Celestia liquid staking protocol named MilkyWay received a total of $5 million in funding in the investment round. Speaking to The Block, JayB Kim, co-founder and CEO of MilkyWay, said that Polychain Capital led the investment round. Other investors included Binance Labs, Hack VC, Crypto.com Capital and LongHash Ventures.

Binance Labs also stated in a statement that it has invested in MilkyWay to help the modular blockchain ecosystem, including Celestia, become the leading liquid staking protocol.

Kim said they started the funding process in December and completed it about a month ago. The investment round was structured as a simple future equity agreement (SAFE) and token guarantee for the main investors and a simple future token agreement (SAFT) for the other investors. Kim declined to comment on the valuation.

Binance Labs, the $10 billion venture capital and incubation unit of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, continues to invest in staking and restaking areas. Recently, it has invested in startups such as Babylon, Renzo, Puffer Finance and StakeStone. MilkyWay is the first Celestia liquid staking protocol released in December. Its only competition right now is Stride.

Kim said MilkyWay differs from Stride in several ways, including architectural design. “MilkyWay’s on-chain architecture is a smart contract running on Osmosis, while Stride uses its own Layer-1 blockchain,” he said. “We argue that our design is much simpler than Stride, involving less operational and technical burden of maintaining the chain, and not limited to that.”

MilkyWay is also “specifically tailored to the modular ecosystem,” although it currently focuses solely on 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).

Due to its broad area of ​​focus, Stride currently has more total assets locked than MilkyWay (around $135 million) according to DeFiLlama data, but its TIA-specific TVL is only slightly higher than MilkyWay. According to the data, MilkyWay’s TVL is approximately $24 million, while Stride’s TIA TVL is approximately $28 million.

“Stride currently has a slightly higher TVL for TIA, which is because they are using 5% of their total supply to run a 6-month airdrop campaign that starts on February 1,” Kim said. MilkyWay also plans to launch its own token and conduct an airdrop in the coming months.