Eclipse $ES Deep Dive
An Honest Look at $ES
Executive Summary
Eclipse Labs has raised $65 million from top-tier investors to build a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)-based Layer-2 on Ethereum. Backed by firms like Polychain, Placeholder, and Hack VC, Eclipse positioned itself as a high-performance, cross-chain rollup with deep architectural ambition.
But despite its capital and narrative, the on-chain reality tells a different story. Activity has been shallow and short-lived, driven primarily by airdrop farming rather than organic demand. Gas fees, deposits, and TVL have been declining. The current app ecosystem lacks a single uniquely valuable product — most offerings are weaker copies of what exists elsewhere.
With no standout application and usage already falling, Eclipse is entering its token launch cycle overvalued. Its fully diluted valuation is expected to exceed $300M, despite network fundamentals that don’t justify that figure. The likely outcome: a brief short squeeze followed by sustained sell pressure, as insiders and market makers capitalize on retail interest before exiting.
Unless Eclipse delivers a product that can only exist on its stack, the token will inflate the ecosystem temporarily — and then gravity will do the rest.
Capital Raised
Since its inception, Eclipse Labs has raised $65 million across multiple funding rounds, positioning itself as one of the most well-capitalized Ethereum Layer-2 projects
Funding Rounds Breakdown
Pre-Seed ($6M) – August 2022
Led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Accel, Polygon Ventures, and others. This early round positioned Eclipse as an ambitious attempt to bring Solana’s high-performance virtual machine (SVM) to Ethereum. The raise is estimated to have been done at a valuation of $30–40 million, typical for strong pre-product infrastructure plays at the time.
Seed ($9M) – September 2022
Co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with support from CoinList, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, and Struck Crypto. This round pushed Eclipse’s valuation into the nine-figure range (estimated $100–120 million post-money), despite having no live network or protocol traction. The funding was used to expand the engineering team and accelerate infrastructure development.
Series A ($50M) – March 2024
Co-led by Hack VC and Placeholder, with participation from Delphi Digital, Polychain (returning investor), OKX Ventures, GSR, Flow Traders, Fenbushi Capital, Maven 11, and DBA. This round was presented as a war chest to launch mainnet and build out the Eclipse ecosystem. While the post-money valuation was not officially disclosed, industry estimates place it between $300–500 million, pricing Eclipse as a top-tier Ethereum L2 contender
Strategic Positioning
Eclipse’s raise was unique not just in size, but in the strategic crossover appeal it promised:
Backing from both Ethereum-aligned and Solana-aligned investors (e.g. Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation researchers).
An architecture that blended Ethereum security with Solana’s execution layer and Celestia’s modular data availability.
This allowed Eclipse to present itself as the future of cross-chain performance — a “best of all worlds” rollup stack.
The Reputation of Polychain
Polychain Capital led Eclipse’s pre-seed round and participated in later raises — but their recent behavior across other investments raises serious red flags. In projects like Celestia, they aggressively sold tokens post-launch, reportedly unloading over $240 million in $TIA and contributing to a 90% price collapse. The same pattern has played out across other Polychain-backed tokens like Manta, Scroll, and Solayer, all down 80–95% from their highs.
There’s no reason to expect Eclipse will be any different. Polychain has consistently shown a willingness to maximize returns regardless of impact on the ecosystem, and their early position in Eclipse suggests they’ll be ready to rotate out when liquidity appears — not build long-term alignment.
On-Chain Activity & Usage
Despite raising $65 million and positioning itself as Ethereum’s fastest L2 by leveraging Solana’s VM, Eclipse’s on-chain activity reveals a pattern of short-lived, airdrop-driven usage with little sustained demand. The following data visualizations illustrate the rise and rapid decline in activity across key indicators such as gas paid, user deposits, TVL, and application traction.
Network Fees Reveal Airdrop-Driven Speculation
This chart shows total daily network fees (in ETH) paid on Eclipse. Activity surged immediately following the launch of Turbo Tap, an app explicitly designed to farm the airdrop. The correlation between usage and reward expectation is further reinforced by the sharp drop that followed the Turbo Tap snapshot.
By June 2025, network fees had collapsed to below 1 ETH per day (~$750), reflecting both a drop in user transactions and the evaporation of incentive-driven behavior. This trend supports the notion that there is no organic transaction demand on the network beyond airdrop farming.
