A former Terraform Labs developer who worked on Terra, Neel Somani raised over $15 million for a project to develop roll-up technology across multiple blockchains.
In general le roll-up consists of performing a transaction outside the main blockchain and then sending the transaction data back to the main network of this blockchain. This allows the calculations to be moved to a second layer in order to lighten the main blockchain. A solution that has a future to allow more scalability.
painful memories
It is not easy in 2022 to launch a new project has been part of the sad team that saw Terra collapse last May. Indeed, following the depeg of the stablecoin UST last May, in an attempt to stabilize the cryptocurrency at $1, many LUNA must have been minted causing the value to fall from $150 to less than $1 in a few hours without success.
It’s definitely the Crypto Sector Tragedy of 2022 which caused the environment to fall further, but which also radically impacted investor confidence in addition to causing the entire community behind Terra Luna to lose fortunes.
Do Kwon, CEO and creator of Terra Luna considers himself the sole culprit of this fiasco, and even if he was not worried by justice in the first place, it seems that things are changing on this subject. Indeed, the Korean authorities have invalidated his passport and a “red flag” is in progress at Interpol in order to get hold of the latter to bring him back to South Korea.
Moreover, it seems that Do Kwon always earns money thanks to LUNA through anonymous crypto wallets and away remains among one of the top 50 cryptocurrencies. Although the coin is worth less than a dollar, the community is still very strong in trying to shake things up.
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The journey of Neel Somani
For all the professionals who have worked on Terra, it is not easy to embark on a new project and yet, this is what Neel Somani decided to do and seems to have undertaken successfully!
Thus, it was via an interview with The Block that Neel Somani indicated that despite his past as an engineer on the Terra project, which could have been an obstacle for his new project, this was not the case. For the latter, the Terra blockchain has very competent developers and he simply wants to develop something similar while learning from Terra Luna’s mistakes.
He added :
If the blockchain I was building were to have any issues, I would be completely exposed to them and there would be no way to limit that risk. On the other hand, when building a blockchain with roll-ups it becomes less of a problem because it is always possible to change the first layer.
Somani has just launched his Eclipse project which is a second layer of the Solana (SOL) blockchain and is inspired by the Cosmos (ATOM) blockchain interoperability. The first version should be available in open source from the beginning of next year.
According to a tweet from the Eclipse project, this one allows reinforces the security and the efficiency of the L1 layer while allowing the usual decentralization at unparalleled speed.
Our $9M seed round was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, following a previous $6M pre-seed round led by @PolychainCapjoined by @Galileo_xyz, @Accel+ notable angel investors including @aeyakovenko of @solana, @sreeramkannan of @eigenlayer: https://t.co/5uhT5MYJ7H
— Eclipse (@EclipseFND) September 27, 2022
Future success?
Eclipse raised $6 million through a pre-sale this summer with the participation of the co-founder of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko as well as Polygon (MATIC). There was then a second investment of 9 million dollars from investment funds: Tribe Capital and Tabiya.
Somani worked as an analyst at the Citadel investment fund. He started his work as a crypto engineer much later part-time at first before joining Terra fully.
While some Terra developers are founding new projects, for others the situation is more complex, especially with Yoo’s arrest, Terra’s General Affairs Manager.
