Celestia, the first modular blockchain project, launched its mainnet on October 31st and simultaneously airdropped its native token TIA to 580,000 active users on the platform. The genesis airdrop distributed approximately 60 million TIA tokens. On the night of the airdrop, Celestia also listed on several centralized exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, Kraken, and KuCoin.
After being listed on major exchanges, the price of TIA tokens briefly surged to $2.99 per token. As of the time of writing, the price has settled at $2.28 per token, resulting in a market capitalization of approximately $321 million.
The airdrop of TIA tokens is considered one of the most anticipated projects in the crypto industry over the past year, following the success of Layer 2 project Arbitrum and Layer 1 project Sui. However, it is important to note that a large-scale airdrop does not guarantee the success of a project. Projects like Aptos and Sui, which also received significant attention, achieved market capitalizations of $2.9 billion and $750 million respectively, but their total value locked on the blockchain did not exceed $100 million.
Celestia’s successful launch of its mainnet holds significant importance for the further development of blockchain technology as it is the first project to introduce modular blockchain technology.
Modular blockchain, also known as “LazyLedger,” is a concept that differs from monolithic blockchains. In a monolithic blockchain, all four layers of processing and settlement – execution layer, settlement layer, consensus layer, and data availability layer – are contained within a single blockchain. This approach provides stability and security but limits transaction processing speed and scalability.
On the other hand, modular blockchain focuses on providing specific functionalities as auxiliary components for other blockchains. It can be compared to an assembly line in a traditional car factory, where each technician completes a specific task or produces a specific component. This modular approach increases production capacity and scalability.
While there is no clear distinction between modular blockchain and Layer 2 within the developer community, some analyses categorize Layer 2 as a type of modular blockchain. However, the community generally avoids rigid definitions to encourage diverse and innovative development.
Celestia, born from Mustafa Al-Bassam’s LazyLedger concept, aims to address the data availability layer problem in distributed ledgers. Data availability refers to the publication of block data on the blockchain network, allowing other nodes to download and verify the data. However, publishing data consumes significant space, and downloading all on-chain data is challenging. Celestia tackles this problem by implementing data availability sampling (DAS) for node verification. Each lightweight node on Celestia samples a portion of the block data and verifies its correctness. The more rounds of verification, the higher the data reliability, reducing operational costs for nodes and the entire network.
With the rapid growth of Layer 2 rollup blockchains like Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync, data storage and transmission burdens are expected to increase. Celestia could serve as a substitute solution for Ethereum’s data availability, effectively improving Ethereum’s processing efficiency and serving as a foundation for smoother rollup network operations without sacrificing decentralization and security.
While Ethereum currently processes an average of 1 million transactions per day, and Solana’s transaction volume is even lower, both blockchains can still handle the current user base. However, as the number of users and transaction data size continue to increase, specialized technologies like Celestia may become the new foundation for blockchains.
In conclusion, Celestia’s mainnet launch marks the beginning of a new era and the modular era. With the achievement of LazyLedger’s goal after four years since the publication of the whitepaper, Celestia has become a reality. It is possible that in four years, the widespread adoption of Celestia and similar projects in the blockchain industry will also become a reality.