Celestia (TIA)

Celestia is a project that started in 2019.
Initially, the blockchain was called LazyLedger and then changed its name to Celestia on June 15, 2021.
The mainnet is recent and was launched on October 31, 2023.
The main person working on the launch of blockchain is Mustafa Al-Bassam.
In particular, he has worked on the sharding technology used on Ethereum, for example.
As announced on its website, Celestia’s aim is to be the “first modular blockchain network“.
A classic monolithic blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum takes care of validating, storing and executing transactions.
Celestia works differently, with a modular architecture.
The blockchain separates the consensus layer from the execution layer.
In practical terms, Celestia can be seen as a blockchain foundation that simply serves to store data in an orderly fashion.
It is in this sense that the blockchain was described as “lazy” under its original name “LazyLedger”.
Each developer can then “plug in” his or her application to Celestia on a higher layer.
This layer will also take care of data validation by producing data validity proofs.
With its modular architecture, Celestia facilitates the work of developers, who no longer have to worry about the execution environment.
What’s more, they don’t have to spend time programming the consensus layer, which is provided by Celestia.
From a technical point of view, Celestia has been developed in the Cosmos environment and uses the Tendermint protocol. TAI is Celestia’s native token, used for :

• Participate in the governance of the DAO ;
• Paying network fees;
• Staking and contributing to network security via Proof-Of-Stake (POS).

Celestia’s current market capitalization exceeds $1.8 billion, putting the TIA token on the doorstep of the world’s top 50.

Buy Celestia online.

The foundations of the Celestia project were laid by Mustafa Al-Bassam while he was still studying at University College London (UCL) and preparing a PhD on the scalability of layer-0 blockchains. The white paper was published in 2019. At the time, the project was known as LazyLedger. After the release of a devnet, the Mamakitestnet was released at the end of May 2022. 

If it was primarily aimed at developers, all users could participate in this experimentation.
To reward people for their involvement, tokens were distributed.
Users could participate in various tests, such as operating a node, delegating testnet tokens, managing a validator node, or sending transactions between wallets.

2023 is a pivotal year for the Celestia project.
Shortly before the release of its mainnet, the team carried out a airdrop in september 2023.

Called “Genesis Drop,” this airdrop involved the distribution of 60 million TIA tokens, representing 6% of the total supply. The goal was to allow users to stake these tokens after the official launch of the Celestia blockchain and the creation of its first block (genesis). The token distribution period began on September 27, 2023, and ended on October 17, 2023. In total, 7,579 developers and 576,653 on-chain addresses on Ethereum rollups, Cosmos Hub, and Osmosis were invited to participate in the airdrop. Unsurprisingly, the mainnet launch followed the airdrop just a few days later, on October 31, 2023. Currently, Mustafa Al-Bassam is CEO of blockchain developer Celestia Labs.

He is no stranger to start-ups, having co-founded Chainspace, a company specializing in the creation of smart contracts, which was acquired by none other than Facebook. He is also said to have been one of the founders of the hacker group LulzSec (now disbanded), known for hacking Sony, Fox, the FBI, and even the CIA.

Project Fundraising

The first major round of financing for Celestia’s development took place in March 2021.
This funding round enabled the team to raise $1.5 million.
Participants in this round included Interchain Foundation, KR1, and Binance Labs. Following this financing, several prominent advisors joined the project, such as Zaki Manian and Ethan Buchman, engineers at Cosmos, and Morgan Beller, co-founder of Diem (a Facebook project formerly known as Libra).

Another major fundraising round took place after the release of Mamaki.
On October 19, 2022, the foundation overseeing Celestia’s development announced the successful completion of a $55 million funding round.
This round was led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with participation from Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, Jump Crypto, and notable angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Eric Wall, and Jutta Steiner.

Currently, the leadership team at Celestia consists of:

• Mustafa Al-Bassam, CEO
• Ismail Khoffi, Co-founder and CTO: Former software engineer at Cosmos.
• John Adler, Co-founder and Director of Research: Previously worked at ConsenSys, contributed to the development of Optimistic rollup technology, and co-founded Fuel Labs in 2020, a start-up specializing in scalable execution layers.
• Nick White, Director of Operations: Prior to joining Celestia, he participated in the development of the Harmony blockchain in 2018.

