.png)
MH Ventures is proud to announce its participation in the successful $9 million funding round for Rome Protocol, a revolutionary project dedicated to unlocking the full potential of Ethereum applications. This investment fuels innovation in modular Solana services, paving the way for a future of unparalleled scalability and security for the Ethereum ecosystem.
Rome Protocol emerges as a leading force in the modular Solana service space. Their core technology acts as a bridge, allowing Layer 2 solutions and applications to leverage the power of Solana's infrastructure seamlessly. This includes capitalizing on Solana's rapid transaction confirmation times, exceptional throughput, and guaranteed immutability of transaction ordering, all secured by its robust underlying security state. By enabling this integration, the Rome Protocol paves the way for a new era of scalability and security for decentralized applications.
Joining MH Ventures in this funding included multiple venture capital firms, notably Hack VC, Polygon Ventures, HashKey, Portal Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Robot VC, LBank, Anagram, TRGC, and Perridon Ventures. Individual angel investors included Anatoly Yakovenko, Nick White, Santiago Santos, Comfy Capital, Austin Federa, and Jason Yanowitz. Together, we strongly support Rome's innovative approach to scaling Ethereum applications on Solana.
The Rome Protocol is poised to transform the way that we build and interact with decentralized applications. By harnessing the power of Solana's blockchain, Rome Protocol creates a new paradigm for cross-chain liquidity and interoperability.
Isolated sequencers lead to fragmented liquidity, where assets are spread across different chains, hindering efficiency. Security vulnerabilities arise due to the "weakest link" problem, where a single compromised sequencer can expose the entire system. Limited interoperability restricts seamless communication between applications built on different rollups. To further compound these issues, reliance on centralized sequencers by many rollups introduces the risk of censorship, limited visibility into transactions, and critical downtime in case of a single point of failure.
Rome Protocol recognizes the limitations of Ethereum's current architecture and offers an innovative solution. Their innovative solution leverages Solana's existing network of validators as shared sequencers for rollups. This creates a robust, decentralized, highly scalable infrastructure for processing transactions, maintaining state, and publishing data. By harnessing Solana's impressive 50,000+ transactions-per-second capacity, Rome Protocol ensures atomic composability (meaning all transactions within a block happen together or none do) and confirms transactions on Solana before finalizing them on Ethereum.
With the Rome Protocol, developers can focus on building innovative applications without worrying about complex cross-chain interoperability infrastructure. By utilizing familiar technologies like OP Stack for execution and state maintenance, Ethereum developers can seamlessly integrate with Rome Protocol, unlocking new possibilities for the Web3 ecosystem.
The Rome Protocol is an innovative architecture designed to streamline and enhance the efficiency of blockchain rollups. It is composed of several parts that interoperate together;
The OP Geth client is the user and application interface, managing interactions within the rollup ecosystem. It facilitates both transaction creation and submission, seamlessly funneling them to the shared sequencer.
The share sequencer receives the transaction(s), packages them, and submits them to Solana for processing. It ensures that all rollup transactions are correctly ordered and ready for execution on Solana.
Rome can process different types of transactions:
Solana serves as the backbone of the Rome Protocol, acting as the global state machine for all rollups. As the main processor, it receives rolled up transactions submitted by the sequencer, executes them, and updates the rollup state on Solana. This includes tasks such as updating balances, ownership, processing smart contract logic and deciding the order of transactions.
Hercules takes the processed blocks from Solana and re-executes the transactions that were already processed by Solana to advance the state of the rollup. Acting as a validator, it ensures that the transactions processed by Solana are correctly applied to the rollup's state. This step is essential to ensure that the rollup's state is consistent with what has been processed on Solana.
Once the rollup state is synchronized with Solana's processed transactions, the rolled-up data is published on a chosen blockchain, either Solana, Celestia, or Ethereum. This ensures the updated state is stored on a secure, decentralized platform that is accessible for anyone to verify.
The last step is to commit the updated rollup state to Ethereum, the ultimate settlement layer. This ensures the rollup state is finalized, immutable, and tamper-proof, providing a high level of security and trust. By committing to Ethereum, the rollup state is permanently recorded, guaranteeing its integrity and ensuring a single source of truth.
Rome Protocol aims to democratize scalability by providing developers with rollup-as-a-service. By modularizing Solana's consensus mechanism, it addresses the scalability and centralization limitations that are hindering the growth of the Ethereum development ecosystem.
Rome will empower layer 2 solutions by tapping into Solana's lightning-fast transaction confirmation times, high throughput, and guaranteed immutable transaction ordering while also leveraging the collective security stake of the Solana network.
Rome Protocol is actively fostering a vibrant developer community. Here are the ways you can get involved:
The Rome Protocol network is on a fast track to development. A closed developer network launches this month, followed by a test network by year's end and a Mainnet launch in mid-2025.
