I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’ll be joining Eclipse as CTO. 

Blockchain ecosystems are going through the next phase of maturation. 

Much like how increases in memory capacity, storage density and bandwidth have catalyzed the growth of real time, data and compute intensive applications (AAA gaming, algorithmic trading, AI/ML), increases in data availability bandwidth ala alt-DA protocols like Celestia, or highly performant out of the box verifiability with tools like RISC Zero are enabling blockchains to experiment with an order-of-magnitude expansion in execution capacity. 

Eclipse is a radical experiment in modularity - the core idea being that if given the choice in each stack, an optimal design would naturally choose the best of each: the performance and UX of the SVM, the security and liquidity of Ethereum and the throughput and verifiability of Celestia. It retains compatibility with the strong consumer dapps that are being built on the SVM, with a focus on security, reliability, and performance. I have many years of industrial and academic expertise in these topics and look forward to working on building a blazingly fast blockchain without sacrificing the best principles of security and reliability.  

A blockchain is only as successful as its dapps, and at Eclipse we are keenly focused on attracting and retaining the best developers we can. Rust is experiencing a hockey-stick moment of rapid growth, with entire domains such as cryptography dominated by Rust developers. Using Rust as the contract language uniquely enables the SVM to more easily onboard the next wave of of capable developers onto blockchain. As the industry matures and more experienced developers enter the space, I expect a larger portion to build on the SVM. This represents a significant advantage to Eclipse, which is only going to expand in significance over time. As the first mover in the modular SVM landscape, compared to the fragmentation of developer attention in the EVM landscape today, we hope to create an inviting and productive development and deployment experience for strong Rust teams.

And finally, in the past several months I’ve gotten to know the Eclipse team very well. They are a focused low-ego high-output team with strong backgrounds and proven ability to execute. Both the engineering and GTM team are a strong mix of crypto-native and web2 talent, with deep research expertise, but also an understanding of the market landscape and competitive dynamics that is extremely rare. For me, this position is a perfect mix of research-oriented foundations with a focus on practical outcomes. 

What’s Next?

With Eclipse hitting mainnet this month, this is a great time to look into the future

Near-term goals

We are looking forward to significant expansion of the ecosystem in coming months, in terms of both dapps deploying on Eclipse as well as the number of users. This will open up the opportunity to scale the chain together with the growing demand, learning from dapp developers and their needs. We are exploring pathways to create sustainable revenue streams for dapp developers through fee and MEV redistribution. We also anticipate significant involvement with dapp developers to provide infrastructure components for indexing, gRPC, wallet support, etc. We also want to create seamless support for NFT-based projects, as  well as developers building games and DePIN projects.

We aim to accelerate the process of Eclipse becoming a Stage-1 rollup according to the L2Beat qualification criteria. This includes working on chain derivation, fraud proofs, as well as support for forced inclusion in the first half of 2025. These plans also align with our growing commitment to security as part of the development process.

Longer-term plans

As the competition for chain performance and developer mindshare heats up, we will have to remain in the avant-garde by not only leveraging the attractive performance properties of the SVM, but adding to them. We have seen some really impressive results from recent Firedancer announcements; we are keen to go even further. 

Moreover, Eclipse has a somewhat different set of trade offs compared to Solana, for example, when it comes to hardware requirements. Similarly, Eclipse can walk the path of progressive decentralization a bit differently as well. 

Beyond performance, we are also keen to expand on developer-facing features in an effort to bring new Rust developers to the platform. This is one of the biggest unlocks we have at Eclipse and one of the most desirable ways to grow the platform and expand the number of active developers.