Nautilus To Deploy Parallelized zk-EVM With Eclipse, RISC Zero, Neon Labs, & Celestia

Nautilus is excited to partner with Eclipse to launch its high throughput chain with an emphasis on providing built-in features for payments. The chain will facilitate a variety of applications from consumer to DeFi.

The Nautilus chain utilizes some of the most cutting-edge features of Eclipse, geared to provide a high throughput zk-EVM rollup.

Zebec, a payments streaming protocol, will be among the first deployments on the Nautilus chain, bringing its 20,000 daily active users. Other dApps include Poseidon Swap (DEX), Questbook (decentralized university), in addition to 80+ others according to the Nautilus team.

How does the Nautilus chain work?

Although the Nautilus chain executes EVM bytecode, it uses the Sealevel virtual machine (SVM) underneath. The chain employs Neon EVM, which utilizes proxy nodes to relay EVM transactions to the SVM. Within the SVM, an EVM bytecode interpreter called Sputnik VM executes the EVM transaction, and the EVM state is stored in SVM accounts to maximize SVM parallelism. Celestia provides data availability for the chain.

As a result, users get the convenience of EVM wallets and tooling while benefiting from the speed of the SVM.

Currently, the Nautilus chain is settled by circulating fraud proofs on the Eclipse settlement layer, making Nautilus an optimistic rollup. This deployment is capable of more than 2,000 TPS.

How is Eclipse adding value to Nautilus?

Nautilus wanted a chain which satisfied the following requirements:

• Ability to add additional zero-knowledge features in the execution layer
• Switch to a zero-knowledge rollup once the tech is ready
• Gas abstraction - pay gas in $ZBC (Zebec Protocol's native token)
• Gas fee redistribution
• Option to move data availability layers in the future if desired

If Nautilus were to create a customized Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain to satisfy their specifications, they would need to:

• Employ a team of infrastructure experts and SREs to ensure uptime and ongoing chain upgrades.
• Implement many features from scratch, since for example OP Stack doesn't provide gas abstraction.
• Manually deploy much of the infrastructure required for the chain, including block explorers, indexers, and bridges.
• Write their own logic to migrate data availability layers, and it would likely be difficult to migrate if it were a smart contract rollup rather than on a sovereign settlement layer.

With Eclipse, however, Nautilus was able to specify their customized chain requirements and build their rollup. This allowed Nautilus to take advantage of 2,000+ TPS for itself while future proofing the chain.

What does the future of the Nautilus chain look like?

While the Nautilus chain is starting as an optimistic rollup, the future of the chain is a zero-knowledge EVM rollup.

The Nautilus zk-EVM re-uses the RISC Zero proof system. In the initial version, SVM (BPF) bytecode undergoes a JIT compilation to output RISC-V bytecode. This bytecode is executed in the RISC Zero zk-VM along with all memory accesses packaged alongside the program. An improvement to this design utilizes accelerators provided by the RISC Zero codebase. These proofs can be computed in parallel and composed to amortize the proving time across many transactions.

A future version of the Nautilus chain might implement the BPF circuit directly and re-use only the RISC Zero proof system rather than the RISC-V circuitry. This is likely to produce more succinct representations for BPF instructions that are being executed. For example, in the V1 for the Nautilus zk-EVM, 64 bit BPF arithmetic instructions must be compiled to 32 bit instructions using the RISC-V instruction set.

Since the Nautilus chain is implemented as a modular blockchain, the settlement layer can always be swapped out for a different proof system, giving the Nautilus community maximum optionality.

How do I get access to testnet?

Take a look at the deployment docs for the Nautilus chain and get started today: https://docs.nautchain.xyz/ 

Follow Nautilus and Eclipse on Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest information.

What is Eclipse?

Eclipse, a customizable rollup provider based in San Francisco, CA was founded in 2022 by Neel Somani. Designed for developers building some of blockchain's most unique use cases, Eclipse challenges the current constraints and limitations presented by existing blockchain technologies. Featuring a novel architecture that allows for decentralized applications to act as their own sovereign chain, Eclipse enables developers to deploy customizable chains without the hassle of managing infrastructure and security.

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