We’re excited to announce Stride Association has completed a strategic fundraise, tailored to fuel Stride’s growth in the Celestia ecosystem. This strategic round aligns Stride with leading Celestia experts and core Celestia rollup teams.

The fundraise is led by DBA, who has deep expertise in LSTs and the modular ecosystem. Follow-on investment comes from 1confirmation, Road Capital, Modular Capital, Imperator, Chorus One and key builders in the modular ecosystem: Neel Somani (Eclipse), Yishay Harel (Dymension), Jon Kol and NoSleepJon (Hyperlane), Cem Özer (Sovereign Labs), Mike Neuder (Ethereum Foundation), Felix Lutsch, Sam Hart (Skip), Zon (Initia), EffortCapital, and monetsupply.

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About Stride

Stride is the largest liquid staking protocol in Cosmos today, with a 90+% market share and $100M in TVL across chains like Cosmos Hub, dYdX, and Osmosis. In just one year, Stride launched over 10 LSTs. Stride has always focused on doing one thing well: liquid staking.

Now, Stride is expanding to support Celestia!

Celestia is a modular data availability (DA) network that securely scales with the number of users, making it easy for anyone to launch their own blockchain. The modular movement is growing fast - Celestia has a $17B FDV already, with a vibrant builder ecosystem.

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About stTIA

Celestia is the most advanced network to build rollups on today, it’s the real deal.

But is Celestia suitable for LST growth? This short answer is yes. ETH is the primary token for Ethereum rollups, and TIA will be the primary token for Celestia rollups. Increasingly, rollups are adopting LSTs in place of native tokens, as users demand yield. The vision for stTIA is that it will become “modular money”, the primary token used across Celestia rollups.

Stride is uniquely positioned to provide liquid staking in the Celestia ecosystem. Stride is neutral and minimal, like Celestia’s itself. Thanks to its minimalism, Stride doesn’t compete with other chains (rollups!) in the modular ecosystem. Rollups will demand neutrality and minimalism from their liquid staking protocols and bridges. Rollups need to deliver liquidity to end users. We expect them to do so through Stride.

Stride is pulling out all the stops for stTIA. Anyone holding stTIA over the next 150 days is currently eligible for a massive STRD airdrop, 5% of Stride’s maximum token supply.

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Final thoughts

Stride launched stTIA yesterday, gaining $10M in TVL in the first 24 hours. 

Looking forward, Stride is working closely with core Celestia teams and DBA to:

1) Make stTIA modular money by getting it into the hands of users on rollups; 2) Improve the accountability, trust, and neutrality of stTIA; 3) Make stTIA eligible for all Celestia ecosystem project airdrops.

This is only the beginning of this new exciting chapter for Stride. Celestia has ignited a rapid modular expansion, and Stride intends to be right at the center of it. We’re excited for you to join us. Follow along on Twitter.