Rome, a new player in the cryptocurrency market, aims to use Solana as an auxiliary network to provide services to layer-2 blockchains built on Ethereum. The company opened the curtain of secrecy and announced that it had raised $ 9 million in funding from leading investors.

In addition to funds from Hack VC, Polygon Ventures, HashKey, Portal Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Robot VC, LBank, Anagram, TRGC, Perridon Ventures, important investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko, Nick White, Santiago Santos, Comfy Capital, Austin Federa, Jason Yanowitz are also included in this project. participated in the financing round.

Founded by Anil Kumar and Sattvik Kansal, Rome aims to position Solana as the foundational network for both “shared sequencers” and “data availability” (DA), according to the press release.

A sorter is the component of the layer-2 blockchain that collects transactions and sends them to the underlying Ethereum blockchain for settlement. Some experts argue that these sequencers should be decentralized to eliminate the risk of single-point errors. A data availability (DA) project is designed to store the massive transactional data generated by Ethereum layer-2s and do so at a lower cost than placing it on the main Ethereum chain.

Kumar said in an interview with CoinDesk, “The main thing is that a shared sequencer needs to have its own chain and doing that takes a lot of time and effort. So we were exploring which chain we should use. If we look at Solana as a state machine, Bitcoin, Cosmos and Ethereum “We can say that it is the best status chain compared to ,” he said.

The project also aims to allow “atomic transactions” between Ethereum layer-2 networks, as Kumar explained. This is the scenario where multiple steps of a transaction occur on different blockchains. Kumar noted that if any part of the transaction fails, none of it is completed and the user will only face a Solana transaction cost, which is typically very low.

Rome joins other crypto projects working to develop shared sequencers, or DA, as part of a broader trend of “modular” blockchains, where certain functions that Ethereum’s main chain previously performed in isolation are taken over by alternative projects.

Metis, an Ethereum layer-2 project, runs a decentralized sequencer, and Espresso Systems is building what it describes as an “L2 sequencer marketplace.” Last month, the NEAR Foundation, which supports the alternative layer-1 blockchain NEAR Protocol, launched a project called Nuffle Labs with $13 million in funding. This project aims to ensure data availability.

Another project, Avail, uses its own network for data availability and announced in April that it plans to integrate into five Ethereum layer-2, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, StarkWare, and zkSync.

Rome plans to open a closed network to developers this month. The testnet is aimed to be launched at the end of 2024, and the mainnet launch is planned for mid-2025.