Eclipse launched its long-awaited mainnet blockchain on Thursday -- introducing a first-of-its-kind layer-2 network that melds tech from the popular Ethereum and Solana blockchains into a single package.
Like other layer-2 Ethereum rollups, Eclipse lets people transact on Ethereum with faster speeds and lower fees. To accomplish this, it operates as its own network, written using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) -- the fast and cheap execution architecture spearheaded by Ethereum's biggest competitor, Solana. Similar to other layer 2s, Eclipse bundles up transactions from its users and periodically passes them down to the base Ethereum chain, where they're cemented permanently to the chain's ledger.