Celestia, a project that aims to solve the perceived centralization problem in current monolithic blockchains, has announced it has raised $55 million in its latest funding round. The round, which was led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, also saw the participation of Delphi Digital, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, and Spartan Group, among others.
Celestia Raises $55 Million to Make Blockchain Deployment Easy
Celestia, a project that aims to tackle the problem of blockchain deployment complexity, has announced it raised $55 million as part of combined Series A and Series B funding rounds. The company announced that the funding round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with the participation of Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, and Jump Crypto, among others.
The combined funding round was oversubscribed four times, and according to reports, gives Celestia a valuation of $1 billion.
The funds will supposedly allow Celestia to continue building its modular network to allow anyone to deploy their own blockchain in an easy way. According to the company, current-gen blockchains are very difficult to deploy and manage, due to their monolithic design. Celestia’s architecture adds a series of layers that offer more decentralization and flexibility.
Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia, believes this kind of architecture might be the future of blockchain development. He stated:
Modular blockchains will define the next decade of Web3 innovation. We envision a blockchain ecosystem with modular data availability layers and execution environments that all integrate together. We believe modular blockchains are the next generation of scalable blockchain architectures.
The new raise comes after the company raised $1.5 million back in March 2021 in its seed funding round.
Celestia Details and Roadmap
Celestia is already actively incubating projects to support companies and individuals willing to adopt modularity for the design of their blockchains. A program called Modular Fellows has already selected several individuals and teams, and will accompany and fund their projects for a period of three months, during which the teams will deliver several milestones and a demo of completed projects.
The project is already active in a testnet called Mamaki, which was launched in May. Celestia aims to launch an incentivized testnet for 2023, in which users will be rewarded with tokens for their participation on the network. Mainnet is also expected to be launched next year, although the company has not offered a specific launch date yet.
What do you think about Celestia’s modular blockchain proposal? Tell us in the comments section below.