Author: Pine Analytics
Compiled by: Shen Chao TechFlow
Summary
Eclipse Labs has raised $65 million from top investors to build a Layer-2 based on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) on Ethereum. Eclipse has the backing of companies like Polychain, Placeholder, and Hack VC, positioning itself as a high-performance, cross-chain Rollup platform with ambitious architectural plans.
However, despite strong funding and a good reputation, the on-chain reality is starkly different. Activity is shallow and short-lived, primarily driven by airdrop mining rather than natural demand. Gas fees, deposit amounts, and total locked value (TVL) have been declining. The current application ecosystem lacks a uniquely valuable product—most offerings are just weaker copies of others.
Due to the lack of outstanding applications and declining usage, Eclipse enters the token issuance cycle with an overvaluation. While its network fundamentals are insufficient to support this valuation, its fully diluted valuation is expected to exceed $300 million.
The likely outcome is that after a brief short squeeze, sustained selling pressure will follow, as insiders and market makers will profit from retail interest and then exit.
Unless Eclipse provides products that can only exist within its stack, the tokens will temporarily inflate the ecosystem—and then gravity will pull it back to the ground.
Fundraising
Since its inception, Eclipse Labs has raised $65 million through multiple funding rounds, making it one of the most well-funded Ethereum Layer-2 projects.
Funding Round Breakdown
Pre-Seed ($6 million) – August 2022
This round of funding was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Accel, Polygon Ventures, and others. This early funding positions Eclipse as an ambitious attempt to bring Solana's high-performance virtual machine (SVM) to Ethereum. The estimated valuation for this funding round is between $30 million and $40 million, which is quite common among strong infrastructure development projects (e.g., pre-product).
Seed Round ($9 million) – September 2022
Co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with participation from CoinList, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, and Struck Crypto. Although Eclipse has not yet achieved a formal network or protocol launch, this round of funding has raised Eclipse's valuation to nine figures (post-funding valuation of $100 million to $120 million). This funding is aimed at expanding the engineering team and accelerating infrastructure development.
Series A Funding ($50 million) – March 2024
Co-led by Hack VC and Placeholder, with participation from Delphi Digital, Polychain (returning investors), OKX Ventures, GSR, Flow Traders, Distributed Capital, Maven 11, and DBA. This round of funding aims to launch the Eclipse mainnet and build the Eclipse ecosystem. Although Eclipse's valuation has not been officially disclosed, industry insiders estimate it to be between $300 million and $500 million, indicating that Eclipse will become a top competitor in Ethereum Layer-2.
Strategic Positioning
Eclipse's funding is not only unique in scale but also in its promised strategic cross-border appeal:
Secured support from Ethereum and Solana investors (e.g., Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation researchers).
An architecture that merges Ethereum's security with Solana's execution layer and Celestia's modular data availability.
This allows Eclipse to present itself as the future of cross-chain performance—a 'best-in-class' rollup stack.
Polychain's Reputation
Polychain Capital led the pre-seed funding for Eclipse and participated in subsequent funding rounds—but their recent actions in other investments have raised serious alarms. In projects like Celestia, they sold off heavily after token launches, reportedly offloading over $240 million in $TIA, causing its price to plummet by 90%. The same pattern has emerged with other Polychain-backed tokens, such as Manta, Scroll, and Solayer, which have all declined by 80% to 95% from their peak prices.
There is no reason to expect Eclipse to be any different. Polychain has consistently shown a willingness to maximize returns, regardless of its impact on the ecosystem. Their early stance in Eclipse indicates that when liquidity appears, they are prepared to rotate out—rather than build long-term partnerships.
On-chain activity and usage
Despite raising $65 million and positioning itself as Ethereum's fastest L2 platform using Solana's virtual machine, its on-chain activity still exhibits a fleeting, airdrop-driven usage pattern with almost no sustained demand. The following data visualizations present the activity rise and rapid decline of key metrics such as Gas payments, user deposits, TVL (Total Value Locked), and application attractiveness.
Network fees reveal airdrop-driven speculative behavior
This chart shows the total network fees paid daily on the Eclipse platform (in ETH). The launch of Turbo Tap (an application specifically for airdrop mining) saw an immediate spike in activity. The sharp decline after the Turbo Tap snapshot further confirms the correlation between usage and reward expectations.
By June 2025, network fees had dropped to below 1 ETH per day (about $750), reflecting both a decline in user transaction volume and the disappearance of incentive-driven behavior. This trend confirms the notion that there is no natural trading demand on the network beyond airdrop mining.
