Original author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Last night, the modular blockchain star project Celestia lived up to expectations and announced a large-scale airdrop. 7,579 developers and over 570,000 on-chain addresses were eligible for the airdrop. This airdrop once again aroused the markets attention to the modular blockchain.

As the first public chain to emphasize the concept of modular blockchain, Celestia completed US$55 million in financing at a valuation of up to US$1 billion in October 2022, and has stimulated incentives through the establishment of the modular research program Celestia Modular Fellows. It has led to the innovative development of multiple projects on the track.

Currently, according to the CryptoData PlatformRootData It shows that there are nearly 30 modular blockchain concept projects, of which nearly 10 projects such as AltLayer, Artela, and Astria have also received investment from well-known institutions this year. In addition, in addition to major news such as the airdrop released by Celestia, the leading modular blockchain project, other key points of the track have also made varying degrees of progress. For example, Eclipse released the latest L2 solution last week; the AltLayer Altitude testnet event announced that it has started its first phase. Phase four; Fuel also released the fourth public test network Beta-4...

Looking back at the background of the birth of modular blockchain, the blockchain is composed of multiple components such as consensus, execution, settlement, data availability, etc., while the traditional architecture single blockchain represented by Ethereum and Solana performs these tasks alone. They have limitations and cannot solve the scalability trilemma, while modular blockchain separates them into multiple modules, and each module uses professional providers to complete customization in the form of combinations and other forms. Therefore, modular blockchain has been a technology route that has attracted much attention in the encryption industry since its birth. What are the latest developments in it recently? This article briefly summarizes the latest developments of other representative modular blockchain projects besides Celestia.

Eclipse

Eclipse is a modular Rollup platform that has raised a total of US$15 million in financing in 2022. Investors include Polychain, Polygon Ventures, Tribe Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, CoinList, etc. Eclipse co-founder CEO Neel Somani previously had a background in Airbnb, Two Sigma, and Oasis Labs. Vijay, Eclipse’s chief commercial officer, was the former business development director of the Uniswap and dYdX teams.

Eclipse is currently only running on the test network, and you can apply for testing through the official website. Last week, Eclipse officially released its mainnet architecture. As the latest L2 solution, it is characterized by embedded Solanas SVM (Solana Virtual Machine). Specifically, Eclipse will use Ethereum as the settlement layer, embed Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as the execution environment, publish data to Celestia to achieve scalable DA (data availability), and complete ZK fraud proof through RISC Zero.

Eclipse co-founder CEO Neel Somani recently mentioned in the Bankless podcast that Eclipse’s original intention was to bring Solana to Ethereum. They hoped to use Solana’s execution capabilities while utilizing Ethereum’s settlement and liquidity, but encountered many limitations. and constraints, the main challenge is that Ethereum data availability is too expensive, so it was decided to introduce Celestia and Risk Zero. Celestia is used for data availability, while Risk Zero is used for fraud proof.

Regarding the Eclipse mainnet token plan, Neel mentioned that the Eclipse mainnet currently has no tokens. He said that because Eclipse has low operating costs (mainly paying for the block space fees of Celestia and Ethereum), there is no need for token issuance. to pay the validator.

Judging from the Eclipse official website, dozens of projects such as BNB Chain, Solana SVM Rollup Cascad Cascade launched by Iejective, Near, and Avail, a modular blockchain developed by Polygon, are deployed on the Eclipse test network or are strategic partners.

AltLayer

AltLayer is a decentralized Rollup-as-a-service protocol. Its entire stack adopts a modular design, and end users can choose Rollups according to their own needs. Rollup SDKs support Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and more. The data available layer supports Eigenlayer, Celestia, and Astria.

AltLayer founder CEO JiaYaoqi once led the construction of Parity technology and is also the co-founder and consultant of Zilliqa.

AltLayer received strategic investment from Binance Labs in August this year, and had previously received US$7.2 million in financing led by Polychain, Jump Crypto, and Breyer Capital in July 2022.

In April this year, AltLayer announced that it would open a free trial of the code-free Rollup Launchpad launch dashboard, which will support all users to deploy their own L2 with one click without writing any code. In May, AltLayer announced the launch of the first multi-sequencer testnet for Rollup, promising to alleviate censorship and enhance the security and usability of Rollup. In August, AltLayer released an API and SDK suite for programmatic access to custom Rollups, allowing developers to leverage a series of endpoints to dynamically create, monitor and terminate Rollups based on application needs.

