Celestia Foundation Raises $100 Million

The Liechtenstein-based non-profit Celestia Foundation has raised $100 million from major crypto-focused venture capital companies, led by Bain Capital Crypto, to help build Celestia

This fundraising, announced on September 23, brings the total money raised for the Celestia project to $155 million. Before the start of the project in October 2022, the team behind the modular data availability blockchain network raised $55 million.

That round of funding was led by Bain Capital and Polychain Capital together.

Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures, 1kx, and Placeholder, among other VC companies and investors, took part in this latest round of funding.

Celestia’s latest tech plan

The Celestia Foundation wants to help Celestia developers make the network better for high-throughput apps. A big deal is that the $100 million raise comes after Celestia’s core developer group announced the technical roadmap for the project.

Scalability is essential, and the developers’ goal is to make the modular consensus network fast enough to compete with Visa’s 24,000 transactions per second. The technical plan says that Celestia will be able to reach this goal once it has 1-gigabyte blocks.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia said:

“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,”

Al-Bassam also said the new plan is more than just making blockspace bigger. Also, ensuring it can be checked and has a low delay is important.

Celestia’s mainnet beta went live in October 2023; many significant changes have occurred since then. For example, rollup chains and Blobstream have been added, allowing Celestia’s data access layer stream to Ethereum.

Polygon Labs and the platform worked together to add the DA layer to the Polygon Chain Development Kit.