Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Last night, the modular blockchain star project Celestia, as expected, announced a large-scale airdrop. 7579 developers and over 570,000 on-chain addresses are eligible for the airdrop, once again drawing attention to the modular blockchain market.

As the first public chain emphasizing the concept of modular blockchain, Celestia, with a valuation of up to $1 billion in October 2022, completed a $55 million financing. By establishing the modular research program Celestia Modular Fellows, it has encouraged the innovative development of multiple projects in this field.

Currently, according to the encrypted data platform RootData, there are nearly 30 modular blockchain concept projects, with nearly 10 projects such as AltLayer, Artela, and Astria receiving investments from well-known institutions this year. In addition to the leading modular blockchain project Celestia releasing heavyweight news such as the airdrop, other key areas in this field have also made varying degrees of progress. For example, Eclipse released its latest L2 solution last week; AltLayer Altitude announced the start of the fourth phase of the testnet activity; Fuel also released the fourth public testnet Beta-4…

Looking back at the background of the birth of modular blockchain, blockchain consists of multiple components such as consensus, execution, settlement, and data availability. Traditional monolithic blockchains represented by Ethereum and Solana alone have limitations when performing these tasks and cannot solve the trilemma of scalability. Modular blockchain separates them into multiple modules, each module using professional providers to complete customization in a combined form. Therefore, modular blockchain has been a technology route that has been highly regarded in the cryptocurrency industry since its inception. What are the latest developments in this field recently? This article briefly summarizes the latest developments of other representative projects of modular blockchain besides Celestia.

Eclipse

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

Eclipse is currently only running on the testnet and can be applied for testing through the official website. Last week, Eclipse officially released its mainnet architecture. As the latest solution for L2, its feature is embedding Solana's 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.

Neel Somani, co-founder & CEO of Eclipse, mentioned in a recent Bankless podcast that the original intention of Eclipse was to bring Solana to Ethereum. They hope to utilize Solana's execution capabilities while leveraging Ethereum's settlement and liquidity, but encountered many limitations and constraints. The main challenge lies in Ethereum's data availability being too expensive, so they decided to introduce Celestia and Risk Zero. Celestia is used for data availability, while Risk Zero is used for fraud proof.

Regarding the plan for Eclipse's mainnet token, Neel mentioned that Eclipse's mainnet currently does not have a token. He stated that this is because Eclipse's operating costs are relatively low (mainly paying for block space fees for Celestia and Ethereum), so there is no need to issue tokens to pay validators.

From the Eclipse official website, dozens of projects such as BNB Chain, Iejective's Solana SVM Rollup Cascad "Cascade", Near, and Polygon's modular blockchain Avail have deployed on the Eclipse testnet or are strategic partners.

AltLayer

AltLayer is a decentralized Rollup-as-a-Service protocol, and its entire stack adopts a modular design. End users can choose Rollups according to their own needs. Rollup SDKs support Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, etc. The data availability layer supports Eigenlayer, Celestia, Astria.

AltLayer's founder & CEO JiaYaoqi previously led the construction of Parity technology and is also a co-founder and advisor of Zilliqa.

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

In April this year, AltLayer announced the launch of a no-code Rollup Launchpad dashboard for free trial, which will support all users to deploy their own L2 with just one click without writing any code. In May, AltLayer announced the launch of the first multi-sequencer testnet for Rollup, promising to alleviate the review system, enhance the security and availability of Rollup. In August, AltLayer released an API and SDK suite for programmatically accessing custom Rollups, allowing developers to dynamically create, monitor, and terminate Rollups based on application requirements using a series of endpoints.

Currently, AltLayer Altitude testnet activity has announced the start of the fourth phase, themed "on-chain games". Users can experience Ottie 2048, Cellula, Loot Royale, and other chain games to earn points. These games are built on top of the Turbo framework released by AltLayer in September, which is customized to optimize the Rollup stack for "Autonomous Worlds", allowing developers to build autonomous worlds beyond full-chain games.

