Neel Somani on Eclipse’s rollups for on-chain app integration

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from blockwest capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have Neil simani the founder of eclipse Neil welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah thank you for having me you're very welcome uh I would love to dive into everything eclipse is working on on app chains and development of dapps which I

0:20think is absolutely necessary for people to be able to use daps we need to be able to build them efficiently and safely and securely more importantly and I would love to just start off our conversation with hearing a little bit about your background and what led you to starting eclipse and then then we'll dive into all the details yeah totally so my background's in

0:40engineering I was a software engineer at Airbnb I worked at Citadel as a quantitative researcher in the Commodities group doing things like power gas not directly related to crypto but there are some like interesting overlaps especially now that people are talking about frequent batch auctions and all sorts of Market structures uh in March I quit I started something in

0:59Terra I was building an evm it was going great at first and then trit-packed so scrapped that project and now I'm working on something that I think is much more exciting these uh very like trust minimized Solana VM Roll-Ups where you could deploy it to any chain for security very cool okay and I would love to dive into that more um so obviously you learned a lot in

1:21your first bout there with Tara maybe you can explain somebody who you know they're not a developer and they've used a few defy apps they're interested in learning out how the system works how would you explain what Eclipse does to them yeah so the first thing to start with is how we run programs and we borrow that from Solana itself so we use this a lot

1:42of virtual machine meaning that if you have a Solana application you can deploy it directly to eclipse and it runs as you intended but then the second part is how we get security and we basically throw away the consensus part of Solana which is the part that typically makes blockchain secure and that requires most of the notes to be honest but for us we want to

2:02relax that assumption we're basically saying only a minority of the nodes on your network need to be honest and reliable so the advantage of doing that is that when you're running a blockchain for yourself usually if you want to want to scale speed then you also have to maintain the liveness of the snap or a gift to maintain security but instead we have this protocol that interacts with

2:20l1s in a very generic way to build this customizable roll-up where let's say you produce a block of transactions on our Solana or Eclipse VM that'll get posted to ethereum or he can get posted to Celestia or some other data availability layer which you'll use for data storage and security okay and I want to break this down a little bit more because it is quite a

2:41bit technical for people who are not developers and don't understand the back end of applications but from from what I understand you know usually when you run an application or you're verifying transactions in adapt you have to go through all the nodes and you're you're finding a way to make it faster but still secure um which is needed I'm guessing for a

3:01sort of mainstream adoption and scalability yeah so you got a high level the way the Roll-Ups typically work is there's two options uh you either have optimistic settlement or a zero knowledge settlement in an optimistic case you basically let the execution note or the sequencer run a bunch of transactions produce a block and say this is the final result

3:21and then uh you just accept it pretend like it's true and if and anyone can watch that uh that sequence of transactions if anything is false they can contest it and if they're right then they get paid a big Psalm and the person who proposed the false block loses a bunch of money so that's an optimistic role of and the zero knowledge Direction you can generate a proof that the trace

3:42of the transaction or the program that you ran is provably correct and you can basically provide some strong evidence that you executed the program correctly so that we're starting as an optimistic roll up and we'll become a zero knowledge roll up in the long run and we most I guess there's another like technical distinction here which is that usually settlement is done on an L1 so

4:03like for an ethereum rollout there's actually a smart contract for like optimism for example and that does that computation to verify whether um like a transaction was executed incorrectly in the case of that uh in the case that someone challenges it but for us we have it honest we have a settlement layer and that's the layer that's responsible for doing that sort of like reasoning and

4:22figuring out whether a transaction was executed right okay and you're you know your first project was in the Terra ecosystem and and now this is related to Solana do the applications that you work with they only work on the Solana blockchain or you know it seems like we're growing into sort of a multi-chain future and obviously there's a lot of applications

4:43running on ethereum as well yeah so we're not going to support ethereum programs to run on our channel uh just because we only want to double down on these high throughput applications like things where the throughput is either necessary or there's some reason for them to be building on Solana uh we're also going to support the movie VM in the longer

