Celestia Labs acquires Sovereign Labs to offer full‑stack custom blockchain buildout

Celestia Labs said it is acquiring Sovereign Labs, bringing the Sovereign SDK and team in-house as it pivots toward offering full-stack custom blockchain infrastructure for applications and enterprises building onchain.

Founded in 2021 by Cem Ozer and Preston Evans, Sovereign Labs develops the Sovereign SDK, which Celestia describes as a leading framework for application-specific, high-performance blockchains. The SDK powers Relay, a bridge that has facilitated more than $8.5 billion in transfers, and Bullet, a perpetuals exchange that the teams say can clear orders in 1.2 milliseconds and process over 30,000 TPS.

As part of the transaction, Sovereign Labs co-founder Preston Evans has been appointed CTO of Celestia Labs. The company framed his prior work with Sovereign Labs customers and background in blockchain infrastructure as central to executing its broader go-to-market strategy around custom chains.

Celestia positioned the deal against a wider move by high-volume crypto applications and enterprises toward dedicated chains optimized for latency, throughput and control. It cited examples such as Hyperliquid building its own chain for low-latency order flow, Polymarket migrating to a custom chain after processing $6 billion in volume in H1 2025, and Robinhood launching a chain for tokenized equities.

Historically focused on Layer 1 data availability and scalability, including its Fibre stack that Celestia says can support up to 625 million TPS, Celestia Labs said it now wants to serve as an end-to-end engineering partner from the base layer through execution and application logic. Integrating Sovereign Labs is intended to fill what the firm called the “missing” execution and app-layer piece of that stack.