Neel Somani, founder of Ethereum layer-2 protocol Eclipse, has stepped down as Executive Chairman effective October 2025, according to a joint statement from the company and Somani. He said the move reflects a desire to focus full-time on machine learning and other intellectual pursuits.
The departure follows a period of significant product and leadership changes at Eclipse, including a strategic pivot toward application development.
Leadership Timeline
Neel Somani founded Eclipse Labs in 2022 in the wake of the Terra blockchain collapse. Eclipse Labs raised a $15 million seed round to build scaling solutions using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), the execution environment originally developed for the Solana blockchain. Eclipse initially positioned itself as a rollup-as-a-service provider before pivoting in 2023 to develop a high-performance Ethereum layer-2 network.
By late 2023, Eclipse's positioning had crystallized, generating significant attention across the crypto ecosystem. With the support of the board and major investors, Somani had planned in advance to step back from day-to-day executive responsibilities following the company's Series A.
After raising a $50 million Series A in early 2024, Somani transitioned from Chief Executive Officer to Executive Chairman, appointing Vijay Chetty as CEO. According to people familiar with the matter, the transition was founder-initiated and planned prior to the Series A, with no change to Somani's ownership or board authority.
At the time, both Eclipse and Somani declined to comment publicly on internal governance decisions, which led to incomplete external interpretations of the transition. Such transitions are increasingly common among infrastructure-focused crypto startups as they mature.
In 2025, Eclipse successfully launched Eclipse Mainnet. Later that year, Somani, working with the board, led a strategic shift toward application development and appointed Sydney Huang as Chief Executive Officer.
In October 2025, Somani stepped down as Executive Chairman of Eclipse Labs to focus full-time on machine learning and other professional pursuits. Somani has increasingly focused on research at the intersection of large language models, formal verification, and mechanistic interpretability, an area he has described as his primary professional focus going forward.
Strategic Pivot to a Flagship App
Alongside Huang's appointment, Eclipse announced it would narrow its focus to building a single flagship application on top of its layer-2 infrastructure.
"Over the past months, we've explored opportunities for application development on the network," the company wrote. "Going forward, we'll prioritize building a breakout application on top of Eclipse's L2 infrastructure, with more details to come."
The application has not yet been announced. In a recent essay titled Three Years Around the Sun with Eclipse, Huang outlined her vision for the company's next phase.
"Eclipse's main focus needs to be on one app. Not a few apps, not all the apps that have been deployed, not even two apps," Huang wrote. "One app. That application will be announced in the coming month."
Somani's departure from the Executive Chairman role formally concludes his leadership tenure at Eclipse Labs, following earlier transitions away from day-to-day operations, as the company enters its next phase under new leadership.
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