Big news: Celestia Labs just snapped up Sovereign Labs. The project is bringing the Sovereign Software Development Kit (SDK) and the whole team on board. This means Celestia Labs is now a one-stop shop for custom blockchain development, handling everything from the base layer up to the apps themselves. It’s a smart move since so many major applications are starting to roll out their own custom blockchains.
The Sovereign SDK: Performance at scale
The Sovereign SDK is the engine behind Relay, the number 1 bridge by volume handling over $8.5 billion in transfers, and Bullet, a perpetuals exchange that’s crushing it by clearing orders in 1.2 milliseconds and managing over 30,000 transactions per second (TPS). It’s become the go-to tech for anyone serious about building custom, high-performance blockchains.
Also, a huge part of the acquisition is that Sovereign Labs co-founder Preston Evans is joining up as the new CTO of Celestia Labs, and he’s bringing years of deep blockchain infrastructure expertise along with a ton of great hands-on experience with customers.
The custom chain trend
This acquisition is happening right as the blockchain industry hits a major turning point. Things like stablecoins, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and prediction markets are finding their footing, and with regulations becoming much clearer, enterprises are finally ready to roll out blockchain solutions on a massive scale.
However, the most successful applications are finding that they need way more performance and control than standard, general-purpose infrastructure can offer. Take Hyperliquid, for example, which built its own blockchain to keep latency super low. Polymarket, which processed $6 billion in volume in H1 2025, is also moving over to its own custom chain. Plus, Robinhood just launched its own dedicated chain this month to handle tokenized stocks.
The full-stack vision: From data availability to application layer
Celestia’s acquisition totally changes the game for the company’s strategic positioning. Previously known primarily as a modular data availability layer, Celestia can now offer end-to-end blockchain development services.
The addition of Sovereign SDK gives Celestia Labs deep expertise across the entire blockchain stack, ranging from Layer-1 (L1) consensus and data availability all the way through to execution and application layers.
This full-stack capability is basically a direct response to what the market is demanding: major applications like Hyperliquid, Polymarket, and Robinhood are actively building custom chains because standard, general-purpose infrastructure simply can’t provide the high-level performance and control they need to really scale.
