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Jump Capital: Why did we invest in Solana EVM compatibility developer Neon Labs

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Jump Capital led Neon Labs' latest token sale private round

原文标题：《 Scaling in a Multichain World: Why We Invested in Neon Labs 》

原文来源： Saurabh Sharma 与 Rahp Maganti，Jump Capital 普通合伙人及副总裁

原文编译：卢江飞

The future belongs to multi-chain. Jump Capital has long believed that a competitive blockchain ecosystem/platform provides users and builders with more choices to better adapt to their personalized needs, goals, and experience. But many blockchains are isolated from each other, leaving users isolated -- clearly a far cry from the vision of building interconnected applications based on privacy and decentralization.

We believe that for the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, there are three main areas/technologies that need to be focused if they are to bring more benefits to the masses:

Scalability: The ability of a blockchain network to verify/process transactions (usually measured in transactions processed per second, known as TPS)

Interoperability: the ability for users and developers on different blockchain networks to communicate (i.e. build applications and transactions)

Developer tools: Applications designed specifically to help and support builders

To that end, Jump Capital is pleased to lead Neon Labs' latest token sale private round and support their cross-chain Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) solution for the Solana blockchain.

Neon EVM's solutions to the three main areas/technologies mentioned above include:

Provide lower gas charges and higher transaction throughput;

Support cross-chain communication;

Allows Ethereum developers to build on the Solana blockchain.

Beyond the extension

As Neon EVM's white paper states, "Ethereum remains the dominant blockchain protocol related to smart contract transactions and settlement, and is the most advanced infrastructure available today for DApp developers and end users."

Having said that, however, as ethereum gas costs continue to soar, it is difficult for some small and medium market participants to take advantage of it, which will inevitably lead to the network becoming more centralized. So in the last two years, "scaling up" has become one of the most focused areas in the blockchain industry, leveraging Optimistic Rollups, zero-knowledge proof Rollups, and side chains, Key Layer 2 projects such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Starkware are trying to solve ethereum scaling in various ways.

On the other hand, some projects are focused on developing better Layer 1 solutions, where Solana has attracted a lot of attention for its ability to offer low transaction costs. During the past several years, Jump Capital and its affiliatesJumpCryptoHas made many contributions to the Solana ecosystem, such as:

JumpCrypto actively participates in Wormhole, especially as a guardian of the Wormhole network;

JumpCrypto is the data provider for the Pyth network;

Actively invest in projects built on Solana blockchain.

Jump Capital is confident that Solana Ecology's rapid growth will continue.

Without Neon, there are still major limitations to building extension technology on Ethereum.

Neon and Solana offer a game-changing alternative solution to these existing projects by bringing Solana optimization directly to key stakeholders (users + developers) without additional Layer 2 infrastructure support (e.g. dispute resolution, collators, etc.). This effect goes beyond extensibility, allowing developers to develop products for multiple diverse communities and scale to larger markets without having to worry about maintaining multiple complex code bases and associated infrastructure.

How does Neon EVM work?

There are many technical details behind the scenes that make up the Neon EVM stack, but at a higher level, the Neon EVM architecture can be summarized as three main components:

EVM itself -- it is a complete EVM emulation on the Solana blockchain;

Web3 broker -- a tool for packaging Neon transactions into Solana transactions;

EVM Governance - This is a complete governance system for managing Neon EVM resources.

Neon EVM also has a key technical feature that allows developers to leverage the superior performance and high throughput of the Solana blockchain to support Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) bytecode compilation.

A quick look at BPF

In 1992, BPF was developed as a special-purpose operating system for filtering packets, but it has now become an important part of the PNUX kernel. Solana supports compilation of BPF bytecode;

In particular, BPF integration allows:

Other virtual machines are loaded into Solana blockchain;

Parallel execution of transactions;

Solana Blockchain VIRTUAL Machine updates with ease: Neon EVM can easily perform updates even after a Solana hard fork.

In short, Neon EVM enables Neon transactions to be executed as local entities on the Solana blockchain. In this case, we can take advantage of outstanding performance innovations on the Solana blockchain to handle Ethereum transactions, including parallel execution of transactions, which has been one of the biggest bottlenecks plaguing Ethereum scalability.

Not only that, dApps built on the Ethereum blockchain can also run seamlessly on the Solana blockchain, with developers making minimal modifications to the existing code base, or even no changes at all! It's the Holy Grail of interoperability for developers.

A new multi-chain era and its impact on ecosystems

Since bitcoin was born, the number of Layer 1 blockchains has exploded, and many of them offer even more powerful performance. Ethereum was the first blockchain to connect turing-complete state machines to BFT consensus, but other blockchains (such as Kadena) have eschewed Turing-complete and proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms (PoS). However, the explosion of the blockchain industry has also led to "fragmentation" problems similar to the early development of the Internet, such as the small scale of many blockchains and isolated clusters of transaction activity.

Neon offers a unique integration feature that brings two of the most core features together:

Support execution of battle-tested smart contracts on EVM-compatible blockchains;

Access to transaction parallelism and extremely fast execution on Solana blockchain.

In the end, each stakeholder benefited, including:

Users - enjoy lower transaction costs, higher throughput, and composability of multi-chain applications;

Developers -- who can deploy their applications on the Solana blockchain and enjoy high execution performance while accessing Ethereum's (or Sopdity, Rblockquoteix, Truffle, and others) rich on-chain tools and DApp infrastructure services;

Verifier/miner -- While they are performing the same on-chain duties as before, higher transaction volume on both networks results in higher MEV.

Cross-chain interoperability will fundamentally facilitate transactions and thus bring more ecological advantages, such as :(1) increased knowledge sharing; (2) Longer product life; (3) Opportunities for specialization; (4) To provide better products and services for more users.

These Flywheel effects are likely to bring more traditional Ethereum developers into the Solana ecosystem while at the same time impacting the creation of newer and better infrastructure/tools on Ethereum. If you're new to The Solana blockchain and like to build on Ethereum, take a lookNeon.