Fuel

Fuel focuses on being the execution layer in the modular blockchain. Its co-founder John Adler is also the co-founder of Optimistic Rollup.

Fuel completed an $80 million financing led by Blockchain Capital and Stratos Technologies in September last year, and in the same month, it launched the developer-oriented testnet beta-1, allowing developers to deploy contracts at will without permission or whitelist, and users can also interact with deployed contracts.

After a year, Fuel has launched its fourth public testnet, Beta-4. The new testnet adds public P2P access and multi-token support, supporting native-level NFTs, multi-asset pools, and more. However, Fuel has stated that Beta-4 is not an incentivized testnet. In December last year, Fuel announced plans to launch the full mainnet in 2023.

In addition, Fuel has recently introduced a grant program for ecosystem development. According to Fuel's Q2 report, the beta version of Fuel Wallet on the Chrome Store has been downloaded over 30,000 times. Fuel Wallet is designed to allow users to explore DApps on Fuel, manage their crypto assets in one place, and support transparent transactions, multi-account management, and easy tracking of assets on the Fuel network. Projects deployed on Fuel include Spark, Fuelet, Acumen, PlayEstates, and more.

Avail

Avail is a modular blockchain developed by Polygon, focusing on data availability, sorting and recording blockchain transactions without the need to download the entire block to prove block data availability, allowing for expansion in ways that a single blockchain cannot achieve. Additionally, off-chain scaling solutions can unleash their full potential by transferring data availability to Avail. Independent chains can use Avail to enhance validator security to ensure data availability.

In March this year, Polygon announced that Avail was split into an independent entity, with co-founder Anurag Arjun leaving and acquiring Avail. The team will migrate to the new entity. In April, Polygon's research lead Prabal Banerjee left and announced joining Avail as a co-founder.

The "Kate" testnet for Avail launched its second phase in June this year, allowing Avail to experiment with basic operations, execute on-chain functions, and run protocol governance in the first phase. The second phase will include a more comprehensive testing environment to encourage validator participation. It will also introduce a "data attestation bridge" to reduce Ethereum Layer2 and Layer3 costs, and open-source a new prototype of the Optimism EVM (OpEVM) software development kit (SDK) to allow developers to build sovereign, EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollups.

Astria

Astria is a shared sequencer network with the goal of allowing anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant Rollup without relying on centralized sequencers, and Rollups can be retrieved from Astria immediately after block creation. The shared sequencer is also one of the ten important areas highlighted in a recent "Hero Post" by paradigm. 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 of financing led by Maven11, with participation from 1kx, Figment Capital, Delphi Digital, Lemniscap, and other angel investors. Astria currently has collaborations with other modular blockchains such as Celestia, Eclipse, and AltLayer.

Caldera

Caldera is a Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) protocol dedicated to enabling anyone to launch and operate dedicated, high-performance second-layer blockchains, or "Rollups". The two co-founders, Parker Jou and Matt Katz, are both graduates of Stanford University.

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

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 like Ethers.js and Thirdweb. Ordinary users can add the testnet to their wallets and interact with deployed contracts. However, Caldera stated that the testnet is not incentivized, and participation does not grant any token rights. In May, Caldera was selected as one of the 16 Web3 accelerator projects announced by Alliance DAO.

Caldera has announced collaborations with Injective, Loot, Manta Network, Syndr, Biconomy, and others. For example, Caldera recently announced a collaboration with Injective to launch its inEVM Layer 2 testnet, allowing Ethereum applications to run natively on the network, with plans for mainnet deployment in the fourth quarter.

dYmension

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

In early February this year, dYmension completed a $6.7 million seed round of financing, led by Big Brain Holdings and Stratos, with participation from Matchbox DAO, Shalom Meckenzie of DraftKings, and others. In the same month, dYmension launched the public testnet Dymension Hub 35-C, with nearly 100 genesis validator nodes now operational.

