Celestia is developing a modular consensus and data network to quickly make it possible for anyone to deploy their own blockchain with low overhead. The new modular blockchain architecture Celestia has developed is designed to accelerate the scale and rate of Web3 innovation over the next ten years.
The company behind the Celestia blockchain network, known as Celestia Labs, recently announced on Twitter the successful completion of its combined Series A and B funding round, bringing in a total of $55 million. The deal was led by the venture capital companies Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
This financing helped propel Celestia into unicorn status by giving the company a valuation of one billion dollars, four times oversubscribed.
Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, FTX Ventures, Placeholder, Galaxy, and Delphi Digital were among the other investors who took part in the round, along with several additional venture capital and angel investors. Before March 2018, Celestia completed a seed funding round in which it raised $1.5 million at a valuation that was not disclosed.
In response to the development of established Layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum and Solana, Celestia’s co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam devised a modular blockchain architecture.
Mustafa Al-Bassam, the co-founder of Celestia, said that “Modular blockchains will define the next decade of Web3 innovation”. He adds, “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. Web3 cannot scale within the constraints of a monolithic framework. We envision a blockchain ecosystem with modular data availability layers and integrated execution environments. We believe modular blockchains are the next generation of scalable blockchain architectures.”
Celestia Labs Approach With This Launch:
To ensure the success of this architecture, Celestia has simplified its layer-1 blockchain and is placing its primary emphasis on ordering transactions and providing data. Its distributed ledger technology does not support smart contracts or carry out computations. Interoperability, an essential feature of its modularity, allows these services to be delegated to other blockchains or other execution environments. As a result, these functions are performed by a third party.
This design aims to give developers the ability to scale out their blockchain networks rapidly and define their data layers and virtual execution environments. As a result, developers will be able to launch their blockchains for applications to run on in an analogous manner to how cloud services can launch new virtual servers.
A monolithic framework is not suitable for Web3, according to Al-Bassam. To this end, we foresee a blockchain ecosystem wherein data availability layers and execution environments are built out in a modular fashion. In our opinion, modular blockchains represent the future of blockchain scaling.
Celestia has been used as the data availability layer by three separate modular blockchain projects: the modular rollups chain Eclipse, the modular app development chain Constellation, and the modular Cosmos settlement layer dYmension.
When Celestia is the foundation for building modular blockchains, developers will gain increased scalability, shared security for interoperability between apps, and execution environment sovereignty. Developers can select their preferred virtual machine, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the Solana Virtual Machine, zero-knowledge rollups, or any other compatible smart contract execution layer, thanks to the platform’s versatility and separation of execution and data levels.