The Celestia Foundation announced a $100 million fundraise Monday, causing its token, TIA, to spike over 14% from $5.94 to $6.81. The token is still up 9.6% over the past 24 hour period, according to Coingecko, priced at $6.17 with a total market cap of $1.3 billion.
The latest round brought the total amount raised by the Celestia Foundation to $155 million. The round was led by Bain Capital Crypto, with support from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and several other firms, according to a press release.
Celestia is a proof-of-stake layer 1 blockchain network that provides a data availability layer for rollups and layer 2 blockchains. TIA serves as a gas token, as well as payment for data storage space and a staking token. The Foundation describes it as a “modular blockchain” because it enables developers to launch their own protocol by combining Layer 2 scaling solutions with different technology, creating a custom stack. The Celestia Mainnet Beta went live last October.
The foundation’s core developer community announced an updated technical roadmap earlier this month, proposing 24 improvement proposals and preparing the network for its first upgrades since launch. The roadmap focuses developer efforts on scaling data availability to 1 gigabyte blocks and decentralizing verification by making “light” nodes able to run in browsers.
Celestia has “scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” Celestia Foundation co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam said in the press release. “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era—while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”
Since TIA’s price hit a high of $20.17 in February, the price has consistently fallen month-over-month, despite Celestia nearing Ethereum in data availability market share, according to Blockworks, and developers launching 20 rollup chains. However, TIA’s current price is still more than three times its initial listing price of $2.08.
