Celestia Foundation secures $100m in new fundraising

The Celestia Foundation, based in Liechtenstein, has successfully raised $100 million from prominent crypto-focused venture capital firms, led by Bain Capital Crypto. This funding, announced on September 23, brings the total amount raised for the Celestia project to $155 million, following a $55 million round in October 2022 prior to its launch, which was co-led by Bain Capital and Polychain Capital.

The recent capital influx also saw participation from other investors, including Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures, 1kx, and Placeholder, among various VC firms.

Technical Roadmap for Celestia

The Celestia Foundation aims to empower developers to build high-throughput applications on its modular data availability blockchain network. The $100 million funding aligns with the announcement of Celestia’s new technical roadmap, which emphasizes scalability. Developers are working to enhance the network’s throughput to match Visa’s capability of approximately 24,000 transactions per second. Achieving 1-gigabyte blocks is a significant milestone on this path.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia, remarked that the project, which launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, is transitioning blockspace from the “dial-up era to the broadband era.” He emphasized that the roadmap focuses not only on scaling but also on ensuring verifiability and low latency.

Since launching its mainnet beta in October 2023, Celestia has made substantial progress, including the deployment of rollup chains and Blobstream, a feature that streams Celestia’s data availability layer to Ethereum. Additionally, the platform has partnered with Polygon Labs to integrate its data availability layer with the Polygon Chain Development Kit.