The Celestia Foundation has secured $100 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with contributions from investors like Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder.
According to a Sept. 23 announcement, the capital raised brings Celestia’s total fundraising to date to $155 million after a recent launch as one of the first modular data availability layer protocols.
The startup targets one of the key challenges in blockchain networks: scalability and data availability.
Launched in 2023, its architecture separates the consensus and data availability layers from the execution layer, allowing developers to create layer-2 rollups with more flexibility compared to traditional monolithic chains like Ethereum.
To put this in perspective, traditional blockchains like Ethereum handle everything — data, transactions, and security — on a single layer, which limits flexibility and slows performance.
By separating these functions, developers can create more specialized blockchains, reducing congestion and lowering costs, thus making blockchain-based services more efficient and scalable for applications.
Celestia unveiled its roadmap earlier in September, promising to scale its block size to 1 gigabyte to boost data throughput for its rollup ecosystem. This upgrade could increase Celestia’s network capacity to exceed Visa's, said the startup, allowing it to process many more transactions per second.
Data availability fee tracker. Source: Celestia
The startup is not alone in this game. Other companies working on data availability solutions include industry players such as Eigenlayer’s EigenDA and Polygon’s Avail.
“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and chairman of the Celestia Foundation, said in a statement
Since May, Celestia has steadily 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.
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