- In a seed round, MilkyWay raised $5 million from Polychain Capital, Binance Labs, and other investors.
- The fundraising has been completed in advance of the upcoming token launch and airdrop for MilkyWay.
Co-founder and CEO of MilkyWay, a Celestia TIA -5.17% liquid staking protocol, JayB Kim said that the company has raised $5 million in a seed round headed by Polychain Capital.
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 in order to assist it in become the most popular liquid staking protocol in the modular blockchain ecosystem, which includes support for Celestia.
As to Kim, MilkyWay closed almost a month ago, having started fundraising for the round last December. According to Kim, 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. Regarding the valuation, he remained silent.
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. It has lately made investments in a number of these start-ups, including StakeStone, Puffer Finance, Renzo, and Babylon.
The first Celestia liquid staking protocol, called MilkyWay, was introduced in December of last year. Stride is now its lone competitor.
According to Kim, MilkyWay differs from Stride in a number of ways, notably its architectural style. While Stride operates its own Layer 1 blockchain, MilkyWay’s on-chain architecture is a smart contract on Osmosis OSMO -4.46%, he said. We contend that, in addition to having reduced operational and technical overhead associated with chain maintenance, our system is orders of magnitude simpler than Stride’s.
“Tailor-made for the modular ecosystem,” MilkyWay focuses exclusively on Celestia (TIA) token liquid staking at the moment. In contrast, Kim stated that Stride allows for the staking of a variety of tokens, such as TIA, Juno (JUNO), dYdX (DYDX), Injective (INJ), and Cosmos Hub (ATOM).
Stride’s TIA-specific TVL is marginally greater than MilkyWay’s, according to DeFiLlama statistics, despite having a broader emphasis and a higher total value locked than MilkyWay ($136 million). Based on the data, MilkyWay’s TVL is approximately $24 million, whereas Stride’s TIA TVL is approximately $28 million.
Due to their decision to use 5% of their entire supply to execute a 6-month airdrop campaign, which started on February 1, Stride currently has a significantly higher TVL for TIA, according to Kim.
Start of the MilkyWay token and airdrop
In the upcoming months, MilkyWay also intends to introduce its own coin and carry out an airdrop.
Currently, MilkyWay is operating the mPoints points program. Then, according to MilkyWay’s announcement in February, it is scheduled to carry out an airdrop known as “Massive airdrop” or “MassDrop,” wherein holders of mPoints would get at least 10% of the MILK token’s entire supply.
Kim stated that the MILK coin is anticipated to launch by the end of the second quarter, but the entire supply will be disclosed later.
MilkyWay intends to grow outside of Celestia because of its emphasis on a more comprehensive modular ecology. “We’re particularly interested in the Initia ecosystem, which is expected to launch its mainnet in Q2,” Kim stated.
According to Kim, MilkyWay is also developing a rollup on the Initia ecosystem. “It will be an optimistic rollup-set, fully functional Cosmos SDK blockchain with 500 ms block timings and more over 10,000 transactions per second. We intend to launch the mainnet at the end of Q2 and the testnet as early as next month,” Kim continued.
Currently, MilkyWay employs about ten people, and Kim plans to add a few more soon now that the new investment has been secured.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