5:01term so we're going to borrow from Aptos and Suite and use that same virtual machine in our architecture okay and how long have you and your team been working on this and what stage is it at right now yeah so uh the tarot project was scrapped in May uh I took like a month to just sort of think about what the future of blockchain architectures would look like and chatted with the Celestia

5:21folks a lot and we started working on this idea in the let's say like the middle of June but July is when this sort of final form took okay great and are are there already applications that are using the technology is it is it really being able to build that quickly or at what stage is is the development of eclipseat yeah so we're gonna have a public test not available in January but

5:43for a few select teams who have reached out really early if they're building really exciting consumer applications then we've given them some Early Access the the kinds of stuff that I want to see is consumer applications where cryptos at the core of it and there's it's like it would it's impossible to remove the crypto element without just completely destroying the application

6:00because I feel like right now we're at a point where if something could be built without crypto it probably should be so we want to see stuff where you're either removing a trusted third party that just cannot be trusted maybe you're encouraging cooperation in a way that's not possible in web 2 or you're like playing with identity in a way to prevent embarrassment or fraud for the

6:18user definitely and I'll this kind of Technology it really sounds like it's all on the back and you know would end users that are using adapt know any different whether you know eclipse is being used or not so their their interface will be a Solana wallet so they can actually use all the same technology that they use with Solana normally but uh yeah they

6:42actually wouldn't know where the security is coming from that's all done behind the scenes for a sophisticated user if they want to see what's the status of a transaction after they've sent it they'll notice that multiple blockchains are listed uh there'll be the eclipse chains so our actual sequencer will be the chain that we get security from and that'll have some sort

6:59of time period where the block is actually finalized and then there'll be a third thing for stuttleman which is like oh in two weeks this transaction will actually be finalized in the case of the optimistic voila okay and obviously the security aspect is important from what I understand you know just a Solana application by itself is sort of backed on the security of the

7:21Solana consensus and the blockchain and hopefully that's secure enough um does using Eclipse sacrifice any security or make it different security Wise from running you know uh any other defy apps which obviously we're still seeing a lot of hacks here and there in in defy that's a very important aspect when you're running an application especially when there's funds locked

7:43into it yeah I mean the security assumption that's changing is basically now you can rely on the security of ethereum but run Solano code and get Solana speed or you can swap out ethereum for any other game so that that's the big deal it's like a customizable roll-up where you pick who you're trusting rather than being tied to the same chain as a virtual machine

8:03that you're using because typically if you're like an evm roll-up you're running on ethereum or if most people expect if you're a salon or roll-up then you're getting security from Solana but in this case we're allowing you to mix and match it okay that's pretty cool and and you mentioned there there was one other blockchain ecosystem um you know sort of so forward-looking

8:21do you expect uh a lot a lot of I haven't followed the growth of like development on Solana but are you seeing that as towards this next Bull Run um and just in general more developers moving to Solana that we will be able to take advantage of your technology yeah I think that in the future we're going to see a lot more app chains uh and a lot more trust minimized app

8:44chains in particular so I'm a huge Celestial Celestia is the um the folks that we iterated with very early on and we're using them for data availability or to store these blocks as a first step uh and I I think that we're gonna start seeing more applications that can only be built with that kind of architecture where you could really blow up the chain

9:01use all the throughput for yourself like a fully on-chain game for example or maybe uh all these critiques about Google search being censored or Twitter recommendation algorithm being like falsified or being like affecting the recommendations so that'd be a great candidate to decentralize it just requires so much throughput to run a full machine learning model on chain but

9:22uh if you have your own chain then it becomes more feasible definitely and I'd love if you could dive a little bit deeper into you know sort of the traditional ethereum dap that's sort of backing on the the layer one protocol versus an app chain and is it actually its own blockchain or you know how much of it is sort of running on the layer one and what is the main difference

9:44yeah so usually for like uh like ethereum or for Solana you have the same node that runs the program they propagate the result to all of the other nodes in the network all those other nodes will also execute what uh what that main node did and as and they'll all come to some sort of consensus on what the final result is so in our case we've broken up a lot of these pieces oh

