Celestia (TIA)

Celestia (TIA) is the native cryptocurrency of Celestia, a blockchain that specialises in data availability: it stores and publishes transaction data for other blockchains, especially rollups, rather than running applications itself. TIA pays for that data space, is staked to secure the network and is used in governance. Celestia's mainnet launched on 31 October 2023, and it was the first major network built on this "modular" idea.

Celestia is the opposite of a monolithic blockchain, which does execution, settlement and data storage on one layer. It serves layer 2 networks and other rollups that execute transactions elsewhere and need somewhere cheap and verifiable to publish their data. It is built with Cosmos technology, the toolkit behind Cosmos (ATOM).

Think of a public noticeboard in a town square. Shops run their own businesses, but each one pins up a copy of its daily receipts so that anyone can check them later. The noticeboard does not care what the receipts say; it only guarantees that they were posted, stayed visible and cannot be quietly removed. Celestia is that noticeboard for blockchains.

The clever part is that checking the board does not require reading every page. A visitor can glance at a few random spots and, if all of them are present, be very confident the whole board is there. That lets even a phone help verify the system. TIA is the fee a shop pays to pin up its receipts, and people who stake TIA help run the board.

Celestia grew out of LazyLedger, a 2019 research paper by Mustafa Al-Bassam that proposed a blockchain devoted only to ordering and publishing data. Al-Bassam co-founded the project with Ismail Khoffi, John Adler and Nick White, and it was renamed Celestia in 2021. The mainnet beta and TIA token launched in October 2023 with an airdrop to developers, researchers and testnet participants. The Lotus upgrade in July 2025 cut issuance and added native TIA transfers to other chains, and a further upgrade in November 2025 reduced issuance again.

Rollups post their transaction data to Celestia as "blobs". Celestia orders the blobs in blocks agreed by validators using proof of stake, but it does not execute the transactions inside them. Each block is expanded with erasure coding, a technique that adds redundant pieces so that the data can be rebuilt even if parts go missing. Light nodes then use data availability sampling: they download a handful of random pieces, and if those are available the whole block almost certainly is. Namespaces label each rollup's data so that it can fetch only its own. This model competes with Ethereum's own blob space, which Ethereum (ETH) rollups have used since 2024, and with other data-availability layers. See scaling blockchain for the wider context.

The genesis supply was 1 billion TIA, split among the public allocation (20 percent), research and ecosystem (26.79 percent), early backers (35.57 percent) and initial core contributors (17.64 percent). There is no maximum supply; new TIA is issued to stakers. Issuance began at 8 percent a year, fell to about 5 percent with the Lotus upgrade and to about 2.5 percent in November 2025, and now declines by 6.7 percent a year until it reaches a floor of 1.5 percent:

• $r_{t}$ is the annual issuance rate $t$ years after the November 2025 reset.
• $0.933$ reflects the 6.7 percent yearly reduction.
• $1.5\%$ is the long-term floor.

Three years after the reset the rate is $2.5\% \times 0.933^{3} \approx 2.03\%$. Holders who do not stake are diluted, which is why many choose staking or liquid staking.

• Blob fees. Rollups pay in TIA to publish data, and the fee rises with the size of the blob.
• Staking. TIA is bonded to validators, who secure the chain and earn rewards.
• Governance. Holders vote on network parameters, and 2 percent of block rewards go to a community pool they control.
• Rollup gas. Some rollups built on Celestia use TIA as their own fee token.

Critics argue that fee revenue from blobs has been small compared with the value of the token and the amount of new TIA issued to stakers, which is one reason issuance was cut twice in 2025. Large allocations to early backers and core contributors were released through scheduled token unlocks, which weighed on the market. Celestia also faces strong competition: Ethereum's blob capacity keeps growing, and rival services such as EigenDA and Avail offer similar data publishing. Supporters reply that cheap data is the main input for scaling rollups and that demand is still early. A further concern is that a rollup relying on Celestia depends on a separate network's validators, so its security is only as strong as Celestia's own stake.

• Celestia
• Celestia documentation