Modular March EP 16: Where Eclipse & SVM Fit in The Modular Thesis

Typically, you wouldn’t think of Solana having a strong footing in the modular thesis. After all, the design choices they have elegantly pioneered (credit where credit is due) revolve around scaling a single state machine. This simply won’t scale to billions of users, and they will need to modularize. However, the extremely performant and extensible Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is an effective tool to build an extremely fast rollup atop Ethereum. We can all be friends here, right? Welcome to today’s Modular March presentation, where we take our first dive as a team into the fascinating world of Eclipse and its modular approach to blockchain scalability and security. For those who’ve been around the block(chain), you know the drill: scalability often comes at the cost of complexity or security. Yet, Eclipse offers high throughput without the mess of state fragmentation via their flexible architecture. They’re mixing the best of both worlds – Solana’s speed and Ethereum’s security, with a splash of Celestia for that decentralized data layer cherry on top. We enjoyed this presentation with Sydney while also trying to understand where the tradeoffs or weaknesses in this design lie. We found some edge-cases but what was most interesting was the application possibilities as a result of using the SVM. We had some solid takeaways, you’ll enjoy this.