Quick take:
- Celestia Labs has raised $55 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
- The Series A and B round also attracted participation from Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, FTX Ventures, Placeholder, Galaxy, and Delphi Digital among others.
- The fundraising pushes Celestia Labs’ valuation to unicorn status.
Celestia Labs has completed a $55 million Series A and B funding rounds led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital. The oversubscribed funding round values the web3 startup at $1 billion, Celestia Labs said in the announcement.
The fundraising also attracted participation from leading web3 venture capital firms including Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, FTX Ventures, Placeholder, Galaxy, and Delphi Digital. There were also several angel investors joining the two rounds.
Celestia Labs is a web3 company that specialises in modular blockchain networks. The company believes that blockchain infrastructure providers must adopt modular networks in order to overcome outage scalability and shortcomings experienced in platforms like Solana and Ethereum.
The company was founded in 2019 with the goal of making it easier to deploy and scale blockchains. Celestia achieves this mission by solely focusing on ordering transactions and making the data for transactions available.
Other blockchain infrastructure operations like smart contract computations are outsourced to rollups or other blockchains.
Modular networks operate independently with each module operating on separate inputs to complete a subtask of what the network is trying to accomplish. On the other hand, a Monolithic network is based on architectures where data input and output, processing, verification and proofing are interlinked.
Blockchain companies have started experimenting with zero-knowledge rollups to overcome the challenges of using a monolithic network. Layer 2 Ethereum scaling protocol Polygon and BNB chain have already rolled out zero-knowledge proof-based infrastructures to boost scalability without risking outages.
Commenting on his company’s mission following the successful completion of the Series A and B funding rounds, Celestia Labs co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam said:
“For the past decade, crypto has been bottlenecked by an endless loop of new monolithic [layer 1] smart contract platforms, each racing to the bottom to sacrifice decentralization and security to provide cheaper transaction fees.”
Al-Bassam believes “Web3 cannot scale within the constraints of a monolithic framework.”
Blockchain games, decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) projects rely on highly scalable protocols to meet the demands of rapidly growing web3 communities.
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