Cem Özer
Chief Strategy Officer at Celestia. Previously co-founder of Sovereign Labs, acquired by Celestia in 2026. Brooklyn, New York.
About
I build blockchain infrastructure. I co-founded Sovereign Labs in 2022 and was its CEO until Celestia acquired the company in July 2026. I now lead strategy at Celestia as Chief Strategy Officer.
Before Sovereign, I was an Ethereum core developer at ConsenSys, working on Teku, the open-source Ethereum consensus client written in Java. I also co-founded Plaintext Capital, a long-only, momentum-based crypto hedge fund.
Selected work
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2026 —
Chief Strategy Officer · Celestia
Strategy and go-to-market as Celestia expands from a modular Layer 1 into full-stack infrastructure for custom blockchains.
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2022 — 2026
Co-founder & CEO · Sovereign Labs
Built the Sovereign SDK, a framework for application-specific, high-performance blockchains. The SDK powers Relay, the largest bridge by volume with over $8.5B in transfers, and Bullet, a perpetuals exchange clearing orders in 1.2 ms. Acquired by Celestia in 2026.
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Earlier
Ethereum core developer · ConsenSys
Contributed to Teku, an open-source Ethereum consensus client, as part of Ethereum’s core development.
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Earlier
Co-founder · Plaintext Capital
A long-only, momentum-based crypto hedge fund.
Press
- Celestia Labs acquires Sovereign LabsCelestia Blog, 2026
- Haun Ventures leads Sovereign Labs’ $7.4M seed roundTechCrunch, 2023
- Haun Ventures backs Sovereign LabsFortune, 2023
Bookmarks
A private archive of tweets and threads I want to keep — essays, research notes, threads worth rereading. Password required. Open the archive.