Atlas - Bringing SVM to the L2 Landscape: What You Need to Know
Verifiable Finance, Solana Virtual Machine, & More
If you’ve been paying attention to the Solana vs Ethereum discourse recently, or even just keeping tabs on Solana’s developments, you’ll know about Solana’s self-stated goal to build a ‘decentralized NASDAQ’. While a lofty goal, this seems like a natural step for a chain that embraces its DeFi applications and builders. This discussion brings up some interesting capabilities on DeFi, specifically for chains that aren’t hellbent on decentralization at all costs, and have performance and scalability higher on up on the totem pole of priorities.
In today’s edition, we’ll be discussing Atlast Network, a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chain, built by the team behind Phoenix, Ellipsis Labs. While it might not be the most popular Solana protocol, Phoenix is historically one of the top perps venues on the chain, processing over $50B in cumulative volume to date. The team’s latest initiative, Atlas, looks to build a blockchain for finance applications that emphasizes transparency as the main benefit of blockchain…
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Background on Atlas Network
Atlas describes itself as the blockchain for verifiable finance. Why is verification above what is already provided by existing blockchains needed you ask? Specifically, Atlas is looking to carve out a niche in the L1 space for itself, catering to those looking for High-Frequency Trading (HFT) capabilities, margin systems, and the ability to run onchain orderbooks.
The blockchain trilemma, consisting of security, scalability, and decentralization, is a spectrum. Some applications and users demand a certain set of tradeoffs. The Ethereum vs Solana discourse may have oversimplified this point, making it seem like there are largely two directions in which new blockchains can build. Especially with the tooling and modularity options available today, this isn’t the case.
According to their docs, Atlas looks to make a very specific set of tradeoffs based on the type of fast-moving, financial applications they are looking to service. When it comes to protocol architecture, Atlas is an Ethereum L2, but uses the SVM. While the EVM certainly has its own appeal when it comes to developer ecosystem and existing applications, Solana has seen a lot of growth in this area, and the team has a lot of experience scaling performant apps on the chain.
The SVM implementation will make it easier for existing Solana apps to deploy to Atlas, a potential first point of contact with the Ethereum ecosystem. This comes as we see more effort to make Solana interoperable, and a little bit less monolithic, even if this just means getting support for more wrapped assets, not anything structural. At Solana Breakpoint, we saw Stacks Founder Muneeb Ali announce that Stacks developers are bringing sBTC to Solana.
The team proclaims that interacting with Atlas should feel almost identical to interacting with Solana itself. The main implementations introduced to Atlas that differentiate its architecture are the following:
Rapid State Merklization:
Full state merklization is implemented at every slot, with a 50ms slot interval, compared to Solana’s 400ms block production interval.
Next-Gen RPC:
Atlas uses a redesigned RPC implementation that is modular, horizontally-scalable, and also backwards-compatible.
Isolated Execution:
A VM executor supports purely functional transaction execution; transactions are either executed/finalized, or not processed, no in-between state when waiting for a certain amount of confirmations.
Atlast was only announced less than a month ago, in mid-September, after being in stealth mode beforehand, with little public information published thus far. The protocol is in its private testnet phase, with access available for those who request. Atlas stands out as an L2 implementing the SVM, with a very specific focus on verifiable finance, rather than a generalized chain.
The idea of building out an L2 using the SVM framework isn’t necessarily new. As far back as February, we’ve previously covered this concept as proposed by Eclipse, an L2 that also allows Solana developers to start building on Ethereum by leveraging the SVM for execution instead of the EVM (while settling transactions on Ethereum). The chain will use the SVM for execution, tapping into existing Solana developers, Celestia for data availability, and Ethereum for settlement. Similar to Solana, this architecture makes it possible for dApps to benefit from local fee markets, such that high activity on a specific dApp does not increase gas costs for the rest of dApps on the chain.
The SVM is just one example of an execution environment on ETH L2s. The direction that the Ethereum Foundation has taken basically promotes applications to deploy on L2s instead of mainnet. The expectation is for teams to deploy their applications on L2 rollups, each of which will offer its own execution environment (EVM, SVM, MoveVM…).
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