Inventory of the characteristics and latest developments of 9 modular blockchain platforms
In 2023, with the successful Ethereum merge and the explosion of the Layer 2 Rollups ecosystem, the Ethereum system shifted to a modular architecture.Author: Biscuit, ChainCatcher
Since the emergence of the first cryptocurrency, monolithic blockchains have been the industry standard, but this is rapidly changing. In 2023, with the successful Ethereum merge and the explosion of Layer 2 Rollups ecosystems, the Ethereum system has shifted towards a modular architecture.
Modularity refers to the division of the blockchain's consensus layer, execution layer, data availability layer (DA), and settlement layer among different chains, rather than having a single chain handle all modules. A Rollup is a blockchain that publishes its blocks to another blockchain, inheriting that blockchain's consensus and data availability. Readers can delve into the technical principles of modular blockchains in “A Detailed Explanation of Modular Public Chains and Market Competition Landscape” and “Amber Group: Why Modular Blockchains Are the Future?”.
Image source: Celestia
The advantages of modular blockchains include scalability, flexibility, and convenience in building projects. Modular blockchains are likely to become the next generation of infrastructure, making significant contributions to the application and development of blockchain technology.
On August 10, 2022, Celestia launched the modular research program Celestia Modular Fellows, which has developed many projects in this field, such as Eclipse, AltLayer, Sovereign, Dymension, etc. These emerging projects are generally favored by capital and have recently completed new rounds of financing.
In addition, if categorized according to modular usage scenarios, there are projects focusing on using zkWASM like ZKCross, modular networks sharing decentralized Sequencer like Astria, and Move execution layer modular solutions like Rooch Network, among others. This article will introduce the different characteristics and latest developments of these modular blockchains.
Eclipse is a customizable Rollup provider compatible with multiple Layer 1 blockchains. The platform enables developers to deploy their own rollups powered by the Solana operating system, using any chain for security or data storage.
Eclipse completed a $6 million Pre-Seed round of financing in August 2022, led by Polychain, with participation from Polygon Ventures, Accel, and others. A month later, Eclipse completed a $9 million Seed round of financing, led by Tribe Capital, with participation from Infinity Ventures Crypto, CoinList, and others.
Currently, instances based on Eclipse include:
- Cascade: Launched by Injective on March 30, this integration brings the Solana Sealevel Virtual Machine (SVM) into Cosmos, allowing Solana developers to quickly deploy their Solana contracts and DApps on Injective. Cascade is currently running on the Injective testnet.
- Nautilus Chain: Combines the speed of Solana with the decentralization and security of Ethereum, capable of parallel transaction processing. The project was formerly known as Zebec Chain. Nautilus went live on the testnet on March 16.
- Polygon SVM: A customized Rollup that brings Solana's Sealevel Virtual Machine into the Polygon ecosystem, enabling developers on Polygon to expand their choices of virtual machines.
AltLayer is a highly scalable application-specific execution layer system that derives security from underlying L1/L2. It is designed as a modular and pluggable framework for a multi-chain and multi-VM world. At its core, AltLayer is a system composed of multiple execution layers similar to optimistic rollups (called flash layers), featuring a novel innovation that allows them to be used once, making it highly resource-optimized.
AltLayer completed a $7.2 million Seed round of financing on July 1, 2022, led by Polychain and Jump Crypto, with participation from Balaji Srinivasan, Gavin Wood, Ryan Selkis, and others. AltLayer's founders Jia Yaoqi and Chief Product Officer Tan Jun Hao both graduated from the National University of Singapore and are co-founders of Zilliqa. AltLayer has now become an incubated project in Binance Labs' Season 6 MVB accelerator.
On April 13, AltLayer opened a free trial of its no-code Rollup Launchpad, allowing all users to deploy their own Layer 2 networks using AltLayer. Its Launchpad integrates the AI tool FlashGPT to help developers build smart contracts faster in Solidity.