At present, the AltLayer Altitude test network activity has announced that it has started the fourth phase, with the theme of on-chain games. Users can earn points by experiencing chain games such as Ottie 2048, Cellula, Loot Royale, etc. These games were newly released by AltLayer in September. Built on the Turbo framework of Autonomous Worlds, Turbo is customized as a Rollup stack optimized for Autonomous Worlds, which will enable developers to build autonomous worlds beyond full-chain games.

Fuel

Fuel focuses on becoming the execution layer in modular blockchains. It shares the same co-founder as Celestia, John Adler, who is also one of the earliest proposers of the Optimistic Rollup solution.

Fuel completed an $80 million round of financing led by Blockchain Capital and Stratos Technologies in September last year, and also launched beta-1, a testnet for developers that month. Developers can deploy contracts to it at will without permission. or whitelist, users can also interact with deployed contracts.

After a year, Fuel has launched its fourth public test network, Beta-4. The new test network adds public P2P access and multi-token support, and supports native-level NFTs, multi-asset pools, etc. But Fuel said Beta-4 is not an incentivized testnet. In December last year, Fuel stated that it planned to launch a complete mainnet in 2023.

In addition, Fuel recently launched a grant program for ecosystem development. According to Fuels second quarter report, the Beta version of Fuel Wallet has been downloaded more than 30,000 times since its release on the Chrome Store. Designed to allow users to explore DApps on Fuel and manage their crypto assets in one place, Fuel Wallet supports transparent transactions, multi-account management, and easy tracking of assets on the Fuel network. Projects currently deployed based on Fuel include Spark, Fuelet, Acumen, PlayEstates, etc.

Avail 

Avail is a modular blockchain developed by Polygon that focuses on data availability, sequencing and recording blockchain transactions, and proving that block data is available without downloading the entire block, allowing for ways that are not possible with monolithic blockchains. Extension. Additionally, off-chain scaling solutions can unlock their full potential by moving data availability to Avail. Independent chains can improve the security of validators to ensure data availability by using Avail.

In March this year, Polygon announced that Avail would be spun off into an independent entity. Avail co-founder Anurag Arjun left and acquired Avail, and the Avail team will migrate to the new entity. In April, Polygon head of research Prabal Banerjee resigned and announced that he would join Avail as a co-founder of the project.

The Avail “Kate” testnet launched its second phase in June this year. The first testnet phase allowed Avail to experiment with basic operations, perform on-chain functions and run protocol governance. The second phase will include a more comprehensive testing environment to encourage validator participation; it will also be followed by"data proof bridge"(data attestation bridge) to reduce the cost of Ethereum Layer 2 and Layer 3; and open source a new prototype of the Optimism EVM (OpEVM) software development kit (SDK) to allow developers to use OpEVM to build sovereign, EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollups .

Astria 

Astria is a shared sequencer network whose goal is to allow anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant Rollups without relying on a centralized sequencer, and Rollups can be retrieved from Astria as soon as a block is created. The shared sequencer is also one of the top ten important areas of focus in the hero post released by paradigm not long ago. It is reported that Astria’s co-founder and CEO Josh Bowen was previously a development engineer at Celestia.

In April this year, Astria completed a $5.5 million seed round led by Maven 11, with participation from 1kx, Figment Capital, Delphi Digital, Lemniscap and others. Astria currently cooperates with other modular blockchains such as Celestia, Eclipse and AltLayer. .

Caldera

Caldera is a Rollup as a Service (RaaS) protocol that enables anyone to get up and running a dedicated, high-performance layer 2 blockchain Rollup. The two co-founders, Parker Jou and Matt Katz, both graduated from Stanford University.

In February this year, Caldera announced that it had raised US$9 million in two rounds of financing, led by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from Neo, 1kx, Ethereal Ventures and other angel investors.

Then in March, Caldera launched two public testnets (EVM compatible) on Ethereum Goerli and Polygon, allowing developers to deploy smart contracts and connect through common tools such as Ethers.js and Thirdweb. Ordinary users can add the testnet to their wallets. Interact with deployed contracts. But Caldera said the testnet is not an incentivized testnet and participation does not confer any rights to tokens. In May, Caldera was selected into 16 Web3 accelerator projects announced by Alliance DAO.

