Ethereum
$9M Blockchain Startup Rome Leverages Solana to Serve Ethereum Layer 2
Rome, a crypto startup project aiming to use Solana as an ancillary network to provide services to Layer 2 blockchains built on Ethereum, has emerged from stealth and announced that it has raised $9 million in funding from high-profile investors.
The funding was provided by Hack VC, Polygon Ventures, HashKey, Portal Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Robot VC, LBank, Anagram, TRGC, Perridon Ventures, as well as notable angel investors including Anatoly Yakovenko, Nick White, Santiago Santos, Comfy Capital, Austin Federa, Jason Yanowitz, according to a press release first shared with CoinDesk.
A sequencer is the component of a layer 2 blockchain that groups transactions together and sends them to the base Ethereum blockchain for settlement, and some experts argue that these sequencers should be decentralized to eliminate what could be single points of failure. A DA project is designed to store the volumes of transactional data generated by Ethereum’s layer 2s, and to do so at a lower cost than it would take to put the data on the main Ethereum chain.
“The bottom line is that a shared sequencer has to be its own chain, and it takes a lot of time and effort to achieve that, so we were looking at which chain we should use,” Kumar said in an interview with CoinDesk. “If we think of Solana as a state machine, it’s the best state chain, compared to Bitcoin, Cosmos, Ethereum.”
The project also aims to enable “atomic transactions” between Layer 2 Ethereum networks, Kumar said. This is where multiple steps of a transaction are performed on different blockchains. If one part of the transaction fails, nothing is performed and the user only loses the cost of a Solana transaction, which is typically very low, he said.
Rome is joining the fray with other crypto projects working on developing shared sequencers or DAs — part of the broader trend of “modular” blockchains where certain functions previously handled exclusively by the main Ethereum chain are being broken out and handled by alternative projects instead.
Another project, Avail, uses its own network for DA and revealed in April that it was planning to integrate it as an option into five Ethereum Layer 2s, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, StarkWare, and zkSync.
Rome says a closed network will be open to developers starting this month, with plans for a testnet in late 2024 and a mainnet launch in mid-2025.