In August, dYmension announced the official launch of the incentivized testnet Froopyland for permissionless IBC RollApp deployment. 1% of the total genesis supply of DYM tokens (10 million) will be allocated to participants in the Froopyland incentivized testnet over three months. The total supply of DYM tokens is 1 billion, with 1% distributed to RollApp deployers (4 million), validators (4 million), test users (1 million), and the top 10 Rollapes (1 million).

Additionally, according to a previous report by The Block, dYmension's co-founder and CEO Yishay Harel stated that before the mainnet launch, dYmension plans to raise approximately $20 million in funding.

Nautilus Chain

Nautilus Chain is a Layer3 modular chain built on Eclipse, combining Solana's speed with Ethereum's decentralization and security, aiming to be the fastest usable EVM chain and capable of parallel transaction processing. Nautilus Chain was originally launched by the flow payment protocol Zebec Protocol.

In August of this year, Nautilus Chain announced the launch of its mainnet. Nautilus Chain stated that its ecosystem currently has more than 80 strategic partners and service providers, with over 70 projects deployed in the Nautilus ecosystem, including DEX PoseiSwap, premium derivative trading platform Coral Finance, and payment protocol Coinflow.

In June, Nautilus Chain also announced the launch of DID digital identity. Holding this DID represents early access rights on Nautilus Chain, including entitlement to receive airdrops of ecosystem project tokens or NFTs, risk-free pre-mining whitelist for mining pools, whitelist for new projects on Nautilus Chain, governance investment eligibility, and the right to receive investment and customized technical support as part of an independent DAO community. The initial quantity of DID identities is only 100,000 tokens.

Sovereign

Sovereign is an ecosystem of interoperable and scalable Rollups that can run on any blockchain. The free and open-source Sovereign SDK toolkit helps developers build zk-rollups. According to the Sovereign website, the Sovereign SDK currently has three goals: first, it will provide a standard interface allowing rollups to communicate with the data availability layer. Second, it will integrate with cryptographic compilers, allowing developers to write code in standard programming languages, which the SDK will automatically convert into a verifiable encrypted form. Finally, it will provide default implementations of common blockchain primitives such as tokens, NFTs, and bridges.

In January of this year, Sovereign completed a $7.39 million seed round of financing led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Maven11, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Balaji Srinivasan. Sovereign's co-founder and CEO, Cem Özer, previously worked on the Ethereum Teku development team, responsible for the productionization of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain client Teku.

Recently, Sovereign released the second alpha version V0.2.0 of the Sovereign SDK, with key updates including the implementation of incentive management for Optimistic Rollups, incentive management through soft confirmations based on sorting, experimental EVM support, implementation of a FCFS sequencer with RPC support, and universal support for CLI wallets.

Artela

Artela is an extensible blockchain network that enables developers to build feature-rich dApps. Artela's scalability allows developers to achieve maximum customization by creating modular extensions on top of the public infrastructure layer (public/private). Artela's co-founder, Jason Hu, previously served as a senior strategic sales executive at Tencent America.

In July of this year, Artela completed a $6 million financing round with investments from Shima Capital, Big Brain Holdings, SevenX Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Amino Capital, and A&T Capital.

Movement Labs

Movement Labs is a modular blockchain network based on the Move language. It has created the modular framework Movement SDK, which provides developers with infrastructure and applications for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure in any distributed environment.

The team is dedicated to building a suite of products and services that allow non-Move protocols to leverage the powerful capabilities of the Move programming language without writing a single line of Move code. The team's first version, M1, redefines L1 as a vertically composable and horizontally scalable first-layer framework that is compatible with Solidity, connects EVM and Move liquidity, and allows builders to customize modular and interoperable application chains with different user bases and liquidity out of the box.

Recently, Movement Labs announced the completion of a $3.4 million pre-seed round of financing with investments from Varys Capital, dao5, Calvin Liu of Eigenlayer, and CoinFlipCanada of GMX.

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