Caldera has announced collaborations with Injective, Loot, Manta Network, Syndr, Biconomy and more. For example, Caldera recently announced that it is partnering with Injective to launch its inEVM Layer 2 testnet, which is designed to allow Ethereum applications to run natively on the network. The mainnet deployment is planned for the fourth quarter.

dYmension

dYmension is the modular settlement layer of the Cosmos ecosystem, which provides all the tools and infrastructure needed to launch rollups as part of the Cosmos ecosystem.

dYmension completed a $6.7 million seed round in early February this year, led by Big Brain Holdings and Stratos, with participation from Matchbox DAO, Shalom Meckenzie of DraftKings, etc. dYmension also launched the public test network Dymension Hub 35-C that month, with nearly 100 The genesis verification node has been running since then.

In August this year, Dymension announced the official launch of the incentivized test network Froopyland for permissionless IBC RollApp deployment. In the future, 1% of the total DYM genesis supply (10 million) will be allocated to the Froopyland incentivized test network that will last for three months. It is reported that the total supply of Dymension token DYM is 1 billion, 1% of which will be distributed to RollApp deployers (4 million), verifiers (4 million), test users (1 million) and former users in Froopyland 10 Rollapes (1 million coins).

In addition, as previously reported by The Block, Dymension’s co-founder and CEO Yishay Harel said that Dymension also plans to raise approximately US$20 million in funding before the launch of the mainnet.

Nautilus Chain

Nautilus Chain is a Layer 3 modular chain built on Eclipse that combines the speed of Solana with the decentralization and security of Ethereum, aiming to be the fastest EVM chain available and capable of parallel transaction processing. Nautilus Chain was first launched by Zebec Protocol, a streaming payment protocol.

In August this year, Nautilus Chain announced that the mainnet was online. Nautilus Chain said that the ecosystem currently has more than 80 strategic partners and service providers, and more than 70 projects have been deployed in the Nautilus ecosystem, including DEX PoseiSwap, premium derivatives trading Platform Coral Finance, payment protocol Coinflow, etc.

Previously in June, Nautilus Chian also announced the launch of the DID digital identity. Holding this DID represents early equity status on the Nautilus Chain. The equity includes access to ecological project tokens or NFT airdrops, risk-free pre-mining whitelists in mining pools, and access to Nautilus Chain. Whitelisting of new projects, governance investment qualifications, access to investment and customized technical support as part of an independent DAO community, and other rights. The first batch of DID identities is only 100,000.

Sovereign

Sovereign is an ecosystem of interoperable and scalable Rollups that can run on any blockchain. Sovereigns free open source toolkit, Sovereign SDK, helps developers build zk-rollups. The Sovereign official website states that the Sovereign SDK currently has three goals: First, it will provide a standard interface that allows rollups to communicate with the data availability layer. Second, it will be integrated with cryptographic compilers. Developers will be able to write code in standard programming languages, and the SDK will automatically convert their business logic into a cryptographically verifiable form. Finally, it will provide default implementations of common blockchain primitives such as tokens, NFTs, and bridges.

Sovereign completed a $7.39 million seed round in January this year led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Maven 11, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Balaji Srinivasan. Sovereign co-founder and CEO Cem Özer previously worked on the Ethereum Teku development team and was responsible for the production of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain client Teku.

Recently, Sovereign released the second Alpha version of Sovereign SDK, V 0.2.0. Key updates include the implementation of incentive management for Optimistic Rollups, implementation of incentive management for sorting through soft confirmation, implementation of experimental EVM support, and implementation of FCFS sorting with RPC support. implements universal support for CLI wallets, etc.

Artela

Artela is a scalable blockchain network that enables developers to build feature-rich dApps. Artelas extensibility enables developers to achieve maximum customization (public/private) by creating modular extensions on top of a common base layer. Artela co-founder Jason Hu previously served as senior strategic sales executive at Tencent US.

In July this year, Artela completed US$6 million in financing from Shima Capital, Big Brain Holdings, SevenX Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Amino Capital, and AT Capital.

Movement Labs

Movement Labs is a modular blockchain network based on the Move language. The modular framework it created, Movement SDK, provides developers with a way to build and deploy Move-based infrastructure, applications and blockchain in any distributed environment.

Committed to building a set of products and services that enable non-Move protocols to leverage the power of the Move programming language without writing a single line of Move code. The teams first release, M 1, redefines L1 as a vertically composable and horizontally scalable Layer 1 framework that is compatible with Solidity, connects EVM and Move fluidity, and allows builders to customize with a diverse user base and fluid modular and interoperable application chains out of the box.

Recently, Movement Labs announced the completion of a $3.4 million Pre-Seed round of financing with participation from Varys Capital, dao 5, Eigenlayer’s Calvin Liu, GMX’s CoinFlipCanada, and others.