Celestia is a modular blockchain project that focuses on data availability. Architecturally, it primarily performs the functions of the consensus and data availability layers. It has introduced the Sovereign Rollup solution to handle the execution and settlement layers. Thanks to the development of Ethereum technology and the practice of Rollup, the concept of modular blockchains is gradually becoming feasible and represents one of the crucial directions for future public chain development. Moreover, the project team itself has a strong background, solid technical expertise, and has already launched its mainnet.
Technical Features of Celestia
Celestia is a modular blockchain that functions differently from most conventional standalone public chains. Functionally, Celestia, designed from the start to be modular, aims at addressing specific functionalities rather than independently executing all on-chain work (execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability). It emphasizes consensus and data availability, focusing on becoming a Data Availability (DA) Layer and relies on Rollup to provide the network with execution layer capabilities. In short, the Celestia network is responsible for sorting transactions to ensure data availability. It offers an effective solution for solving data availability issues, requiring minimal resources for light nodes to verify blocks to prove data availability.
Celestia Team
The Celestia team is based in the UK, with 40 members disclosed on LinkedIn and a total of 46 listed on the official website. Key members include Mustafa Al-Bassam, Co-Founder & CEO, with a Computer Science Bachelor’s degree from King's College London and a Computer Science Ph.D. from University College London. Ismail Khoffi, Co-Founder & CTO, holds a Master's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Bonn. Al-Bassam was a founder and core member of the infamous hacker group LulzSec and was involved in hacker activities. In 2018, he co-founded the blockchain scaling research team Chainspace, which was acquired by Facebook in 2019. In 2019, Al-Bassam published the LazyLedger paper and in September of the same year, co-founded LazyLedger (later renamed Celestia) and has been CEO since.
Celestia Financing
In 2021, Dutch cryptocurrency investment firm Maven 11 Capital included Celestia in its $40 million closed-end fund portfolio. In July 2022, venture capital firm NFX's second fund added $62.61 million to invest in Celestia and Ramp Network. In October 2022, Bain Capital and Polychain Capital led a $55 million investment in Celestia, resulting in a post-investment valuation of $1 billion.
Celestia's Economic Model
Celestia's native token is TIA, with an initial total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens. The token has not yet entered circulation and is set to airdrop on October 17, 2023. Future TIA tokens will be issued in an inflationary manner, starting at an 8% annual rate, decreasing 10% annually until reaching a long-term issuance rate of 1.5%.
In the TIA Genesis Block:
Total supply chain: Infinite
Supply (Genesis Block, as a percentage): 1 billion
Seed round investors: 15.9%
A&B round investors: 19.7%
R&D and ecosystem: 26.8%
Community: 20%
Initial core contributors: 17.6%
Teams and investors will start releasing 33% of their allocations after the first year. Teams will receive the remaining funds over 3 years, while investors will receive theirs over 2 years. R&D and the ecosystem will unlock 25% upon release, with the remaining 75% unlocking continuously from the 1st to the 4th year.
Celestia Airdrop
Celestia will distribute 20 million TIA tokens to the top 10 TVL-ranked users on L2Beat, with wallet balances of at least $50 among the top 50% active users on-chain. The wallet snapshot was taken on January 1, 2023 (Ethereum block 16308181), the TVL ranking snapshot on April 20, 2023, and 23 points are distributed based on users' behaviors on the Ethereum mainnet and other top 10 chains.
User behaviors influencing point distribution include the number of interactions with smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet or Optimism, the number of transactions, the total value of all transactions, possession of ENS domains, account age, active months, Gitcoin donations, Ethereum chain gas spending, and the time of the last transaction.
Top 10% active addresses receive 7.15 million TIA, with 78,793 addresses eligible to receive 90 tokens each. The top 20% active addresses get 4.25 million tokens, with 60,186 addresses qualified to receive 70 tokens each. The top 50% active addresses receive 8.6 million tokens, with over 170,000 addresses meeting the criteria to receive 50 tokens each.
Summary
According to the track analysis, benefiting from the success of Rollup and Ethereum's technical development, modular blockchains will be one of the key trends in the development of blockchain architecture. Celestia will play a vital role in this field. Compared to existing competitor projects, Celestia's data availability solution has a lower threshold for implementation and faster development pace. However, its limit might not be as high as other solutions using KZG polynomial commitments. Therefore, continual monitoring of the project's development, Ethereum's Cancun upgrade, and the developments in upstream and downstream tracks, including Rollup, are crucial. Additionally, as the current market is still in a bearish phase, the release of the project's potential awaits market recovery and accumulation of underlying technology.
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