 See TIA price. 

TIA is Celestia’s native token.
It fulfills the classic roles of a utility token, namely :

• Pay fees transaction fees ;
• Pay to store store data ;
• Serve as native token for new blockchains developed with Celestia ;
• Staking staking to contribute to network security and earn revenue;

Participate in governance by taking part in votes and submitting proposals to develop the protocol.

As with Bitcoin, the number of TIA tokens is capped.
The developers have thus foreseen that there will never be more than one one billion TIA tokens tokens on the network. Of the initial supply of TIA tokens, the breakdown was as follows:

• 20% for the public ;
• 26.8% for ecosystem development and research ;
• 35.6% for first-time investors ;
• 17.6% for initial contributors.

The inflation rate (rate at which new tokens are issued) on Celestia is 8% in the first year.
Thereafter, this rate will fall by 10% each year until it reaches a floor value of 1.5%.

Technical data

In 2022, the Celestia team launched the Modular Fellows which aims to support and mentor modular developers.
The initiative was an immediate success, with over 400 applications received.
For the first selection, 13 people (known as “modular fellows”) were chosen.
The program lasts three months and provides Modular Fellows with technical support, mentoring and a monthly stipend of $3,000 to build the project of their choice.
Après le programme, un soutien continu sera disponible pour les boursiers sous forme d’aide à la collecte de fonds et de subventions.

Modular Fellows work closely with the Celestia Labs team and a hand-picked group of Modular mentors who will help solve engineering problems and provide feedback on milestones.Modular Fellows act asproject incubator for Celestia. Over time, Celestia’s Celestia ecosystem ecosystem has grown to include more than 80 dApps in the following areas:

• Wallet: Cosmology, Cosmostation, Keplr, Leap wallet.
• Inter-chain: Axelar, Catalyst, Hyperlane, Mitosis, Skip, etc.
• Infrastructure: Aori, Arc, Marlin, Nebra, Noble, etc.
• Rollup: Alpha Dune, AsMatch, Astria, Deri, Forma, LightLink, etc.
• Virtual Machine (VM): Cartesi, CosmWasm, Polaris.

1. Go to the Coinhouse home page and click on “Login”.
2. Select the “Buy” button (at the top of the home page) and type “TIA” in the search tab of the “Receive” section.
3. Choose your payment method (credit card or bank transfer) and click on “Continue”.
4. After purchasing TIA tokens, they are transferred to the integrated Coinhouse wallet.
   For the time being, it is not possible to transfer them to an external crypto wallet.

Another way to buy TIA coins on Coinhouse is to exchange them.
Simply click on the “Exchange” button at the top of the home page, then exchange USDC stablecoins (buy USDC) for TIA tokens.

This means that you must first have USDT stablecoins in your Coinhouse account.

Celestia is a project that breaks with the majority of blockchains currently on the market.
Unlike the classic monolithic model of Ethereum, for example, Celestia offers a modular blockchain.
Pour faire face au trilemme de la blockchain, les développeurs ont misé sur la décomposition de la blockchain en couches.

Celestia distinguishes itself from most other cryptos by separating the consensus layer from the execution layer.
Without handling transactions, this “lazy” blockchain can focus solely on key and highly energy-intensive blockchain roles, such as data storage or DA (Data Availability).

Celestia makes developers’ work much easier by providing them with a ready-to-use ready-to-use base that manages consensus.
Users can program custom blockchains and their decentralized applications by selecting their execution environment (language and virtual machine of their choice) and directly connecting it to the Celestia ecosystem.
Celestia serves as a database where validators can retrieve data when they need to verify the validity of a block.

Despite its youth, the project already enjoys a strong strong reputation and ranks in the top 100 worldwide in terms of market capitalization.
By bringing a new vision to the market, Celestia could well be the Catalyst for the advent of modular blockchains.