MilkyWay, a Celestia liquid staking protocol, has raised $5 million in a seed round funded by Polychain Capital, said co-founder and CEO of the company, JayB Kim.
According to Kim, Binance Labs, Hack VC, Crypto.com Capital, and LongHash Ventures were among the other investors in the round.
In a different statement, Binance Labs claimed that it has contributed to MilkyWay to assist it in becoming the most popular liquid staking protocol in the modular blockchain ecosystem, which includes support for Celestia.
Kim stated that MilkyWay closed almost a month ago after starting fundraising for the round last December. Kim clarified that the round was set up as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) for the participating investors and as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) and token warrants for the co-lead investors.
The $10 billion startup capital and incubator division of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Binance Labs, is still placing significant bets on the restaking and staking sectors. Renzo, Puffer Finance, StakeStone, Babylon, and Renzo are just a few of the startups in which it has lately made investments.
MilkyWay, first introduced in December, is the Celestia liquid staking mechanism. Right now, Stride is its lone rival. According to Kim, MilkyWay differs from Stride in several ways, notably its architectural style.
“MilkyWay’s on-chain architecture is a smart contract on Osmosis, whereas Stride runs its own Layer 1 blockchain,” he stated. “We argue that our design is magnitudes simpler than Stride, which includes and is not limited to the less operational and technical overhead of maintaining a chain.”
MilkyWay targets “tailor-made for the modular ecosystem,” with Celestia (TIA) liquid staking. Stride supports TIA, Cosmos Hub (ATOM), dYdX (DYDX), Injective (INJ) and Juno (JUNO), Kim mentioned.
“Stride has a slightly higher TVL for TIA now due to their decision to use 5% of their total supply to run a 6-month airdrop campaign, which began on Feb. 1,” Kim stated.
In the upcoming months, MilkyWay also intends to introduce its coin and carry out an airdrop. MilkyWay’s mPoints program precedes “Massive Airdrop” or “MassDrop” with a 10% MILK token allocation for mPoint holders, announced in February.
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