Althoughthe TIA token airdrop has made Celestia highly sought after, it cannot hide the "fact" that the protocol is obscure and the vision is out of reach.
Original title: How a Ph.D. Student's Research Paper Turned Celestia Into $345M Blockchain Project Overnight
Original author: Oliver Knight & Bradley Keoun, Coindesk
Original source: Coindesk
Compiled by: Felix,
Mustafa Al-Bassam studied for a PhD in computer science at University College London in 2019 and published a paper titled "LazyLedger" while in school.
The paper, in extremely complex terminology and Greek mathematical characters, was a deep thought on how blockchains worked at the time: breaking up the various functions of a distributed ledger—especially how users query data on the network—into different “applications.” layer". A key benefit is minimizing the overall resources required to run the main blockchain.
Al-Bassam is now the CEO of Celestia Labs, the primary developer of the Celestia project. Celestia’s mainnet beta version was successfully deployed this week as a new “data availability” network, a move Celestia claims marks the beginning of a “modular era” for blockchain architecture.
Presumably, Celestia's main use case is to relieve the Ethereum blockchain of the burden of storing and transmitting the large amounts of data generated by the rapidly growing "Layer 2" network so that user transactions can be cheaper and faster.
“In theory, Celestia could become the backbone of a highly scalable and interoperable Rollup network and, most importantly, enable such modules,” Christine Kim, vice president of research at crypto firm Galaxy, wrote in an Oct. 19 report. The vision is to achieve this without sacrificing decentralization or security.”
Of course, with the crypto market focusing more on tokens and prices, the main focus of most news reports (and social media posts) was the project’s airdrop on Tuesday. A total of 191,391 addresses claimed 60 million TIA tokens, accounting for approximately 6% of the supply. An additional 140 million tokens will be allocated to future initiatives.
The market has placed such high expectations on this airdrop that traders are using pre-market futures to speculate on the price ahead of the airdrop. According to the CoinMarketCap website, TIA tokens are already listed on a number of crypto exchage, including Binance, KuCoin , Kraken , Bybit and MEX C.
As of November 2, CoinMarketCap listed the project's TIA token circulation as approximately 141 million (141,043,527), with a price of US$2.58 per coin, a 24-hour increase of 14%, and a current circulating market value of approximately US$362 million, fully circulated. The market capitalization is as high as US$2.58 billion.
The airdropped tokens accounted for only a portion of the total supply of 1 billion, with more than half of the tokens allocated to early investors and initial contributors. Many of these tokens are currently locked. Seed investors will be gradually unlocked between October 2024 and October 2025, and initial core contributors will be unlocked by October 2026.
TIA Token Distribution (Celestia Labs)
The TIA airdrop is one of the largest airdrops in the crypto industry over the past year. Of course, a large-scale airdrop does not guarantee the ultimate success of the project.
Sui and Aptos , two huge projects, are both Layer 1 blockchains developed by former Meta employees. Both have similarities with Celestia in that they both airdrop tokens to developers and test network users, but Sui and Aptos are still working on it. Compete with public chains such as Ethereum for market share.
After the release of its mainnet, the circulating market value of Aptos rose to US$2.9 billion, and the circulating market value of Sui was US$750 million. However, despite the overvaluation of the tokens, the total amount of capital locked on the blockchain has failed to exceed $100 million.
The protocol is obscure and has competitors
On October 31st, the X platform was full of posts discussing Celestia. “It will be $10 soon,” one user wrote in reference to TIA’s price. Another poster asked where to sell airdropped tokens. In addition, Jesse Pollak, head of Base Networks, congratulated Celestia.
This optimism may be masking the reality of how incomprehensible the project is.
“Data availability” is such an obscure term that even Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist recently said it was too confusing. Dankrad Feist is the proposer of the equally obscure blockchain concept “danksharding”.
FundStat crypto analyst Sean Farrell simplified the concept for investors in a note on Tuesday: Data availability "allows network nodes to download, store transaction information, and make it available for verification."
The main idea of Celestia is to help solve the scalability and stability issues plaguing monolithic blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Part of this is by creating a new place to host and access the vast amounts of data being generated by the rapidly growing ecosystem of “layer 2” networks.
Data availability is crucial to reducing the load on Ethereum, so in addition to Celestia, two competing projects, Avail and EigenDA, are also working on data availability. Avail is led by former Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun, while EigenDA is a project of the EigenLayer ecosystem led by Sreeram Kannan, associate professor at the University of Washington.
The creation of these new projects reflects this year's recognition among developers of "modular blockchain" architectures, which separate the core functions of a blockchain (consensus, settlement, data availability and execution) and then partition them. Layered to ensure efficiency.
Why issue TIA tokens?
According to Celestia’s project documentation, the TIA token is “an important part of how developers will build on the first modular blockchain network.”
To use Celestia's data availability, Rollup developers submit a type of transaction called "PayForBlobs" on the network and charge a fee, denominated in TIA.
Modular blockchains are designed to focus on using specific channels to increase speed and execution, whereas monolithic blockchains can only scale at the expense of decentralization or security.
Celestia spokesperson Ekram Ahmed said: “Modular blockchains are not one blockchain that does everything, but are specialized and optimized to perform specific functions.”
Al-Bassam, a PhD student who went on to found Celestia, has co-authored three academic books with Ethereum’s famous founder. In a speech earlier this year, Vitalik Buterin praised Celestia as a scaling solution for Ethereum rollups.
On October 31, Celestia’s official account on the X platform posted: “What was once considered a crazy moon landing plan has now become a reality four years after the release of the “LazyLedger” white paper.
Is Celestia’s vision difficult to realize?
Ahmed said Data Availability Sampling (DAS) is what differentiates Celestia from other blockchains. Users of monolithic blockchains typically download all data to verify that the data is available. While verifying data isn’t necessarily the biggest concern for Ethereum or Solana users right now, Ethereum averages about 1 million transactions per day, according to ycharts, and Solana accounts for only a small portion of that.
But last week VanEck simulated a scenario where the number of Solana users would reach 100 million. If blockchain can scale to this level, projects like Celestia aim to ensure that data from every blockchain node can be verified.
Ahmed said modular blockchain solves the data verification problem, allowing users to verify very large blocks using a technique called data availability sampling. Celestia's flagship feature is data availability sampling. This is a method of validating all data available on the blockchain.
Target users include those running so-called light nodes – capable of running on small computers that do not require large amounts of computing power or data storage capacity – to verify the availability of data without having to download all the data in a block. These light nodes perform several rounds of random sampling of block data, and as more rounds are completed, the availability of the data will be enhanced.
Ahmed concluded: “Once a light node successfully reaches a predetermined trust level, such as 99%, the block data is considered available.”
If Al-Bassam’s vision comes to fruition, crypto users may interact with Celestia on a daily basis without their knowledge. To fully understand it all? Seems unlikely.
