Celestia Foundation, the team behind the modular blockchain network Celestia, has raised $100 million in new funding.
The investment, announced Monday, was led by Bain Capital Crypto, with additional contributions from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder. It follows a previous $55 million investment led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital in 2022, bringing the total raised by the startup to $155 million.
Celestia develops what the company calls a modular high-availability data blockchain architecture that’s designed to solve the challenges inherent in building and deploying blockchain networks at large scale. Using this technology, the company says, developers can use its data availability layer to maintain efficiency, speed, security and low cost.
It does this by separating the consensus and data layer from the execution layer, which allows developers to create customizable transaction ordering rules. Comparatively, other blockchains such as Ethereum combine execution and data, which not only makes them slower but creates congestion and leads to high fees.
The objective of this specialized design, Celestia said, allows developers to rapidly scale out blockchain networks and define their own data layers and virtual execution environments. This allows developers to launch blockchains for apps that can run using custom transaction rules.
“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and chairman of the Celestia Foundation. “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era — while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”
The startup revealed its technical roadmap earlier in September, which included bigger block sizes ranging up to 1 gigabyte that will boost data throughput for transactions. According to the company, in the previous era, a throughput that matched credit card and financial technology company Visa Corp. at about 24,000 transactions per second was a laudable goal. “With 1 gigabyte blocks, Celestia will deliver the capacity of many Visa networks in parallel,” the company announced.
For comparison, Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain by market cap, has a throughput of 50 TPS. The Solana blockchain, a close competitor to Ethereum, can reach a theoretical peak of 65,000 TPS but averages around 400 TPS.
As a base layer for deploying modular blockchains, Celestia allows developers to choose their own virtual machines for smart contracts. This means they can choose the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Solana virtual machine, zero-knowledge roll-ups or some other compatible smart contract execution layer allowing them broad flexibility. A smart contract is a self-executing piece of software code that lives on a blockchain, automatically executing specific actions when predefined conditions are met.