Astria Blockchain raises $5.5 million in a seed round for development of a Shared Sequencer Network.

Astria is a modular blockchain startup that aims to decentralize revolutionize the modular blockchain architecture. The revolution aims to aid anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant rollouts without having to rely on a centralized sequencer. To give perspective, sequencers coordinate transactions on layer-2 rollups, networks that offload activity from layer-1 networks like Ethereum with an aim of reducing network congestion and reduce fees. In their operations, Sequencers can technically censor and re-order transactions to achieve some benefits before passing them down to a layer-1 network. Astria is therefore, seeking ways to decentralize the process as most sequencers in use are centralized. By using a shared decentralized sequencer, rollups can maintain high throughput and low-latency soft commitments while achieving cross-chain composability.

Recently, Astria has raised $5.5 million in a seed fundraising round to develop its decentralized and shared sequencer. The fundraiser event was led by Marven 11 and attracted other crypto investors including 1kx, Figment Capital and Delphi Ventures. Astria is still in the development phase of its Astria EVM(Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is powered by a shared sequencer network. Astria EVM is set to serve as a flagship EVM in for modular blockchain Celestia on its data availability layer. he modular blockchain architecture separates the core blockchain functions into independent networks to prevent any being sacrificed to achieve efficiency of the other. The core blockchain functions include consensus, settlement, execution and data availability and separating them leads to emergence of firms that specialize in optimization of individual functions therefore creating maximum efficiency when they work collectively.

Budding blockchain networks are facing censorship concerns leading Astria to develop a protocol to alleviate this issues. As earlier indicated, Astria seeks to revolutionize modular blockchain architecture. This is because modular networks take a long time to build but have numerous benefits in scalability, flexibility and are upgradable. Monolithic blockchain architecture on the other hand, are designed to handle all the core functions on the same blockchain network which include executing transactions, ordering data and information verification. Prominent examples of monolithic blockchains include Bitcoin, Solana and Ethereum. Monolithic blockchains however, eliminate censorship concerns because the utilize the network’s single validator and sequencer to remain censorship-resistant but on the downside, this feature puts them at a risk of being centralized which is contrary to crypto philosophies.

Asa shared sequencer network, Astria therefore, aims to enable developers deploy censorship-resistant rollups. Josh Bowen, CEO and co-founder of Astria has noted that the key concept in the firms framework is to separate the task of ordering transactions from executing transactions to achieve transparency and efficiency. Astria’s shared sequencers are however, not to be confused with sequencers deployed by Cosmos. Cosmos implements shared security solutions with the key difference being the fact that Cosmos’ solutions require Hub Validators to execute transactions while shared validators have the power to execute transactions and only order transactions that are ready to be processed.