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Rome, the blockchain startup that raised 9 million dollars relies on Solana to serve Ethereum Layer 2
Rome, a crypto startup project that aims to use Solana as an ancillary network to service Ethereum-based layer 2 blockchains, has emerged from the shadows to announce that it has raised $9 million in funding from high-level investors.
According to a press release first shared with CoinDesk, the funding was provided by Hack VC, Polygon Ventures, HashKey, Portal Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Robot VC, LBank, Anagram, TRGC, Perridon Ventures, as well as major investors including Anatoly Yakovenko, Nick White, Santiago Santos, Comfy Capital, Austin Federa, Jason Yanowitz.
A sequencer is the component of a layer 2 blockchain that groups transactions and sends them to the Ethereum base blockchain for settlement, and some experts say these sequencers need to be decentralized to eliminate what can be single points of failure. A DA project is designed to store the reams of transactional data generated by Ethereum’s layer 2s, and to do so at a lower cost than it would cost to put the data on the Ethereum main chain.
“The main thing is that a shared sequencer has to be a chain in itself, and it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort to do that, so we were looking at what chain we should use,” Kumar said in an interview with CoinDesk. “If you look at 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 Ethereum layer-2 networks, Kumar said. This is where multiple stages of a transaction are carried out on different blockchains. If any part of the transaction fails, none of them are executed and the user only pays the cost of a Solana transaction, which is typically very low, he said.
Rome joins the fray with other crypto projects working to develop shared sequencers, or DAs, part of a broader trend of “modular” blockchains, in which certain functions previously handled exclusively by the Ethereum mainchain are being spun off and handled by alternative projects instead.
Another project, Avail, uses its own network for DA and announced in April that there are plans 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 test network in late 2024 and a main network launch in mid-2025.