Participated · Equity · Sep 2024

Celestia Foundation operates a modular data-availability network that lets developers deploy applications using any VM and enables secure, self-sovereign blockchains. Led by Chairman Mustafa Al-Bassam, Celestia Mainnet Beta went live in October 2023 and an early ecosystem has formed. Since launch developers have deployed the first 20 rollup chains, and Celestia data blobs recently accounted for more than half of the total data published by rollups. The foundation's core developer community announced a technical roadmap with a primary objective to scale to 1 gigabyte blocks to greatly increase data throughput for rollups. The foundation intends to use newly raised funds to expand operations and accelerate development efforts. Celestia Labs develops a modular blockchain design that focuses on ordering transactions and providing data availability while outsourcing smart-contract execution to other chains or execution environments. The network intentionally strips down its own layer-1 to avoid providing smart contracts or performing computations directly. By separating execution and data layers, Celestia aims to let developers launch their own blockchains with less technical know-how and lower expense, akin to how cloud services provision virtual servers. The approach is presented as an alternative to monolithic Layer-1 blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. Developers using Celestia gain benefits including higher scalability, shared security for interoperability, and sovereignty of choice between virtual machines and execution environments. Three modular projects—Eclipse, Constellation and dYmension—have chosen Celestia as their data availability layer, and the company recently raised capital to support further development.