Celestia Raises $55M in Funding

Published on: 22.10.2022

The first modular blockchain network to power scalable, secure Web3 apps, Celestia, raises $55M in funding, with the support from rounds led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.

Celestia raises $55M in funding to launch modular blockchain network. The platform is developing a modular consensus and data network that will allow anybody to quickly construct their own blockchain with minimum overhead.

Celestia’s innovative modular blockchain architecture is designed to significantly increase the scope and rate of Web3 innovation over the next decade.

About the Investors

The Celestia Foundation has raised $55 million in support from rounds led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital. With participation from Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, and select angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Eric Wall and Jutta Steiner.

Celestia presents modular blockchain architecture to address the issue of blockchain deployment and scaling. These specialized networks are less limited and disassemble monolithic chains into flexible components, providing better size, security, and decentralization.

“Modular blockchains will define the next decade of Web3 innovation,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia. “For the past decade, crypto has been bottlenecked by an endless loop of new monolithic L1 smart contract platforms, each racing to the bottom to sacrifice decentralization and security to provide cheaper transaction fees. Web3 cannot scale within the constraints of a monolithic framework. We envision a blockchain ecosystem with modular data availability layers and execution environments that all integrate together. We believe modular blockchains are the next generation of scalable blockchain architectures.”

Celestia Overview

Celestia has been chosen as the data availability layer for modular blockchain projects such as Eclipse, Constellation, and dYmension. Celestia’s expanding ecosystem is drawing projects from all corners of the cryptocurrency world, including rollups, rollup infrastructure, DeFi applications, and more. Celestia is now supporting 26 projects through Modular Fellows, an unique organization that promotes and mentors modular builders.

“Modular designs are unlocking rapid experimentation across the decentralized application stack,” said Alex Evans, Partner at Bain Capital Crypto. “By minimizing base-layer complexity, Celestia offers cleaner abstractions for developers and greater sovereignty for communities of users. The pace of development in the Celestia community has been breathtaking, and we’re excited to support this growing ecosystem.”

Celestia’s primary advantages for Web3 developers Include

“In a moment where everyone is recognizing the importance of app-chains and rollups. Celestia can enable both, standing in the center with the holy-grail of data availability, and accelerating the modular movement,” said Chris Burniske, Partner at Placeholder. “History has taught us that thin pieces, loosely joined, leads to a combined pace of innovation that tends to outstrip vertically integrated designs. However, it can take some time for such architectures to come together, and few layers are more important than a secure data layer that is thin in functionality, but hyper-applicable and scalable in its utility. Celestia is that data layer; its consensus is solely responsible for ordering transactions and guaranteeing their data availability, pushing all layers of execution and verification above it. Magically, the more nodes supporting Celestia with data availability sampling, the greater the secure data throughput of the system.”

Celestia’s testnet, Mamaki, introduced in May of this year. Mamaki released a new data availability API. Allowing developers to access a powerful yet basic foundation for developing blockchains: sorted and accessible data. Mamaki will be upgraded in late October 2022.