Um. You actually can be, have your, the operators of a chain be centralized because you are checked by Ethereum. So how does this dynamic between Eclipse and Solana change the game here? Because I, I would imagine Eclipse in terms of uh, hardware nodes running the system, there's much, much fewer of them than, than with Solana. How does that change the, the, the numbers and economics and game here?

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. There's thousands of validators for the Solana network. And so while, while I don't want to commit to like specific numbers in terms of like, what's the resulting dollar amount? You get the, it is correct is that the fixed cost of Eclipse is 4,000 times cheaper than Solana as an L1. Because there's, there's only one, you don't need 4,000 validators. So uh, that, that's true. And I, I also hate like when people talk about rollups and decentralizing their sequencer because uh, not, not that that sounds like a bad thing. Exactly. It's just, it's not an important conversation. Because what they should be talking about is what are the security properties today? Uh, and that's much more important. And if you get all the same security properties, it doesn't matter if there's a component that's centralized.

• 48:03David Hoffman?

  I will say that like three sequencers, like a handful of sequencers can make a ton of sense. But when people say decentralizing the sequencer, they're talking about like, yo, spread that all around the globe, like smear that ice cream all over that, or cream cheese all over that bread. That's the weirdest metaphor I've ever used.

• 48:22David Hoffman?

  But yeah, we only need like a small number of sequencers to preserve uptime and liveness and still retain like the vast majority of execution and cost, right? And latency.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And really, the only impact is to liveness because the risk is what if the sequencer just refuses to include your transaction? But what's good about rollups is that's exactly what the canonical bridge prevents, which is you can submit the transaction there directly. Doesn't matter if someone wants to censor you. So and the downside there is that, of course, if you submit to Ethereum directly, it's going to be much more expensive. So there's like a cost imposed on short term liveness.

• 49:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I want to make a, you know, statement here and the Solana tribe might sort of hate this, but so I'm just absorbing this right now and I kind of feel like this is good for the SVM as a technology. So.

• 49:13David Hoffman?

  The SVM takes a huge job.

• 49:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, this is a win for the SVM. And again, we're, you know, contingent on Eclipse being successful and all of these things, right? We know you're going to be doing major things and this is going to be a very successful layer two. That's the contingency, a win for the SVM, but a loss for Solana. So everything that.

• 49:31David Hoffman?

  A loss for Sol, where Solana is for me, kind of like Sol plus the SVM.

• 49:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's not what Solana Sol token holders care about, dude. They care about the same thing that ETH token holders do, which is like, they want to propagate, they want their investment, they want Sol number to go up. So sure, Solana as a concept has won, just in the same way that, you know, Modular has won, but can I invest in Modular Coin? Do you know what I mean? Like, it seems to be a, because what you're just, what you guys were just talking about, which is like this decentralization that Solana has versus Eclipse. And they do have a much wider validator set and they're much more decentralized than Eclipse. And of course, that's because Eclipse has outsourced its decentralization settlement consensus layer to Ethereum, right? And it doesn't have to pay those costs.

• 50:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  So what, you know, what one kind of group is, is holding up as sort of this is an attribute, we're a bit more decentralized. That's like a millstone because that's a massive cost of running the infrastructure, right? And this is, this is why maybe your statement, Neil, of a, you know, modular centric maximalist is, is kind of coming true. This is what the modular bulls have sort of predicted is that the economics of running an execution layer as a layer two on top of something like Ethereum far outstrip and far outpace what you can do independently as an alternative kind of layer one execution layer.

• 50:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's, it's really, I do very much see all of the different rollups and all of the different layer twos and Eclipse included. It's execution layer against execution layer. That's really where the competition is in that world. And so my conclusion is that this is actually a win for the SVM, but potentially a loss for Sol tokens and for Solana. And I know the Solana community may not like hearing that, but wow, that, I don't know how else you interpret this. Can someone give me the counter to that? Or maybe not on this call, maybe that's a follow up episode.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  There's no question. Yeah. Okay, cool. Just making sure. I was gonna get, I wasn't sure. I should get commentary on that on the record.

• 51:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you want to give commentary on that? Have I said anything that's incorrect?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  I think that, well, I don't try to predict token price. That's in general, I don't even look at prices. I have like a ton of crypto. It's not about price, it's about value capturing. Yeah, so I mean, of course, like, there isn't really any activity from this chain on that translates to the Solana long, right? It's like if you run a transaction on Eclipse, nothing happens on Solana as a result. So that that part, I think, goes without saying. Uh, but yeah, it depends on whatever, whether it's good or bad is the same as whether Maker Dows proposal is good or bad for Solana, I think. Uh, meaning that Maker Dow is also proposing a separate chain and the Solana community seem to like that. So I think, well, how are they receive that should probably be how they treat Eclipse, is what I think.