Sovereign is an ecosystem of interoperable and scalable rollups that can run on any blockchain. The Sovereign SDK will provide all the templates typically needed to enter a blockchain—p2p networks, databases, and RPC nodes—allowing builders to focus on the business logic of their chains.
On January 30, 2023, Sovereign completed a $7.39 million Seed round of financing, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Maven11, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, and others. Its co-founder and CEO Cem Özer previously worked on the Ethereum Teku development team, responsible for the production of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain client Teku.
Sovereign features a sovereign zk-rollup, and its SDK is designed to be easily integrated with the DA layer. However, Sovereign has not yet integrated with zkVM. On March 24, Sovereign launched an account module on Celestia's testnet to help developers simplify the management of Rollup states.
dYmension is a modular platform for the settlement layer, providing all the tools and infrastructure needed for Rollups in the Cosmos ecosystem. dYmension introduces a paradigm shift in scalability called the "RollApps" framework, enabling online communities and applications to operate as decentralized, autonomous, and cryptographically secure economies.
On February 9, 2023, dYmension completed a $6.7 million Seed round of financing, led by Big Brain Holdings and Stratos, with participation from MatchboxDAO, Shalom Meckenzie, and others.
According to The Block, dYmension's co-founder and CEO Yishay Harel stated that an incentivized testnet will be launched in the second quarter of this year, with the mainnet expected to launch in the third quarter. Additionally, before the mainnet launch, dYmension also plans to raise approximately $20 million in funding.
Astria is a modular blockchain that allows Rollups to share a decentralized Sequencer network, aiming to enable anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant Rollup without relying on a centralized Sequencer.
On April 4, 2023, Astria completed a $5.5 million Seed round of financing, led by Maven11, with participation from 1kx, Figment Capital, Delphi Digital, Lemniscap, and others. Its co-founder and CEO Josh Bowen was previously a developer at Celestia.
Astria EVM achieves fast, censorship-resistant transaction ordering by leveraging a shared ordering network and utilizes Celestia for data availability. The project's goal is for Astria EVM to serve as a liquidity and bridging hub for Celestia, helping to guide Celestia's Rollup ecosystem.
Rollkit is a modular rollup framework that allows developers to freely deploy rollups across the entire modular stack, including sovereign rollups and settlement rollups. Celestia Labs initially began developing Rollkit in 2021, and it is now an independent project.
Rollkit will launch a developer call in April to help guide its development process. Developers can currently use Rollkit to build on Celestia's Mocha testnet.
Caldera focuses on building high-performance, customizable, and application-specific Layer 2 blockchains, allowing anyone to launch and operate dedicated, high-performance Layer 2 blockchains "Rollups".
On April 4, 2023, Caldera completed $9 million in financing, led by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from 1kx, Alliance DAO, SevenX Ventures, and others. Its co-founder Matt Katz graduated from Stanford University and has interned in software development roles at Skiff, Fractal, and Warp.
Caldera launched its testnet on Goerli and Polygon Mumbai on March 31, with the team stating that the testnet is intended to showcase the capabilities of the Caldera chain and is not an incentivized testnet, but rather for demonstration purposes and can be reset at any time.
Rooch is a Move execution layer that connects multiple chains to Web3. It provides scalability for public chains and offers a Move execution environment and settlement protocol for Web3 applications. The core team of the project comes from the Starcoin team.
Currently, the Rooch technical team has built OMO, a universal simulator with proof at each step, which can arbitrate interactive fraud proofs on any Layer 1. Additionally, Rooch lists Celestia, EigenLayer, and PolygonAvail as candidates for the data availability layer.
ZKCross is a multi-chain zkRollup execution layer that uses zkWASM. By decoupling the execution and settlement layers, ZKCross provides a trusted universal multi-chain execution layer for all blockchains through zkWasm, secured by an end-to-end ZKP protocol. Multi-chain native products can also be rapidly developed and deployed through ZKCross.
According to Rootdata, ZKCross has received investments from IOSG Ventures and Cogitent Ventures. Currently, ZKCross has been selected for Binance Labs' Season 6 MVB accelerator list.
