The Celestia Foundation has announced a successful financing round, raising $100 million to support its ongoing projects. Bain Capital Crypto led this funding, which also included participation from several other firms, such as Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder. With this latest round, Celestia’s fundraising has reached $155 million.
Celestia entered the market in Mainnet Beta in October 2023 with a new modular consensus and data solution that aims to revolutionize blockchain scalability. Since its launch, developers have been able to launch the first 20 rollup chains on the platform. For example, Celestia data blobs have contributed to over 50% of the total data published by these rollups, which is quite a feat within the network.
Originally, scaling permissionless blockchains involved optimizing a highly centralized Layer 1 (L1) architecture in which all applications operate on a single layer of execution. Celestia, however, solves these issues and enables developers to scale throughput and increase it many times. This is a significant feature because developers are not locked into a particular smart contract language, virtual machine, or rollup framework.
Celestia Aims for 1 Gigabyte Blocks to Enhance Data Throughput
Celestia’s infrastructure allows developers to build applications with high throughput, autonomy, and robustness if needed. This includes scaling existing ecosystems such as Ethereum or creating their own sovereign networks.
Additionally, Celestia’s core developer community has laid out a technical roadmap with an ambitious goal of achieving 1 gigabyte blocks. This change is to significantly improve the overall data throughput across the Celestia rollup environment. Compared to this, the transaction capacity, which was earlier considered a benchmark for Visa, is approximately 24,000 TPS. For the 1 gigabyte blocks, Celestia wants to achieve or surpass that.
On the occasion of Celestia’s launch last year, co-founder and Chairman of the Celestia Foundation Mustafa Al-Bassam said it brought blockspace from the “dial-up era to the broadband era.” The current roadmap looks to extend this, with a goal of establishing a “fiber optic era” of blockspace, while keeping the space verifiable and very low latency.
