Ex-Terra developer Somani raises $15 million for startup

A former developer from the defunct Terra company has raised $15 million for his startup.

Neel Somani launched his Solana-based cross-chain modular startup, Eclipse, after the collapse of TerraUSD. In his previous company, he worked at Terranova, a Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) project connecting the TerraUSD stablecoin ecosystem to Ethereum.

One of the main motivations behind the Eclipse project was the ecosystem of talented developers on Terra. He tried to build something similar despite being associated with the company, which crashed and wiped out roughly $60 billion.

Prior to working for Terra, Somani was previously a quantitative analyst at Citadel. His crypto career started by working part-time as a crypto engineer.

Previously, Eclipse had raised $6 million in a three-week pre-seed round over the summer. Investors such as Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon were part of the round.

After that, there was another round of funding with a seed round of $9 million led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya.

According to Somani, Eclipse will open source its first protocol release early next year.

Meanwhile, his ex-workplace Terra and his ex-colleagues face an investigation or dozing arrest.

Recently, South Korean prosecutors in charge of the Terraform Labs case arrested a major employee of the controversial blockchain startup called “Yoo”.

As reported by Korean media platform JTBC, Yoo is one of the six people for whom prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant. His specific offense is centered around market manipulation.

According to the report, Yoo’s market manipulation violated the Capital Markets Act of Korea. With the history of evasive authorities, a bench warrant will be issued to hold Yoo in custody pending trial.

With more than $40 billion worth of investors’ funds wiped out in an instant, South Korean regulators are seriously looking for who to pin the crash on for law enforcement. Do Kwon has been on the run since the investigation was launched, although he claims he is not in hiding.

Korean prosecutors have raided exchanges that may have transaction records involving the collapsed LUNA and UST tokens. While the findings from these raids remain a mystery, the decision to bring Do Kwon in for questioning and prosecution has intensified in recent weeks.

Korean prosecutors have also sought the help of Interpol and a red notice has been issued to capture Do Kwon for his arrest. Since the seizure of his personal cash holdings is not enough to fish him out, Korean regulators have canceled his passport after first sending him a notice to return the passport within a 14-day time frame.

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