Blockchain Data-Availability Project Celestia’s Foundation Raises $100M

Celestia Foundation, the team behind the Celestia blockchain network, said Monday that it has raised $100 in a fundraising round led by Bain Capital Crypto.

The news comes as as Celestia’s native token, TIA, is down 54% since the beginning of 2024, according to CoinMarketCap. Celestia had one of the hottest airdrops of 2023, issuing TIA to 580,000 of its users.

The fresh round of capital means that the foundation has a total of $155 million in funds, and saw participation from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder. The team did not detail what the new capital will be used for but highlighted that core developers are focused on its new roadmap unveiled earlier this month.

“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, in a blog post shared with CoinDesk. “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era – while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”

Celestia is part of a growing field of modular blockchains, aimed to solve scalability issues with features that enhance the speed or execution of transactions. It is also a provider of data availability, which is pitched as a cheaper alternative to storing data on layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum.