Celestia-based Astria Network sunsets its shared sequencer network after raising $18 million

The Astria Network recorded its last block on Monday as part of a somewhat unexpected plan to deprecate the network a little over a year after launching its mainnet. 

Astria was “intentionally halted” at block number 15,360,577, the team wrote on X on Monday, marking the end of the experimental infrastructure project looking to help Layer 2 networks decentralize. 

The project, launched in 2023 and built using the Celestia data availability layer, pitched itself as the "first decentralized shared sequencing layer." Said differently, it was a modular system that could be plugged into L2s to reduce their dependency on a centralized sequencer, a key component that compiles transactions to be recorded on the Ethereum mainnet. 

Centralized sequencers are sometimes thought of as a single point of failure for Layer 2s, because they control the transaction ordering process and collect transaction fees for a single beneficiary.

Astria, initially attempting to carve out a more niche role as a settlement layer for rollups launched using data-availability network Celestia, raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Maven 11 in 2023 and a $12.5 million strategic fundraise led by dba and Placeholder VC in 2024. The project also developed an EVM rollup. 

Troubles and obstacles

Co-founder Josh Bowen first announced Astria would shut down in mid-November. However, there were signs that the project was struggling to gain traction. Earlier this year, Astria announced it would cease development work on the Flame EVM. 

An early devnet also suffered an unexpected shutdown. 

It is unclear why Astria decided to sunset the project entirely. The team does not appear to have published a respective of its work on its website, social media pages, or GitHub. The Block has not yet received a response to a request for comment.

That said, the project arguably saw limited adoption as a sequencer plugin, and the one major integration where it was enshrined — in Flame, using the Astria Bridging Protocol — was rolled back.

Further, despite calling itself an "unapologetically Celestia first project," Astria also shuttered its Celestia validator earlier this year.

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