Customizable rollup provider Eclipse is launching a Solana-focused scaling solution, which allows applications to be compatible with Polygon, the companies exclusively told TechCrunch.
Rollups, a part of the layer-2 blockchain ecosystem, are a scaling solution to help make blockchains faster and cheaper. Rollups work by compiling a number of transactions into one bundle to go onto a layer-1 blockchain like Ethereum or Solana. So basically, instead of sending thousands of individual transactions, it’s one larger one that costs less.
The Polygon Solana — or Sealevel — Virtual Machine (SVM) will be powered by Eclipse and will be able to run smart contracts and tooling compatible with Solana, which will ultimately increase throughput speed and interoperability for crypto subsectors like gaming, DeFi and more, Neel Somani, founder of Eclipse, said to TechCrunch.
“Ethereum was obviously still really slow and still very expensive, so it was very obvious rollups were the path to scaling Ethereum,” Somani said. “So we were thinking, what if we made a highly parallelized rollup, but the difference is that we stick to a standard set of tooling that already exists like the Solana Virtual Machine or Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).”
That was the initial motivation behind Eclipse, but it’s evolved into a customizable rollup provider: People can pick their base level (like Polygon or Solana), choose a virtual machine like EVM or SVM, and make customizations in the application that might include different elements at the core level, Somani said.
Applications, games, projects, protocols and more are still “too expensive” in the crypto ecosystem, but rollups can help support different use cases without constraining the blockchain, Somani said.
Through the launch, decentralized applications (dApps) built for the Solana blockchain can migrate or become multichain through the Polygon SVM, which can open up the doors for both communities using and building on different blockchains.
Between the two communities, there’s been high demand for a collaborative solution in mainly the gaming and physical infrastructure application spaces, Somani said. “That’s the big areas we’ve been seeing demand for and it’s the areas where Polygon and Solana have been going after lately.”
In the long term, Eclipse sees this launch as just the beginning for scaling.
“I think this hinges toward a future proliferation of all kinds of virtual machines across all these different base layers,” Somani said. “This might be one example of an SVM rollup, but we are likely to see SVM on Ethereum mainnet or SVM on other base layers.”
Correction: The headline on this story was updated to properly reflect the launch of the scaling solution.
