The SVM Proliferates: Eclipse, Atlas, and Fogo

Introduction

Ethereum’s rise to prominence, coupled with its refusal to scale throughput, led to a proliferation of EVM-compatible chains. From the first notable alt-L1s like Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, to popular L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, all the way to soon-to-debut projects like Monad and Megaeth, the EVM market has become saturated. The recent launch of Eclipse and a number of SVM chains in development like Atlas and Fogo may suggest we are witnessing the early stages of a similar dynamic play out with Solana.

Notably, this report does not attempt to provide an exhaustive list of SVM chains and the surrounding tech stack since that would sacrifice depth in the analysis. Instead, we focus on a select number of players in the emergent SVM ecosystem that have taken different approaches (Eclipse, Atlas, and Fogo), with the goal of understanding the motivations behind the various design choices, current state, and future outlook. 

Why Build an SVM Chain?

When Ethereum embraced a modular scaling roadmap, the community explicitly gave up on scaling the L1, pushing activity onto L2s and other chains. When observed side by side with Solana, the juxtaposition is evident. Solana’s integrated approach and focus on performance enables far better UX for both developers and users. Developers can primarily focus on their application without placing too much emphasis on the infrastructure or which chain they should launch on, while users benefit from unified liquidity and a seamless wallet experience without the need for complicated bridging.  

In other words, while Ethereum actively encourages users to move to other chains, Solana core developers actively fight to keep users and liquidity on the L1, making teams who move to other chains regret that decision. However, even as the most performant, widely used blockchain today, Solana is still far from perfect, prompting some teams to iterate upon some design choices while maintaining compatibility at the SVM execution layer to optimize for performance. With this context in mind, there are two primary motivations behind emergent SVM chains:

1. Export Solana’s execution environment to other ecosystems – primarily Ethereum (e.g., Eclipse).