• 52:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think that's gonna happen? You think they're gonna receive you with open arms here?

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  The crypto tribes would love to reinterpret any news as positive for them. That's part of the game. That's part of the arena of crypto Twitter.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, to be fair, Toly is an angel investor in Eclipse. So he's very like, grow the pie, I think, in his, in his thinking.

• 52:46David Hoffman?

  Neil, is there a BD person at Eclipse? Are you guys all engineers right now?

• 52:50Speaker 02

  We have our chief business officer, BJ, uh, who is head of BD at Uniswap, uh, who is head of BD at D Y D X. He has some great plans for bringing liquidity to Eclipse and we're going to be supporting D five protocols in a pretty big way. So that's going to be a big emphasis for this chain.

• 53:05David Hoffman?

  So isn't one of like the biggest ways that Eclipse wins is to convince Solana apps and apps and consumers to migrate to Eclipse?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of reason for them to try out Eclipse, but the similar to that point about EVM compatibility, like that go to market tactic. I think it's a little bit, I think it's a good initial tailwind, but in the long run, I really want to see new apps on Eclipse. Just like true innovation on, uh, on the Ethereum side, especially in decentralized physical infrastructure networks. I used to be a quant at Setitall in the commodities group, so I, I do a ton of physical stuff. And in particular, like all these energy related projects, I think are really interesting. So I talk with those guys all the time.

• 53:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's fascinating to me about this project too is, um, uh, a lot of people have said, oh, this, this Solana should just become a layer two on Ethereum, right?

• 53:54David Hoffman?

  This is, this is that.

• 53:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's been very clear that Solana is not going down that path, or at least not right now, not entertaining it. I mean, that that seems pretty clear. And so they're not doing that. Therefore, someone else is like the white space will be filled by a market competitor. Right? This is very Darwinistic, you know, evolutionary type social pressures where the space and the gap will be filled. And you're doing that exact play. Now you have to start with a blank slate where you have no kind of network state, no apps. And you're building from the ground up, but it's basically that play. You you're executing Solana as a layer two on top of Ethereum and you're watching that experiment play out. And that's kind of interesting.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's true with markets in a really weird way, especially in crypto. Where Eigenlayer is another good example of that, where people are like, I want to do more stuff with my ETH that isn't necessarily enforceable on chain. And I don't want to change the Ethereum core code so that Eigenlayer pops up. Like you can restake your ETH and we can have additional slashing conditions. I think that kind of like void filling happens in Ethereum landscape more than anywhere else.

• 55:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So no token planned or like what ever using ETH for gas? Like, what's the story here?

• 55:12Speaker 02

  As of now, the Eclipse mainnet has no token.

• 55:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doing this all without a token. And of course, I guess costs are low, right? You don't have validators to pay in the form of token issuance because you're just paying a little bit for Celestia block space and Ethereum block space then.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what's cool. It's like a small business in the sense that like it's a small, like a, maybe I phrase that weirdly, but in the sense that it's just like profitable from day one. Every transaction pays for itself, unlike a layer one where they typically have to inflate the hell out of their token. That's just not how rollups work, so it's a big advantage.

• 55:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like now we're at a different stage of the cycle than we were in 2021 and 2022, which is now we have real cheap block space and it is plentiful. We have, this is our high bandwidth moment. And so maybe, you know, a question for you of like, all right, so who's going to buy all this block space that we've now produced? I mean, where are the apps? What are they going to be? Is there anything that you see there? Or is this going to take some like months and years to really play out to build out these ecosystems?

• 56:19Speaker 02

  I think definitely on the order of months. I think on day one, it'll be stuff that we've already seen in crypto, just given that new apps need that. It's like a chicken egg problem where until the highly scalable infrastructure existed, I don't think there was any way for someone to build like truly game changing apps in the EVM world up until now. Like I think front tech was, has been highly constrained by, by the fact that the fees are actually getting quite high now. There's a lot of reasons why, even the fact that, and I mean, I can, I can talk about like more details on it. But I think even like the AMM construction, for example, is kind of an artifact of a low throughput blockchain. Because if you truly had things your way, you'd probably start by trying to build an order book. And people did try on Ethereum, it just never worked.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  So, um, so yeah, I think that this is going to enable a lot of new stuff that people can, can start experimenting with.

• 57:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Neil, you said earlier, um, and you know, maybe we'll come full circle of this. Eclipse in your mind isn't quite a layer two, isn't quite a roll up. You had some ideas on, uh, you know, the best, the best term or the best way to describe this. So how would you describe it? What kind of term should we use for this new platypus type of creature that has just emerged?

