The future belongs to modular and scalable blockchains.
Celestia is paving the way with its groundbreaking data availability network.
With a staggering 190% increase in just one month, it's a project you cannot ignore.
Don't miss my December 2023 research report on TIA.
Here's what we'll cover in today's edition:
Overview
Use Case
Adoption
Revenue
Tokenomics
Treasury
Governance
Team & Investors
Competitors
Risks & Audits
Summary
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Celestia is a modular data availability network that securely scales with the number of users, making it easy for anyone to launch their own blockchain.
It is a new generation 'Modular' blockchain that has significant advantages over the traditional 'Monolithic' chains.
Traditional monolithic blockchains implement all four functions (Execution, Settlement, Consensus & Data Availability) together in one layer.
However, this approach limits the system's throughput because the consensus layer cannot be optimized for individual functions.
Celestia is the DA layer, that only orders and publishes transactions but does not execute them.
By decoupling the consensus and application execution layers, it modularizes the blockchain technology stack and unlocks new possibilities for decentralized application builders.
Celestia has already attracted a wide range of apps and services that have been built using their modular blockchain.
Its design makes it easy for developers to:
Deploy blockchain in minutes
Scale dynamically
Create custom applications
Build sovereign rollups
Celestia generates revenue from apps built on it through two main methods:
Pay for blobspace: Rollups pay with $TIA to publish data to Celestia's blobspace.
Pay for gas fees: Developers use TIA as a gas token for rollups, similar to ETH on Ethereum-based rollups.
Celestia is a POS blockchain based on CometBFT and the Cosmos SDK.
It supports in-protocol delegation and will start with an initial validator set of 100.
TIA inflation starts at 8% annually and decreases by 10% every year until it reaches the long term issuance rate of 1.5%.
Celestia will have a total supply of 1b $TIA at genesis, split across five categories.
Tokens will have different unlock schedules but can be staked. Staking rewards are unlocked upon receipt and increase the circulating supply.
Current supply stats:
Circulating supply: 145.9m
Total supply: 1b
Max supply: ∞
Market cap: $1.79b
FDV: $12.36b
Market cap/FDV: 0.15
The treasury (R&D & Ecosystem) was allocated 26.8% of total token supply. At current prices that is:
268m $TIA = $3.13b USD
Only 25% of that is currently unlocked ($784m). The remaining 75% unlocks continuously from year 1 to year 4.
Celestia implements decentralised governance.
TIA holders can participate in key aspects of governance, such as voting on network parameters through governance proposals.
In addition, TIA stakers govern the community pool, which receives 2% of block rewards.
Celestia was founded by Mustafa Al-Bassam, Ismail Khoffi and John Adler in 2019 when the first whitepaper was released (LazyLedger).
Celestia Labs has raised over $59m across 3 separate rounds.
Significant investors include Bain Capital, Polychain, OKX, Maven 11 and Interchain.
Celestia's main competition is with other modular blockchains building data availability:
@eigen_da
@AvailProject
@arbitrum - AnyTrust
@intmaxIO
Modular blockchains are all the rage at the moment and Celestia is one of the most established and strongest projects in the space.
Informal Systems has conducted some audits on Celestia earlier in 2023.
According to the team, further audits were completed before the mainnet beta was launched in October.
I would like to see further audit documentation from the team around the codebase.
Overall, I am quite bullish on Celestia as it offers an innovative solution to compatibility and scalability of blockchains.
Upcoming catalysts:
Integration with Arbitrum Orbit
Potential juicy airdrops (Staking $TIA)
Ecosystem growing
Overall weighted score = 7.68
Note: I am NOT an ambassador or advisor of Celestia. This is NFA.