Celestia Airdrops TIA Token as Network Goes Live, Claims Start of 'Modular Era'

Modular blockchain Celestia has rolled out its mainnet beta following the issuance of its native TIA token to 580,000 users.

Described as a "modular data availability network that securely scales with the number of users," Celestia aims to solve scalability and stability issues that are common with monolithic blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.

"It's the start of a new era," the Celestia Foundation, which supports development on the network, wrote in a blog post. "The modular era."

As of about 2:30 ET (6:40 UTC), the TIA tokens were changing hands around $2.29, according to CoinMarketCap.

"Based on current market prices, the Celestia airdrop is estimated to distribute about $120 million in on-chain value, targeting users in the Cosmos (ATOM) and Ethereum (ETH) layer 2 ecosystems," Sean Farrell, an analyst at FundStrat, wrote in a note to subscribers on Tuesday. "This could either stimulate on-chain activity or flow into related assets, benefitting asset prices."

Modular blockchains are designed to solve scalability issues by using specific channels for speed and execution, unlike monolithic blockchains, which can scale only at the expense of decentralization or security. Celestia also uses data availability sampling (DAS), a way of verifying all data that is available on a blockchain. The combination helps increase the speed at which data is transferred.

"Celestia’s mainnet beta launch marks the arrival of the first live modular data availability network with data availability sampling," said Ekram Ahmed, a spokesperson at the Celestia Foundation. "Celestia mainnet is a giant leap in our mission to make deploying chains as easy as smart contracts.”

The beta enables rollups and other modular chains to use Celestia as a data availability and consensus layer.

The blockchain will initially have 2MB blocks with support for up to 8MB blocks, with upgrades due to be made after an on-chain governance process. The company hopes to support 1GB blocks to "provide abundant data availability for the modular ecosystem" in the future.

The company raised $55 million in a combined Series A and B last year at a valuation of $1 billion.