OKX Ventures Announces Investment in Celestia Labs

October 16, 2023 - OKX Ventures, the investment arm of leading crypto exchange and Web3 technology company OKX, today announced its participation in Celestia Lab's Series B funding round.

Celestia is the first modular blockchain network, meaning developers can use Celestia as a base layer for consensus and data functions, and then choose a virtual machine, such as Ethereum, Solana, zero-knowledge roll-ups or any other compatible smart contract execution layers, to build and deploy their own new blockchain. This contrasts with previous generations of blockchain infrastructure, in which Layer-1 chains perform consensus, data functions and execution altogether - a structure Celestia calls 'monolithic.'

Celestia is also expected to be the first blockchain network to use Data Availability Sampling (DAS) when it goes live later this year. DAS is a lighter, faster way to verify blocks without requiring nodes to download all the data in a block. By allowing nodes to verify smaller, randomly selected data within a block, Celestia intends to avoid the scalability tradeoffs which have historically held back Layer-1s to date.

OKX Ventures Founder Dora Yue said: "For the sake of scalability, we see a trend towards modularity in the blockchain industry. Celestia has pioneered a modular approach that is a completely different paradigm when compared to traditional Layer-1 chains, giving developers greater customization capabilities and potentially leading blockchain infrastructure into a new era."

Developers can receive several benefits by using Celestia as a base layer for deploying modular blockchains. These benefits include higher scalability, shared security for interoperability between apps, and the flexibility to choose between execution environments including Ethereum and Solana.