Chain Deposits Are in Steady Decline
The ETH and Hyperlane deposit curves into Eclipse closely track the surge in gas usage — both saw a rapid ramp-up between December 2024 and March 2025, driven by incentive-driven activity. Starting in Q2 2025, deposits began a steady and unrelenting decline, as users withdrew capital and likely reallocated it to more liquid or active ecosystems.
Hyperlane-based deposits peaked between $25M and $27M in Q1 2025 but has since dropped to below $17M. This decline is consistent across bridged assets like USDC, SOL, and WIF. Importantly, this isn’t a reshuffling of asset composition — it’s an ecosystem-wide outflow. As reward incentives tapered off, so did user engagement, exposing the fragile and temporary nature of Eclipse's liquidity base.
DeFi App Ecosystem is Small, Illiquid, and Bleeding
Across the top 10 Eclipse apps, TVL remains shallow:
Only 3 apps exceed $2M TVL (Orca, Astrol, Save).
Most others sit below $500K, some under $100K.
The 1-month change column shows steep double-digit declines across nearly all major protocols (Astrol -24%, Invariant -28%, Neptune -27%).
This landscape suggests developers aren’t finding sticky traction, and users aren’t finding useful or profitable reasons to stay.
A Missing Center of Gravity
As it stands today, Eclipse’s application ecosystem lacks any uniquely valuable product. The current set of apps — DEXs, lending markets, stablecoins, NFT marketplaces — are structurally no different from what already exists on Solana, Ethereum, or other Layer-2s. In most cases, they offer fewer features, less liquidity, and no competitive advantage.
For a blockchain to sustain long-term usage and justify its own blockspace, it needs a clear shelling point — an application or experience that users can't get anywhere else. So far, Eclipse has failed to produce one.
Instead, the network's short-term activity has been driven almost entirely by airdrop farming. And while the upcoming token launch may temporarily spark interest, it’s unlikely to hold user attention without a core reason to stay. Token incentives can kickstart momentum — but they can’t substitute for genuine product-market fit.
Without a standout application native to Eclipse, the ecosystem risks rapid disintegration post-TGE. Builders will leave for deeper liquidity. Users will rotate to chains where their tokens have exit opportunities. And the network — despite its capital and engineering — may fade into irrelevance, not because the tech failed, but because nothing on it truly mattered.
If Eclipse wants a future, it needs to incubate or attract an application that is only possible on its architecture — one that leverages the SVM in a way no EVM chain can replicate. Otherwise, the token will briefly inflate the ecosystem, and then gravity will do the rest.
Expected Token Launch Dynamics
Based on similar projects and the current state of the Eclipse ecosystem, the most likely outcome is a valuation mismatch at TGE. Despite the chain’s declining usage and lack of sticky applications, Eclipse is expected to debut with a fully diluted valuation (FDV) higher than its most recent private round — likely exceeding $300 million. This would immediately place it among the top L2s by valuation, despite having none of the corresponding fundamentals.
Shortly after launch, perpetual futures markets will likely go live, and traders will begin to short the token in an attempt to price it down to where it belongs. In response, market makers and early backers will squeeze these shorts, pushing the price up temporarily until short interest drops to manageable levels. Once that liquidity dries up, stakeholders with unlocked or liquid tokens will begin to gradually sell, introducing steady sell pressure and initiating what often becomes a persistent, grinding downtrend.
This pattern — inflated launch, initial short squeeze, followed by prolonged distribution — is common in overhyped, underutilized ecosystems. Without a catalyst for organic demand or a unique application to retain attention, Eclipse’s token is likely to follow the same trajectory.
Final Thoughts
Eclipse has raised serious capital, built a technically impressive stack, and attracted attention from top-tier investors. But none of that has translated into sustained user demand, product-market fit, or a reason for the chain to exist beyond short-term speculation.
The current reality is clear: Eclipse has no killer app, no sticky user base, and no uniquely compelling reason for developers or capital to stay post-TGE. The launch of the token will likely play out as so many have before — a brief wave of hype followed by sustained sell pressure, driven by insiders rotating out and the absence of organic demand.
Eclipse may yet find its footing, but that path will require more than capital and clever architecture. It will require delivering something only Eclipse can offer — not just technically, but economically and experientially. Until then, the project’s valuation will remain out of sync with its utility, and its token will be priced more by narrative than by usage.
In markets like this, gravity eventually wins.
Sources
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