Celestia Foundation raises $55M to develop and expand its modular blockchain infrastructure

Renowned modular consensus and data network Celestia Foundation has recently announced that it has raised $55 million in a funding round led by Polychain Capital and Bain Capital Crypto. 

According to the official blog post, the funding saw the participation of major names from the industry, including Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto.

Celestia is building a modular blockchain architecture that aims to solve the challenges of deploying and scaling blockchains. These tailored chains promise greater scalability, security, and decentralization since they are less constrained and break the rigidity of monolithic chains into flexible components. This will make it easier got developers to freely choose their own execution environments, like Solana VM, EVM, etc.

Celestia plans to revolutionize Web3 ecosystem

According to Celestia, it plans to create an infrastructure that would make it simple and inexpensive for anyone with technical know-how to deploy their own blockchain. The co-founder of the company Mustafa Al-Bassam highlighted the importance of modular blockchains in the Web3 ecosystem by stating:

“Modular blockchains will define the next decade of Web3 innovation. For the past decade, crypto has been bottlenecked by an endless loop of new monolithic L1 smart contract platforms, each racing to the bottom to sacrifice decentralization and security to provide cheaper transaction fees.”

Though the company has not clarified how it will allocated the newly-raised funds in its operation growth, its expanding ecosystem is attracting projects from all corners of crypto industry, including rollups, rollup infrastructure, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps, and more. 

To date, modular blockchain projects, including Eclipse, dYmension, and Constellation have already chosen Celestia to be their data availability layer. The company claims to be nurturing 26 projects in Modular Fellows, an initiative that supports and mentors modular builders.

Venture capitalists seem to have an insatiable thirst for the Web3 sector despite the prolonged crypto winter. In the second quarter of 2022, venture firms reportedly committed $14.67 billion to the industry, effectively repeating first-quarter commitments.

In July, Web3 gaming infrastructure provider Planetarium raised $32 million in a Series A funding, as TheCoinRise reported.