Originally published on: September 23, 2024
The Celestia Foundation has secured a whopping $100 million in a recent funding round spearheaded by Bain Capital Crypto. This round also saw contributions from other notable investors such as Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder, making it a significant milestone for the startup.
With this recent influx of capital, the Celestia Foundation has now raised a total of $155 million, solidifying its position as a pioneering modular data availability layer protocol in the blockchain space. The startup aims to tackle one of the biggest hurdles in blockchain networks: scalability and data availability.
Established in 2023, Celestia’s innovative architecture separates the consensus and data availability layers from the execution layer, offering developers a more flexible approach to creating layer-2 rollups compared to conventional monolithic chains like Ethereum. By decoupling these functions, developers can design more specialized blockchains, reducing congestion, lowering costs, and enhancing efficiency and scalability for blockchain-based applications.
In a bid to further enhance its capabilities, Celestia recently unveiled a roadmap that includes scaling its block size to 1 gigabyte to increase data throughput for its rollup ecosystem. This upgrade could potentially elevate Celestia’s network capacity to surpass that of Visa, enabling it to process a significantly larger number of transactions per second.
While Celestia is a trailblazer in the data availability space, it faces competition from other industry players like EigenLayer’s EigenDA and Polygon’s Avail. However, Celestia’s co-founder and chairman, Mustafa Al-Bassam, remains confident in the startup’s vision, stating, “When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era.”
Having steadily gained market share from Ethereum since May, Celestia’s trajectory looks promising. Al-Bassam emphasized the startup’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology, asserting, “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era – while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”
As Celestia continues to make waves in the blockchain industry, its innovative approach to data availability and scalability sets it apart as a key player in shaping the future of blockchain technology.
