PANews reported on December 30th that Neel Somani, founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 protocol Eclipse, has stepped down as executive chairman, effective October 2025. He stated that this move reflects his desire to fully dedicate himself to machine learning and other academic research. This departure comes at a time when Eclipse is undergoing significant product and leadership changes, including a strategic shift towards application development.

Prior to this, Somani, in collaboration with its board, spearheaded the company's strategic shift towards application development and appointed Sydney Huang as CEO. Alongside Huang's appointment, Eclipse announced it would focus on building a flagship application on its Layer 2 infrastructure. In a recent article, Huang wrote, "Eclipse's main focus must be on one application. Not several, not all of the deployed applications. This application will be announced next month."