Celestia Labs acquires Sovereign Labs to expand beyond Layer 1

Celestia Labs said on July 15 that it acquired Sovereign Labs, a high-performance appchain developer whose Sovereign SDK is used to build custom chains. The deal brings execution and application-layer expertise in-house as Celestia Labs expands beyond Layer 1 and positions itself as a full-stack custom blockchain development partner for enterprises. Sovereign has focused on the Celestia ecosystem since 2021, and six team members are joining Celestia Labs as part of the acquisition, including co-founder Preston Evans, who has been promoted to CTO. Celestia Labs said the combined teams have shipped more than 25 production blockchains. It described Sovereign SDK as a leading framework for application-specific, high-performance blockchains, powering projects including Relay, a bridge that has handled more than $8.5 billion of transfers, and Bullet, a perpetuals exchange capable of clearing orders in 1.2 milliseconds and processing more than 30,000 transactions per second. The company said demand is rising for custom blockchains as applications outgrow the scale and latency limits of general-purpose chains, citing Hyperliquid’s custom chain design and Polymarket’s migration to a custom chain after processing $6 billion in volume in the first half of 2025.