The investment round’s supporters, including Bain Capital, Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder, have raised $155 million for Celestia.
Celestia Foundation has successfully obtained $100 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with contributions from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder.
As announced on Sept. 23, this funding brings Celestia’s total fundraising to $155 million following its recent launch as one of the first modular data availability layer protocols.
The startup addresses a fundamental challenge in blockchain networks: scalability and data availability.
Established in 2023, its design separates the consensus and data availability layers from the execution layer, enabling developers to create layer-2 rollups with greater flexibility compared to traditional monolithic chains like Ethereum.
In comparison, traditional blockchains like Ethereum handle data, transactions, and security on a single layer, limiting flexibility and slowing performance.
By separating these functions, developers can create more specialized blockchains, reducing congestion and lowering costs, thus enhancing the efficiency and scalability of blockchain-based services for applications.
Celestia revealed its roadmap earlier in September, pledging to increase its block size to 1 gigabyte to enhance data throughput for its rollup ecosystem. This upgrade could expand Celestia’s network capacity to surpass that of Visa, enabling it to process many more transactions per second.
The startup is not the only player in this arena. Other companies working on data availability solutions include industry players such as Eigenlayer’s EigenDA and Polygon’s Avail. “When Celestia was launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” stated Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and chairman of the Celestia Foundation.
Since May, Celestia has consistently gained market share from Ethereum, starting at around 20% and reaching approximately 40% by the end of July. “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era, while keeping it verifiable and low latency,” Al-Bassam added.
