A Technical Deep Dive into Cascade - The First Interchain SVM Rollup by Eclipse & Injective

Injective has launched Cascade, a Solana Sealevel VM (SVM) rollup optimized for the IBC ecosystem powered by Eclipse. This means that projects built for Solana can easily deploy to Cascade, bringing new smart contract capabilities into the Injective ecosystem. Additionally, projects on Injective can now leverage the Cascade parallelized SVM.

Injective’s Cascade chain incorporates two exciting elements:

1. An SVM rollup, bringing the throughput and speed of Solana to the Cosmos
2. The first-ever example of interchain security (ICS) being leveraged for rollups

How Does It Work?

The Interchain Security specification is finalized at a high level, but the technical details are still in the process of development. This requires the completion of the cross-chain validation (CCV) module for IBC-enabled chains. To bring Cascade live as soon as possible, we are launching a testnet beta as a V1 prior to the final deployment.

V1: Standard Eclipse SVM Chain Deployment

Eclipse offers customizable rollups. Eclipse is currently in a testnet beta phase, and Injective has been selected as one of Eclipse's exclusive early testnet partners. With Eclipse, Injective was able to easily spin up a rollup with the desired specifications.

The testnet beta phase involves an SVM sequencer run by the Eclipse team. This sequencer receives transactions from Solana wallets and smart contract deployments from the Solana CLI. Blocks produced by this sequencer are posted to a data availability layer. Under the hood, Injective plans to utilize Celestia as its data availability provider in order to further increase throughput. Settlement powered by Injective will eventually ensure the sequencer executes transactions correctly.

V2: Interchain Security (Cascade, Eclipse & Injective)

The Eclipse team has received a grant from the Solana Foundation for implementing inter-blockchain communication (IBC) for the SVM. Because of this capability, Eclipse chains can be used for interchain security (ICS).

There are two possible constructions for the Injective SVM chain to participate in interchain security with the Injective Hub:

1. Cascade’s operator (Eclipse) provides ICS for the Injective Hub. This means that if the Eclipse-managed sequencer misbehaves, the Injective Hub can slash the Eclipse operator.
2. The Injective Hub provides ICS for Cascade. The stake on the Injective can allow us to decentralize sequencers for Cascade. In this case, if an Injective validator misbehaves and executes a Cascade transaction incorrectly, then the Injective validator's stake will be slashed. A possible modification to this design might only slash the Injective validator for the consumer chain reward.

Since Eclipse chains don't implement ABCI or use the Cosmos SDK, we cannot use the cross-chain validation (CCV) module which is built to enable interchain security for Cosmos IBC chains. Instead, the interchain security protocol must be implemented from scratch. On the Injective side, we can trivially add the CCV module.

The following messages must be supported between Eclipse and the Injective Hub:

• Initiation and completion messages for unbonding operations: undelegation, redelegation, and validator unbonding
• Slash requests from the consumer chain

We must also implement IBC channel initialization and reward distribution.

V3: Injective Unbonding

In the far future, Injective might determine that the rollup is self-sufficient and no longer requires interchain security. At this point, Eclipse should offer permissionless sequencing. If the Eclipse sequencer is not yet permissionless, then the Eclipse team and/or Injective team will run the sequencer(s).

Another First for the Injective Community

In collaboration with Eclipse, Injective will be the first to offer an SVM rollup via Cascade. Moreover, Injective looks to pioneer the use of interchain security for rollups, building at the bleeding-edge of blockchain infrastructure to push the Cosmos ecosystem forward.

Builders can get started with the official developer docs: https://eclipse-3.gitbook.io/cascade/cascade-docs/cascade-developer-documentation

Read more about the announcement here: BusinessWire Press Release

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About Eclipse:

Eclipse is building the fastest Ethereum Layer 2 using the Solana Virtual Machine, so that developers get all the benefits of dedicated throughput with none of the downsides.

Join our community: https://linktr.ee/eclipsefnd

About Injective

Injective is a lightning fast interoperable layer one blockchain optimized for building the premier Web3 finance applications. Injective provides developers with powerful plug-and-play modules for creating unmatched dApps. INJ is the native asset that powers Injective and its rapidly growing ecosystem. Injective is incubated by Binance and is backed by prominent investors such as Jump Crypto, Pantera and Mark Cuban.

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