Milky Way, Celestia Tia
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Liquid Stake Protocol has raised $5 million in a seed round co-led by Binance Labs and Polychain Capital, MilkyWay co-founder and CEO JayB Kim told The Block.
Other investors in this round include 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 a leading liquid staking protocol within the modular blockchain ecosystem, including Celestia.
MilkyWay began raising money for the round last December and closed it about a month ago, Kim said. CEO Kim added that this round consisted of Simple Future Asset Contract (SAFE) and token warrants for co-representative investors, and Simple Future Token Contract (SAFT) for participating investors. He declined to comment on valuation.
Binance Labs, the incubation arm of the $10 billion venture capital and cryptocurrency exchange Binance, continues to invest heavily in the staking and re-staking space. It has recently invested in several startups, including Babylon, Renzo, Puffer Finance, and StakeStone.
What is Milky Way?
MilkyWay is the first Celestia liquid staking protocol, launched last December. Currently its only rival is Stride.
Milky Way differs from Stride in several ways, including its architectural design, Kim said. “MilkyWay’s on-chain architecture is smart contracts. osmosis 
Osmo
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Stride, on the other hand, runs its own layer 1 blockchain,” he said. “We claim to have a much simpler design than Stride. Stride has low operational and technical overhead to maintain the chain, including but not limited to:
MilkyWay is currently only focused on Celestia (TIA) token liquid staking, but is “tailor-made for a modular ecosystem.” Stride, on the other hand, supports several tokens for liquid staking, including TIA, Cosmos Hub (ATOM), dYdX (DYDX), Injective (INJ), and Juno (JUNO), Kim said.
According to DeFiLlama data, given Stride’s broad focus, Stride’s total valuation is higher than MilkyWay’s at approximately $135 million, but its TIA-related TVL is only slightly higher than MilkyWay’s. Per data, MilkyWay’s TVL is approximately $24 million and Stride’s TIA TVL is approximately $28 million.
“TIA’s TVL is currently slightly higher, as Stride decided to use 5% of the total supply to run a six-month airdrop campaign that started on February 1,” Kim said.
MilkyWay token launch and airdrop
MilkyWay also plans to launch its own token and conduct an airdrop in the coming months.
MilkyWay currently operates a points program called mPoints. It will then allocate at least 10% of the total supply of MILK tokens to mPoint holders in an airdrop called a “mass airdrop” or “MassDrop,” MilkyWay said in February.
CEO Kim added that the total supply of MILK tokens will be revealed at a later date, but that the tokens are expected to be launched at the end of the second quarter or early third quarter.
MilkyWay’s Initia Plan
With a focus on a broader modular ecosystem, MilkyWay plans to expand beyond Celestia. CEO Kim said, “We are particularly interested in the Inissia ecosystem, whose mainnet is expected to be launched in the second quarter.”
Kim said MilkyWay is also building a rollup into the Initia ecosystem. “It will be a full-featured Cosmos SDK blockchain, anchored by optimistic rollup, boasting over 10,000 transactions per second and block times of 500ms. We plan to launch testnet as early as next month and mainnet by the end of the second quarter. “It is,” CEO Kim added. .
MilkyWay currently has about 10 employees, and Kim plans to hire a few more in the near future with the new funding.
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