• 57:28Speaker 02

  So basically I want to rename terms where I think if the word roll up, maybe it should even be eliminated. But I know that's too confusing and people have been using it for a while. But it's because it's too broad of a category, like people call it everything a roll up. An L2 should maybe even be reserved to in in line with what Don Crowe was saying. Just something that is maximally using Ethereum for like everything it can. So ideally, it's using Ethereum for DA, has its bridge there, ETH for gas. That's an ETH L2. And then everything else, like, for example, if you put your your DA off chain and you're using a ZK proof for the entire transaction chain, then that's a Validium. If you're using off-chain DA for like, basically, I want to like give new terms to each specific

• 58:10Speaker 02

  construction, but but that might just be overly confusing for your average layperson. So I I haven't come up with a term for what Eclipse should be called per se. But but I do have like some issues with existing terminology. I feel like it's so much easier to be a critic. So that's why I have issues with existing terminology, but I don't want to commit to it.

• 58:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would call you guys an Ethereum layer two Validium with the SVM as its execution.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  That seems reasonable. I think that that's like a it's it's like it captures all the important properties. Yeah.

• 58:42David Hoffman?

  It's also helpful.

• 58:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that that that, yeah, that's not a, you know, that's not memeable.

• 58:47David Hoffman?

  We'll we'll call it Eclipse for now.

• 58:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, it's cool.

• 58:52David Hoffman?

  Neil, I have learned a lot. This is very, very exciting. Oh, can you give us like kind of the short term roadmap? I know mainnet launch date, weeks or months, maybe something like this. But also what else is on the horizon that people might be excited about?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so mainnet on the order of weeks. This upcoming quarter, we're gonna bring, so this is early next year. We're bringing IVC compatibility. So this is actually something that Solana Foundation gave us a grant for. So we're just like wrapping up and productionizing that work. And what that'll mean is that all these Cosmos chains who historically wanted to get access to the Solana ecosystem. Actually, what's what's weird about Eclipse, and maybe this is just like a fact about Wolfs in general, is the bridging is the most important part. So historically, Solana just hasn't had very good bridges, such as Layer Zero. They announced their test app deployment on Solana, but the mainnet deployment has been repeatedly delayed. And that's because the execution model of Solana has all these small little details. But but basically, what I'm saying is that we're going to be interoperable with all with more chains.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  That's that's something that's coming up on the horizon.

• 59:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  And the Solana Foundation gave you a grant to do this.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, for the IVC work. Yep.

• 59:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, interesting, like full credit to Anatoly, who's maybe an investor here and also the Solana Foundation for funding a grant, because this is really has the potential, you know, to maybe cannibalize some of what they're doing. And it looks like they're forging into that. So I certainly have to respect that. You know, I stated Anatoly and others have always said, hey, I'm, we're just trying to propagate S V M in this open source technology. And so some points there for Solana, maybe at the end, if we still have any Solana listeners left at the end of this conversation. Neil, last question for you, at least from me, and maybe David's got something too. We didn't open with this, and we usually do, but I kind of feel compelled to ask it at

• 1:00:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  the end. How did you get into crypto? This project just like magically appeared on my radar kind of this week. And I don't know very much about, you know, now I know a lot more after doing this episode, but I don't know anything about you. So tell us about yourself.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  It's a bunch of facts that I try to hide, but I was working in Trad5. So I was working at Setitall. And then around the time, I think March of last year, I left, I was briefly building an E V M for Cosmos. That was actually my first thing that I was building in crypto. And then Terra famously de-pegged, and all the T V L just like flowed out of Cosmos. And then I was like, wow, like, that seemed to be like the thing that was holding, like, kind of propping Cosmos up to some degree at that time. So I had to reevaluate that project. I ended up scrapping it. And then I just spent a lot of time thinking about the economics of L1s versus rollups. And the Celestia team reached out, and they got me completely rollup pill. I was chatting with some researchers in Ethereum world. And yeah, then that initial

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  idea was just, all right, now I want to make Solana into an Ethereum rollup. And just ran into all the issues that I think most people probably wouldn't anticipate from first principles. But that's effectively what happened.

• 1:01:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, thanks, Neil. What a story. Yeah, that's a great story. Yeah, I guess we'll close it at that. We appreciate your time. Looking forward to what you're building here. And thank you for introducing us to the Eclipse Platypus today. It's an exciting new world of new chains that we can construct here. And I like what you're doing here.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:02:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Gotta end with some disclosures, of course. We are long-term investors, not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes. Neither David nor myself are invested in this project. Of course, we are bullish generally on Layer 2s and Ether the asset. Gotta let you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.