Modular blockchain Celestia has announced a successful fundraising round, raising $100 million, bringing the total capital raised to $155 million.
Celestia Foundation, the organization behind the leading modular blockchain protocol Celestia (TIA), announced early on September 24th that they had concluded their latest fundraising round, securing $100 million. Participating in the round were several major crypto investment funds, including Bain Capital Crypto, Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and others.
This round has brought the total amount raised by the project to $155 million. It is also one of the largest fundraising rounds in the crypto industry in recent months.
Announcing $100M in new fundraising, bringing the total raised to $155M.
With Celestia underneath ✨, developers can deploy high-throughput, unstoppable applications with full-stack customizability.https://t.co/gOdTLqV353
— Celestia (@CelestiaOrg) September 23, 2024
Celestia is a pioneer in the modular blockchain space. Launched in October 2023, Celestia allows other blockchains to scale by offloading data availability requirements. After nearly a year in operation, the project has built an ecosystem of more than 20 rollups, while the blob data blocks created by Celestia account for more than half of the total data uploaded by rollups.
Celestia also recently announced plans to expand the block size to 1 GB, significantly increasing data storage capacity for the blockchains within its ecosystem. With much larger blocks, Celestia aims to reach transaction speeds of 24,000 TPS, equivalent to the processing capacity of the Visa payment network.
Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia, stated: “When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, we quickly expanded block space and ushered in an era of increased bandwidth for the crypto industry. Now, developers are planning to expand block space to the level of fiber optic Internet networks, while still ensuring data remains easily verifiable and with low latency.”
The fundraising news comes as Celestia’s TIA token has seen a downward trend over the past three months, in line with the broader crypto market. However, following the news of securing $100 million, TIA has surged nearly 20% in the past 24 hours.
At the end of October, Celestia will undergo a significant token unlock event for investors from the Seed, Series A, and B rounds. A total of 175.74 million TIA tokens, valued at around $1.2 billion at current prices, will be unlocked. These tokens account for 16.4% of the total supply and 82.4% of the market cap at the time of writing.
Rumors are circulating on social media platform X (Twitter) that the recent fundraising round was actually an OTC deal executed months ago, with the unlock set for late October.
