Celer Network

Celer Network is a blockchain interoperability protocol that lets decentralized applications and their users access tokens, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs and governance across multiple chains from a single transaction flow. Its core developer product is the Celer Inter-chain Messaging framework (Celer IM), which pairs MessageBus smart contracts deployed on supported chains with the State Guardian Network (SGN), a Tendermint-based proof-of-stake relayer blockchain, so that developers can build inter-chain-native dApps with shared state and coherent application logic instead of deploying isolated contract copies on each chain. Use cases cited by the company include cross-chain swaps, yield farming, token and NFT bridging, cross-chain governance, collateralization and fee aggregation.

The company's consumer-facing product is cBridge, a decentralized, non-custodial asset bridge built on top of Celer IM that supports token transfers across more than 40 blockchains and layer-2 rollups. Celer's earlier documentation describes the project as a layer-2 scaling platform for fast, low-cost off-chain transactions for crypto payments and smart contract execution, based on a state channel network (CelerPay/CelerApp) with the SGN acting as a channel guardian for off-chain state availability. More recent work extends this lineage into AgentPay, a state-channel payment network aimed at real-time, low-fee payments between AI agents, and Celer Intent, an omnichain liquidity protocol for cross-chain value transfer.

CELR is the protocol token: it is staked in the SGN to provide economic security (with slashing for malicious or malfunctioning validators), used to pay message-routing fees to validators and their delegators, distributed as block rewards, and used for governance over protocol parameters such as supported chains and tokens and fee configurations.

Founding story

Third-party coverage names Dr. Mo Dong and Dr. Junda Liu as founders of Celer Network, describing Mo Dong as holding a computer science PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with prior work at Princeton University and VMware, and Junda Liu as a computer science PhD from UCLA with prior work at IBM Research and NEC Labs.

Business model

Celer operates protocol infrastructure rather than a conventional software product line: users and dApps pay fees for message routing and cross-chain transfers, which accrue to State Guardian Network validators and their CELR stake delegators, alongside block rewards issued by the SGN. Developer-facing SDKs for Celer IM and cBridge are offered to attract application integrations.

Fees are paid by users and dApps to SGN validators and stake delegators for routing messages and cross-chain transfers; the SGN additionally issues block rewards in CELR to block-producing validators.

Traction

The company reports that cBridge has processed more than $14B in cross-chain asset transfer volume for over 540,000 unique users across 40+ blockchains and layer-2 rollups. The GitHub organization hosts around 110 public repositories with continued commit activity, and the blog documents a steady cadence of chain integrations and partnerships from 2019 through 2025-2026.

Latest developments

In June 2025 Celer introduced Celer Intent, an omnichain liquidity protocol for cross-chain value transfer, and in November 2025 launched AgentPay, a state-channel payment network for AI agents targeting millisecond settlement and low fees; a follow-up post reports thousands of paid agent calls over a single open channel. cBridge support was extended to Redbelly (August 2025), Unichain and Base (August 2025), and Velora (October 2025), and Celer partnered with Oasys for MUSHI token bridging (October 2025) and with CoinMarketCap to bridge tokens for the CMC20 index DTF launch (November 2025).