Eclipse Labs cuts 65% of staff, names Sydney Huang as new CEO in post-TGE pivot

Layer 2 developer Eclipse Labs announced a leadership change and major layoffs Monday as it pivots toward building user-facing applications.

Eclipse announced on X that Sydney Huang, known as "0xSydney" on X, will take over as CEO following the voluntary departure of Vijay Chetty, also known as Litquidity. Huang previously served as Product Lead for Eclipse.

As part of the restructuring, Eclipse is reducing its workforce by 65% to "align resources with our updated strategy," according to the post.

"Going forward, we'll prioritize building a breakout application on top of Eclipse's L2 infrastructure, with more details to come," Eclipse said.

The move comes after Eclipse's token generation event (TGE) last month, with native token ES deployed on Eclipse, Ethereum and Solana. ES price fell over 65% since the TGE, trading down 13.2% in the past 24 hours to $0.1586 as of 10:50 p.m. ET Monday, according to CoinGecko data.

While Eclipse has previously focused on infrastructure and supporting developers, the new CEO said the company's next chapter will prioritize in-house development of applications that can attract end users.

"Our mission has always been to build infrastructure that can serve real-world applications. That remains unchanged, but our focus is evolving. The next chapter is about serving end users and building those applications in-house," Huang said on X on Monday.

Despite the layoffs, Eclipse said it will continue operating and improving its layer-2 chain while directing more resources to applications on top of it. 

Founded in 2022, the Layer 2 developer launched its Ethereum-connected rollup in November 2024, which runs the Solana Virtual Machine. It describes itself as the "Solana on Ethereum" as it seeks to pair Solana's speed with Ethereum's security.