Modular Blockchain Astria Raises $5.5M for Shared Sequencer Network

Modular blockchain Astria has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to develop its shared sequencer network.

The funding round was led by Maven 11 and included contributions from various prominent crypto investment firms including 1kx, Delphi Ventures and Figment Capital.

Astria's aim is to enable anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant rollup without having to rely on a centralized sequencer.

Sequencers coordinate transactions on layer 2 rollups – networks that offload activity from layer 1 chains such as Ethereum to decrease network congestion and reduce fees. Sequencers can technically censor or re-reorder transactions for some benefit before they pass those transactions down to a layer 1 chain. Therefore rollups seek ways of decentralizing this process.

"By using the shared sequencer, rollups are able to maintain high throughput and low-latency soft commitments, while gaining cross-chain composability," Astria said in an emailed announcement on Tuesday.

Astria is also developing its Astria EVM, powered by the shared sequencer network and which it plans to serve as the flagship Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for modular blockchain Celestia's data availability layer.

"Modular" is used as a term for networks that separate the core blockchain functions – consensus, settlement, data availability and execution – into separate layers in order to prevent any being sacrificed in favor of any of the others.

Read more: AI-Focused Crypto Protocol Fetch.ai Raises $40M to Deploy Decentralized Machine Learning

CORRECTION (April 4, 17:10 UTC): Changes Delphi Capital to Delphi Ventures.