Celestia Staking Protocol MilkyWay Raises $5 Million

As an experienced analyst in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, I find MilkyWay’s $5 million seed round raise led by Polychain Capital and Binance Labs intriguing. With the participation of reputable investors like Binance Labs, Hack VC, Crypto.com Capital, and LongHash Ventures, it signifies a strong confidence in MilkyWay’s potential as a Celestia liquid staking protocol.


MilkyWay, a Celestia liquid staking project, announced a successful $5 million seed funding round. This financing was spearheaded by Polychain Capital, according to MilkyWay’s co-founder and CEO, JayB Kim.

Based on Kim’s information, Binance Labs, Hack VC, Crypto.com Capital, and LongHash Ventures were some of the investors that took part in the funding round.

Binance Labs declared they have aided MilkyWay’s rise as the most widely-used liquid staking protocol within the modular blockchain network, including Celestia, through their involvement.

Kim announced that MilkyWay wrapped up operations about a month ago, having initiated its fundraising campaign in December for the investment round. Regarding the fundraising structure, Kim explained that investors were given SAFTs for future tokens and SAFEs along with token warrants as co-lead investors’ commitments.

As an analyst, I’ve noticed that Binance Labs, the investment arm of Binance, the $10 billion cryptocurrency exchange, continues to show strong interest in the redelegation and staking industries. Recently, they have made strategic investments in a number of emerging startups, including Renzo, Puffer Finance, StakeStone, and Babylon. These companies represent intriguing opportunities in this sector.

As a researcher, I’d describe it this way: I’ve been following the development of two liquid staking mechanisms in the Celestia ecosystem: MilkyWay and Stride. MilkyWay was launched in December, and while Stride currently stands alone as its primary rival, they differ significantly in their architectural designs, according to Kim’s findings.

“According to him, MilkyWay is implemented as a smart contract on Osmosis, whereas Stride operates its own Layer 1 blockchain. We believe our design is significantly more straightforward than Stride’s, with fewer operational and technical requirements for maintenance.”

As a crypto investor, I’m excited about MilkyWay’s approach, which is specifically designed for the modular ecosystem. With Celestia’s liquid staking solution (TIA) on board, Stride is able to support various projects such as Cosmos Hub (ATOM), dYdX (DYDX), Injective (INJ), and Juno (JUNO).

“Kim mentioned that Stride currently holds a larger total value locked (TVL) in TIA compared to before, primarily because they allocated 5% of their entire supply towards a six-month long airdrop initiative, which commenced in February,” is one way to paraphrase the original statement.

As an analyst, I can share that MilkyWay has plans to launch its coin soon and will conduct an airdrop in the coming months. Prior to this event, MilkyWay’s mPoints program members were allocated a 10% share of MILK tokens as part of what they called “Massive Airdrop” or “MassDrop,” which was announced back in February.

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2024-04-30 17:40