Celestia Foundation Secures $100M to Advance Modular Blockchain Technology

The Celestia Foundation has successfully raised $100 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with additional participation from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and others. This latest round of investment brings the total funding for the project to $155 million, according to the Celestia Blog.

Advancing Modular Blockchain Technology

Celestia Mainnet Beta, which went live in October 2023, has introduced the industry’s first specialized modular consensus and data network. Since its launch, the platform has seen the development of an early ecosystem, with developers deploying the first 20 rollup chains. Notably, Celestia data blobs have recently accounted for more than half of the total data published by rollups.

Traditionally, scaling permissionless blockchains involved optimizing a monolithic Layer 1 (L1), where applications operate on a single shared execution layer. Celestia, however, bypasses the constraints of the execution layer overhead, allowing for scalability beyond the current monolithic limitations. This flexibility enables developers to use any virtual machine (VM) to deploy high-throughput, unstoppable applications, whether to enhance existing ecosystems like Ethereum or to establish their own sovereign networks.

Scaling to New Heights

Celestia’s core developer community has recently outlined a technical roadmap with the ambitious goal of scaling to 1 gigabyte blocks. This advancement is expected to significantly increase data throughput within Celestia’s rollup ecosystem. The foundation aims to deliver a capacity comparable to multiple Visa networks operating in parallel, a significant leap from the previously impressive throughput of Visa (~24,000 transactions per second).

“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and Chairman of the Celestia Foundation. “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era - while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”