Celestia Labs Acquires Sovereign Labs To Build High-Performance Custom Blockchains
Today we are proud to announce that Celestia Labs is acquiring Sovereign Labs.
This acquisition establishes Celestia Labs as a full-stack custom blockchain development partner for companies building onchain, marking a new chapter for Celestia’s go-to-market strategy and ambitions.
Why Sovereign Labs
Sovereign Labs has been a core pillar of the Celestia ecosystem since its founding in 2021 by Cem Ozer and Preston Evans. Now in 2026, the Sovereign SDK is the industry's leading framework for application-specific, high-performance blockchains. It powers applications like Relay, the #1 bridge by volume powering over $8.5B of transfers, and Bullet, a perpetuals exchange capable of clearing orders in 1.2 milliseconds and processing over 30,000 TPS.
The addition of the Sovereign Labs team and the Sovereign SDK expands our in-house expertise at Celestia Labs to the entire stack of blockchain engineering, from Layer 1 through to the execution and application layers, enabling end-to-end development for peak scale, performance and customisation.
As part of the acquisition, Preston Evans is now CTO of Celestia Labs. His hands-on experience with customers at Sovereign Labs and general mastery of blockchain infrastructure will be crucial in this next phase.
The need for high-performance custom chains
The blockchain industry is at an inflection point. Key application categories like stablecoins, decentralised exchanges, and prediction markets are hitting product market fit. Meanwhile, regulatory clarity is clearing the way for enterprises to roll out blockchain solutions at scale. However, these successful apps and enterprises need greater scale, performance and control than general purpose infrastructure can provide, leading many to build their own custom blockchains as a result.
Hyperliquid, the leading decentralized exchange, built its own blockchain to optimize for low latency and custom order flow rules. Polymarket, the prediction market which processed $6B in volume in H1 2025, is migrating to a custom chain to resolve congestion issues and build a more performant exchange. Robinhood launched its own chain this month, purpose-built for tokenized stocks.
The trend towards custom chains is only just starting and will accelerate as more blockchain applications go mainstream. Therein lies our opportunity.
Celestia’s next chapter
Our thesis from the beginning has been that for blockchain applications to be usable at a global scale, the underlying blockchain infrastructure needs to be scalable, performant and customizable. Until now, we have focused exclusively on building the underlying Layer 1 technology to enable this, like Fibre which is capable of supporting up to 625M TPS. While that is a critical component, it is not the full picture.
Major applications and enterprises don’t just need a scalable Layer 1, they need a full-stack blockchain infrastructure solution with a hands-on design and engineering partner. The acquisition of Sovereign Labs completes the picture, adding the missing technology and expertise to meet the market where it is going.
A more ambitious era of digital markets requires more ambitious infrastructure to match. With Sovereign Labs on board, we are ready to build it.