Chain deposits are steadily declining
The curve of ETH and Hyperlane deposits into Eclipse is closely related to the surge in Gas usage—driven by incentive-driven activity, both saw rapid growth from December 2024 to March 2025. Starting in the second quarter of 2025, deposit amounts began to decline steadily as users withdraw funds and possibly reallocate them to more liquid or active ecosystems.
Hyperlane-based deposits peaked at $25 million to $27 million in the first quarter of 2025 but have since dropped below $17 million. This declining trend is also observed in bridge assets like USDC, SOL, and WIF. Importantly, this is not a reallocation of asset composition but rather an outflow of funds from the whole ecosystem. As the reward incentive mechanisms gradually weaken, user engagement declines, exposing the fragility and temporariness of Eclipse's liquidity foundation.
The DeFi application ecosystem is small, illiquid, and suffering from significant losses.
In the top 10 Eclipse applications, the TVL remains very low:
Only 3 applications have a TVL exceeding $2 million (Orca, Astrol, Save).
Most others have salaries below $500,000, with some even below $100,000.
The one-month change column shows that almost all major protocols have experienced significant double-digit declines (Astrol -24%, Invariant -28%, Neptune -27%).
This situation indicates that developers have not found sticky traction, and users have not found useful or profitable reasons to stay.
Lack of Focus
At present, Eclipse's application ecosystem lacks any unique and valuable products. The existing application portfolio—DEXs, lending markets, stablecoins, NFT markets—structurally resembles existing applications on Solana, Ethereum, or other Layer-2s. In most cases, they offer fewer features, worse liquidity, and lack competitive advantages.
For a blockchain to sustain long-term usage and prove the validity of its block space, it needs a clear value proposition—an application or experience that users cannot obtain elsewhere. So far, Eclipse has not achieved this.
On the contrary, the network's short-term activity is almost entirely driven by airdrop mining. While the imminent token issuance may temporarily spark user interest, it is unlikely to attract users' attention without core reasons for retention. Token incentives can spur user growth momentum but cannot replace true product-market fit.
Without excellent native applications from Eclipse, the ecosystem could quickly unravel after the TGE. Builders will leave to seek more liquid platforms. Users will turn to chains where their tokens have exit opportunities. And this network—despite having strong funding and engineering capabilities—might become irrelevant, not due to technical failure, but because there is nothing truly significant within it.
If Eclipse wants to have a future, it needs to incubate or attract an application that can only be realized on its architecture—an application that can leverage SVM in a way that cannot be replicated by any EVM chain. Otherwise, the tokens will only briefly inflate the ecosystem, and then gravity will pull it back to the ground.
Expected Token Issuance Dynamics
Based on similar projects and the state of the Eclipse ecosystem, the most likely outcome is a valuation mismatch at TGE. Despite the chain's declining usage and lack of sticky applications, Eclipse's fully diluted valuation (FDV) is expected to exceed its most recent round of private financing—potentially over $300 million. This would instantly place it among the highest valued L2 platforms, despite lacking corresponding fundamentals.
The perpetual contract market may go live shortly after launch, and traders will begin shorting the tokens in an attempt to drive their prices down to where they should be. In response, market makers and early supporters will short squeeze these positions, temporarily pushing prices up until the short positions are reduced to manageable levels. Once liquidity dries up, stakeholders holding unlocked or liquid tokens will begin to sell off gradually, creating sustained selling pressure and triggering a typically prolonged and severe downward trend.
This pattern—overpriced issuance, initial market short squeezes, followed by long-term issuance—is common in overhyped, low-utilization ecosystems. Without a catalyst for natural demand or unique applications to attract attention, Eclipse's tokens are likely to follow a similar trajectory.
Final Thoughts
Eclipse has raised substantial funds, built an impressive tech stack, and attracted attention from top investors. But none of this has translated into sustained user demand, product-market fit, or provided the blockchain with a reason for existence beyond short-term speculation.
The current reality is clear: Eclipse lacks a killer application, no sticky user base, and no unique reasons for developers or capital to remain post-token issuance. The token issuance is likely to follow the trajectory of many previous token launches—a brief wave of hype followed by sustained selling pressure due to insider rotations and a lack of natural demand.
Eclipse may still find a foothold, but this path requires more than just funding and clever architecture. It needs to provide something only Eclipse can offer—not just technically, but economically and experientially. Until then, the project’s valuation will not align with its utility, and the pricing of its tokens will be more narrative-driven rather than based on actual usage.
In such a market, downward gravity will ultimately prevail.