10:06and on and on they have to store the result right they have to maybe like a few days later someone requests well hey what was the status of that transaction then they need to be able to retrieve that so we've broken up so the person who executes the transaction is not the same one who is verifying that the transaction was executed correctly and they're also not the same one to store

10:24the data at the end of the day so these are like three different functions consensus execution and data availability okay thanks for that and when there are you know developers that are building dapps on on Solana for example and they go to Eclipse to to use your Solutions you know how easy is it for onboarding integration um or existing apps as well that are

10:49already built you know to be able to move into eclipse uh they should actually be able to use the same exact CLI so they can just point their command line interface to our Network and they can deploy it as usual so it should be seamless in the long run we're going to have our own CLI though and that's going to be necessary when people want to configure their app

11:07roll up in a more specific way maybe they want to specify the number of sequencers they want to have some sort of like memory or course requirements and we'll actually offer some sort of fee market for interchange security to decentralize the sequencer in the long run okay and what are the main sort of objectives that you and your team need to that are working on right now in in

11:29Eclipse um on the way to the the public test net yeah right now I think if the business development side is really interesting to me so getting these courses like weird unseen consumer use cases where cryptos at the core I've been working with a lot of our University Partnerships to see if these students have some bright ideas um and then getting like major

11:47Partnerships outside of web3 and growing the pie so that's the BD side on the engineering side uh the test net plan is pretty straightforward moving forward after that it gets really complicated because we have to sort of set up the orchestration in order for people to spin up their own app specific roll up initially we're only going to provide one it's going to be a share to app roll

12:06up which the eclipse team runs ourselves similar to optimism uh but in the long run people will be able to spin up their own chains okay and based on your you know expertise and insights into the growth of dapps uh on Solana and in general are you thinking that there's going to be a lot of defy and finance based applications that are using this technology or their other industry use

12:31cases or you know where do you see the the category of what kind of dapps are going to be growing the most through this next run yeah I mean D5 is okay I think I'm tired of seeing Jax's and yield farms and all the same stuff I I want this more to be a blockchain for the most imaginative developers to build consumer applications that we haven't seen before

12:51so I'm more focusing on that uh and I think the main reason why these great consumer applications haven't been seen is just they just don't have enough throughput so now we we're giving them the full Solana VM for themselves and people will say that Salon is um is like big enough for any consumer application but even Pitts recently moved off they were using like 10 of the the throughput

13:09on Solana they made their own chain now they have to maintain the liveness of this network and they have to do all this other stuff which they probably shouldn't be thinking about as an application developer so that's a good opportunity to capture these posts you feel like they may be outgrown where Salon is at right now and and there actually is stuff in this a lot of white

13:25paper about them horizontally scaling proof of history and things like that but it hasn't been implemented right now so this is a really good solve for them in the short term and then for applications I really need all this throughput uh it's it's just a long-term fix definitely yeah I'm looking forward to a Time when you know there's a million active users and people that

13:43aren't really in web 3 sort of using these applications and sort of breaking out more into the mainstream yeah Charlie I think I'm a good candidate is something like um a lot of these social networks that we've all had issues with like yell for example Yelp has been censoring reviews and they'll if a restaurant pays them there's rumors that they'll remove a bad a bad review

14:00so and there's a try and anyone in y'all's Position will will basically be trusted that they can't be doing that but there's such a strong profit incentive that they might end up doing it anyway the at a certain point you just have to decentralize and remove the middleman I used to really want to be y'all believe and no I don't even care because the quality has gone down so bad

14:18definitely um and I for projects that are developing uh in currently on other ecosystems and for startups that are sort of looking to build daps and app chains that are going to be you know fast scalable and secure what's the best way for them to learn more about Eclipse to sort of follow along with your team's launch first thing is follow our Twitter uh

14:43it's Eclipse fnd so Eclipse Foundation uh the our website we have a mailing list and we have a Discord but I think the top thing is a Twitter because that's I use Twitter personally the most so I'll post everything on there sounds great Neil I will leave your Twitter and the foundation's Twitter and the platform links in the description box below thank you so much for your

15:03insights into this all the best with you know growing uh your project and I'm looking forward to seeing the public test net let's definitely follow up in the near future great thank you