Ethereum
Rome Protocol Gets $9 Million to Bring Solana Capabilities to Ethereum Layer-2
The Rome Protocol has secured $9 million in a funding round to integrate modular services from Solana network in Ethereum ecosystem.
The protocol said its funding round included several notable investors like Hack VC, Polygon Ventures, HashKey, Portal Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Robot VC, LBank, Anagram, TRGC, and Perridon Ventures.
The round also included notable angel investors, such as Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko and Austin Federa. Other investors included Nick White, Santiago Santos, Comfy Capital and Jason Yanowitz.
Rome Protocol
According to the protocol, the platform would be designed to integrate Solana’s capabilities into services on Ethereum.
This approach will allow Ethereum-based rollups to use Solana as a shared sequencer, thereby confirming transactions faster, improving privacy and scalability, and reducing blockchain costs.
Rome Protocol noted that Ethereum’s isolated sequencer functionality raises concerns about liquidity fragmentation, weakest link security, and interoperability on the network’s rollup-centric roadmap. Because of this, many rollups rely on centralized sequencers, which risk censorship, limited visibility, and critical downtime.
To address these challenges, the Rome protocol will allow rollups to use Solana’s existing validators as shared sequencers for transactions, state maintenance, and transaction publishing. This approach aims to transform Solana’s 50,000+ transactions per second (TPS) capacity into infrastructure for Ethereum rollups. It also ensures atomic composability with transactions confirmed on Solana before they are submitted to Ethereum.
The Rome Protocol will allow developers to focus on their applications rather than building new cross-chain interoperability infrastructure. Ethereum developers can use familiar technologies like OP Stack for execution and state maintenance.
Shared sequencer architecture
The proposed shared sequencer architecture includes Rhea, Remus, Romulus and Hercules functionalities.
Rhea will ensure fair sequencing and submission to Solana, while Remus will improve atomic transactions between rollups.
According to the protocol:
“Rhea enables fair and blind sequencing of rollup transactions. All transactions are treated equally and processed on a first-come, first-served basis. Remus enables atomic execution of cross-rollup transactions as a premium service.”
Romulus will facilitate atomic transactions through Solana and various rollups, while Hercules will accept Solana’s block-ordered transactions.