MilkyWay raises $5mn seed round with investments from Polychain, Binance Labs, and others.

Fellow Milkers we are proud to announce that we have raised $5mn in seed round with investments from Polychain, Binance Labs, HackVC, Longhash Ventures, and Crypto.com Capital. We are privileged to also have backing from distinguished angel investors such as Mustafa Al-Bassam (co-founder and ceo of Celestia), George Lambeth (Celestia’s inaugural investor), Batuhan Dasgin, Stan (co-founder of Initia), YQ (founder of Alt Layer), Rushi (co-founder of Movement), Kenny Li (co-founder of Manta), and Michael Ng (founder of StakeWithUs).

The capital raised will play a crucial role in propelling our mission forward. We intend to utilize these funds to expand our team, cover operational expenses, and most importantly, further the development of the modular ecosystem. Our goal is to grow the modular ecosystem by amplifying the applications of modular liquidity.

MilkyWay 101

Founded in December 2023, MilkyWay stands as a bespoke liquid staking protocol for Celestia, a modular blockchain engineered to optimize Data Availability (DA) for integrated rollups.

By segregating the consensus and data availability layers from execution, Celestia ensures secure and efficient data storage. This architecture allows rollups to significantly reduce gas fees by utilizing Celestia for DA. Staking within Celestia plays a vital role, not only securing its chain but also supporting various applications by offering a data availability layer.

MilkyWay was conceived to offer Celestia users the ability to stake their TIA tokens while retaining liquidity, making TIA liquidity more available to be further utilised, potentially providing economic security and usage in various DeFi platforms for the crypto space and providing opportunities for modular enthusiasts.

Progress To Date

Since launch, MilkyWay has experienced remarkable growth. Our protocol now serves over 156,000+ milkTIA holders and has over 2.6 million TIA tokens staked, demonstrating the community’s strong acceptance and confidence.

Born within the Cosmos ecosystem, where Celestia chose as a technological backbone, MilkyWay has seamlessly integrated with more than ten DeFi protocols. These integrations offer a holistic user experience that spans trading, leveraging, lending, and borrowing activities.

As our journey progresses alongside Celestia, we have expanded our efforts to enrich the wider modular ecosystem. This includes integration with the Dymension ecosystem and its native DEX, which bolsters its rollups, as well as extending our reach to the Arbitrum ecosystem via Camelot. Not only is Camelot the largest native DEX on Arbitrum, but it also acts as the go-to DEX for all Arbitrum Orbit Chains that might choose to utilize Celestia for Data Availability (DA).

These developments solidify MilkyWay’s status as the leading provider of modular liquidity for rollups that rely on Celestia for DA.

Future Plans and Use of Funds

The new capital will be pivotal for our innovation and community value creation efforts like our upcoming collaboration with Initia to bolster modular security, where milkTIA will be used to secure both the L1 and the rollups built on top of it.

We are also planning to introduce our rollup in partnership with Initia, integrating with Celestia to facilitate access to MilkyWay’s data across Celestia rollups. Furthermore, we will be launching our governance and utility token, MILK, later this year.

Special Thanks

We extend our deepest appreciation to Sunny Aggarwal and the Osmosis Labs team for their constant support and guidance. Their contributions have been invaluable to MilkyWay’s launch and ongoing success. We eagerly look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Osmosis Labs team and its vibrant community, fostering further innovation and collaboration.

Our gratitude also extends to our investors, users, and the broader blockchain community for their support. We are excited to share further updates as we continue to pioneer the future of modular liquid staking.

About the MilkyWay Team

The MilkyWay team was founded by a trio of Cosmos veterans:

• JayB Kim: Ex-CTO at Cosmostation with prior roles at Tendermint, Oak Security, and Crescent.
• Josie Leung: Experience in product roles at Tendermint and Crypto.com, and business development at LinkedIn.
• Joon Whang: A tech virtuoso formerly with Tendermint, Cosmostation, and Composable Finance.