According to its recent funding announcement, Celestia has successfully raised $55 million to go toward its goal of addressing the “centralization problem” in blockchains. Participants included Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital as round leaders, as well as Delphi Digital, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, and Spartan Group.
Celestia will use the funds to continue developing its modular network, which will make it possible for anyone to establish their own blockchain with no effort. This latest investment round follows the company’s successful initial funding round in March 2021, in which it raised $1.5 million. The total fundraising round was oversubscribed four times, and according to reports, this results in a valuation of one billion dollars for Celestia.
What’s Celestia up to?
Due to their monolithic nature, existing blockchains are cumbersome to deploy and operate; Celestia improves upon this by adding a series of layers that provide additional decentralization and flexibility. The team behind Celestia is of the opinion that the future generation of scalable blockchain designs will consist of modular blockchains. They imagine an interoperable blockchain ecosystem with decentralized data storage and flexible execution environments.
There are already initiatives in the company’s incubation phase that will help businesses and individuals interested in adopting modularity in the design of their blockchains. A number of individuals and groups have qualified to participate in the Modular Fellows program. During the three months that Celestia will support and fund their projects, the teams will fulfil a number of milestones and present their final products for demonstration.
The fact that Celestia was able to raise such a substantial sum of money is proof that many VCs still see great potential in the blockchain sector, despite the upheavals caused by the long crypto winter. Furthermore, a four-fold oversubscription shows that many investors see modular blockchains as the future.