Ellipsis Labs has launched the personal testnet for Atlas, a blockchain aiming to mix the excessive efficiency required by monetary establishments with the transparency and safety provided by DeFi.
Atlas is optimized for monetary functions that require low transaction prices, excessive availability, quick pre-confirmations and frequent oracle updates, conditions for what the crew calls “verifiable finance.”
The platform is anticipated to draw use circumstances like spot and programmable orderbooks, margin buying and selling, orderbook-based lending and environment friendly credit score markets, constructing upon the crew’s expertise as builders of the Phoenix DEX on Solana.
Phoenix, an orderbook-based spot alternate on Solana, has processed over $50 billion in unincentivized buying and selling quantity — that means no factors, no token.
The brand new chain takes the Solana Digital Machine as an execution layer, however settles to Ethereum mainnet. This design selection is the results of the crew’s deep expertise as DeFi software builders, in line with Ellipsis Labs CEO Eugene Chen.
“Atlas is the infrastructure that we want we needed to construct Phoenix on high of, and possibly the place future variations of Phoenix will reside,” Chen advised Blockworks.
Learn extra: Solana DEX goals to maneuver value discovery onchain
By utilizing a customized implementation of the Solana Digital Machine (SVM), Atlas is suitable with present Solana packages, whereas deciding on Ethereum. This hybrid method permits Atlas to profit from Ethereum’s safety and enormous asset base, whereas nonetheless sustaining Solana’s execution effectivity.
“We don’t actually care about these purity exams of Solana vs. Ethereum, we mainly will need to use the most effective device for the job,” Chen stated. “We don’t have to construct our personal settlement layer
as a result of Ethereum exists and it’s doing fairly a great job at that.”
This method mirrors efforts by Eclipse, one other mission working to combine the SVM into Ethereum’s ecosystem by constructing a rollup.
Whereas Eclipse and Atlas share the identical purpose of constructing Solana-based functions suitable with Ethereum, Atlas “began from scratch on modularizing or decoupling items of the native Solana consumer,” Chen stated, including that attracting present Solana dapps shouldn’t be the purpose.
“We’re not that involved in having tons of copy/paste functions from Solana, in the identical means that I don’t suppose it makes a ton of sense for Ethereum layer-2s to have a ton of copy/paste functions from Ethereum,” he stated.
A key innovation was re-engineering the SVM to make it play good with Ethereum, the place Atlas will publish state variations, Chen defined.
“We’ve re-engineered the reminiscence system of the SVM to make sure environment friendly state root Merklization,” he stated, noting this permits Atlas to keep up consistency with Ethereum’s mainnet whereas providing quick transaction speeds and opening the door for superior use circumstances like parallel zk-proving.
Ellipsis Labs hopes its work on the SVM — primarily based on Agave, the validator consumer from Anza, previously referred to as Solana Labs validator consumer — will profit the Solana group as effectively.
“We perceive [Solana’s] shortcomings particularly across the developer expertise [and] these are some areas the place we’re actually desirous to contribute again upstream to the Solana world,” Chen stated.
Atlas’ modular structure will “virtually actually” use an exterior information availability layer — nonetheless to be decided — which technically makes the layer-2 a validium.
Though Chen dislikes the “modular vs. monolithic” narrative debate, the modular structure was a deliberate effort to make sure the liberty to optimize all components of the tech stack.
“As a substitute of attempting to be essentially as impartial as attainable, we’re really being very opinionated within the design to be pretty much as good as attainable for particular varieties of monetary functions,” he stated.
Along with efficiency enhancements, Chen factors to its oracle system as a key differentiator. Oracles are important for margin buying and selling and different monetary companies that depend on well timed market information.
“It’s a quite simple thought; we’re simply going to ensure that as quick because the oracle can spit out value updates, we’re going to incorporate them on the chain for de minimus value,” he stated.
The present testnet is just accessible to builders by software, in line with a weblog publish saying the mission. Wanting ahead, Atlas is on observe to launch a public testnet by the tip of 2024, with a full mainnet launch anticipated by mid-2025. The platform may even have to bear a number of audits earlier than the mainnet launch.
The crew is specializing in steadily scaling, whereas sustaining its core dedication to efficiency, transparency and safety, Chen stated.
“There’s nonetheless quite a bit left for us to construct, however we’re not going to make any false claims,” he added.
