Investing in Celestia
Figment Capital is pleased to announce our continued support of Celestia in its recent $55m combined Series A and B fundraising round. The additional capital will help the Celestia team drive the web3 industry toward a modular future. We’re also proud to be investing alongside Bain Capital Crypto, Polychain Capital, and FTX Ventures, among others.
From Monolithic to Modular
Celestia is more than a new chain: it’s a paradigm shift. Since the industry’s inception, every blockchain has managed its own execution, settlement, data availability, and consensus. These 4 tasks were wrapped up in a monolithic architecture that has hindered blockchain performance and flexibility.
Often, less is more. By unbundling the blockchain stack and focusing on just data availability and consensus, Celestia is able to optimize for those tasks while freeing other chains to specialize in settlement and execution.
This opportunity has not gone unnoticed. Despite being pre-launch, multiple teams are already creating solutions that leverage Celestia. These projects, like Eclipse, Cevmos, and Sovereign Labs, promise new improvements in execution and settlement.
The modular paradigm is here to stay. With Celestia’s rise to prominence and Ethereum’s transition to a rollup-centric roadmap, more teams are building modular blockchains than ever before.
Toward Sovereignty
At Figment Capital, we invest in infrastructure that gives sovereignty to more applications and users. Celestia perfectly fits this mold by empowering rollups with technical and social sovereignty.
While traditional Ethereum rollups have some technical independence, they are still limited by their underlying chain. For example, they must make their fraud or validity proofs interpretable by the EVM. Celestia removes this and other technical burdens.
It also unlocks an entirely new type of rollup: a sovereign rollup. These rollups are a synthesis between a Cosmos L1 and an Ethereum rollup. They maintain the security and scalability of a traditional rollup, but gain the ability to fork, independently of the data availability and consensus layer. For many communities and applications, forkability and self-sovereignty are essential properties to governance and innovation. Celestia unlocks sovereignty for scalable infrastructure.
Celestia also makes protocol sovereignty more accessible. It lowers the barrier to entry for new protocols by allowing them to focus on execution.
Figment has helped launch over 40 blockchains and helps validate and govern a dozen more. At Figment Capital, we know how difficult building and launching blockchains can be. That’s why we’re excited about Celestia: it allows more teams and communities to create their own blockchain than ever before.
Scaling Web3
Rollups are one of the most promising blockchain scaling solutions. However, Ethereum rollups are currently throttled by the limited blockspace of the base chain. While we’re excited about developments like EIP-4844 and danksharding to address these challenges, we believe that an optimized data availability layer that doesn’t have the technical debt and path dependence of Ethereum is another important scaling solution.
By leveraging data availability sampling, Celestia can support higher TPS as more nodes join the network. This is in stark contrast to monolithic scaling solutions, which often achieve scalability by reducing their node set. Celestia’s cheap, scalable blockspace will help rollups bring Web3 to the masses.
Conclusion
By unbundling the blockchain stack, Celestia brings greater sovereignty and scalability to Web3. We look forward to supporting them on their mission to build a more modular future.
The statements and assertions contained herein reflect the beliefs and opinions of Figment Investment Management, LLC, which makes no representation as to their accuracy. All information is provided “as is”, may not be relied upon for any purpose, and is not subject to express or implied warranties of any kind.
