Celestia liquid staking protocol MilkyWay raises $5 million ahead of token launch and airdrop 

MilkyWay, a Celestia liquid staking protocol, has raised $5 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital, MilkyWay co-founder and CEO JayB Kim told The Block.

Other investors in the round included Binance Labs, Hack VC, Crypto.com Capital and LongHash Ventures, Kim said. Binance Labs said in a separate statement that it has invested in MilkyWay to help it become the leading liquid staking protocol within the modular blockchain ecosystem, including for Celestia.

MilkyWay began raising for the round last December and closed about a month ago, Kim said. The round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) and token warrants for the co-lead investors, and as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) for the participating investors, Kim added. He declined to comment on the valuation.

Binance Labs, the $10 billion venture capital and incubation arm of crypto exchange Binance, continues to bet big on the staking and restaking verticals. It has recently invested in several such startups, including Babylon, Renzo, Puffer Finance and StakeStone. 

What is MilkyWay? 

MilkyWay is the first Celestia liquid staking protocol that was launched last December. Its only rival currently is Stride.

MilkyWay is different from Stride in several aspects, including its architectural design, Kim said. "MilkyWay's on-chain architecture is a smart contract on Osmosis, whereas Stride runs its own Layer 1 blockchain," he said. "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 is also "tailor-made for the modular ecosystem," although currently only focusing on the Celestia (TIA) token liquid staking. Stride, on the other hand, supports multiple tokens for liquid staking, including TIA, Cosmos Hub (ATOM), dYdX (DYDX), Injective (INJ) and Juno (JUNO), Kim said.

Given its broad focus, Stride has more total value locked than MilkyWay at around $135 million, but its TIA-specifc TVL is only slightly higher than MilkyWay's, according to DeFiLlama data. MilkyWay's TVL is around $24 million, and Stride's TIA TVL is around $28 million, per the data.

"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 said. 

MilkyWay token launch and airdrop

MilkyWay is also planning to launch its own token and conduct an airdrop in the coming months.

MilkyWay is currently running a points program called mPoints. It is then set to conduct an airdrop called "Massive airdrop" or "MassDrop," with at least 10% of the total supply of the MILK token allocated to mPoint holders, MilkyWay said in February.

Kim said the total supply of the MILK token will be revealed later, but added that the token is expected to launch at the end of the second quarter or early third quarter.

MilkyWay's Initia plans

Given its focus on a broader modular ecosystem, MilkyWay plans to expand beyond Celestia. "We're particularly interested in the Initia ecosystem, which is expected to launch its mainnet in Q2," Kim said.

MilkyWay is also building a rollup on the Initia ecosystem, Kim said. "It will be a full-featured Cosmos SDK blockchain that is settled through optimistic rollup, boasting 500ms block times with 10,000+ transactions per second. We plan on launching testnet as soon as next month and mainnet at the end of Q2," Kim added.

There are currently around ten people working for MilkyWay, and Kim looks to hire a few more people in the near future with the fresh funding in place.

(Update, 7:50 am ET): After the article was published, MilkyWay said that Binance Labs was not a co-lead but a participant in the round, which has been updated.