What is Celestia (TIA)?

Celestia is an innovative project that adopts modular blockchain architecture, a new approach in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. Unlike classic (monolithic) blockchains, Celestia works by separating the execution and consensus layers. This allows the network to allocate tasks such as transaction verification and data availability to different layers, increasing scalability. TIA coin, the native cryptocurrency that powers the Celestia network, is also referred to as Celestia coin. So what is Celestia coin? In short, TIA coin is a token used on the network to pay for transactions, pay for blobspace, and secure the network through staking. Although full of technical details, Celestia's approach can be summarized as “blockchain that focuses on its own business”. Let's look at the details of this project together...

Definition and Emergence of Celestia

Celestia is one of the best examples of a modular blockchain. A modular blockchain refers to an architecture in which the core functions of the blockchain are divided into separate layers. In Celestia's case, the consensus and data availability layer is separated from the execution layer where smart contracts run. This allows each layer to focus on its own “area of expertise”, resulting in increased scalability and flexibility. This approach aims to solve the problem of data overload, which is common in blockchains. Clearly, Celestia makes everyone's job easier by “dividing labor”. For example, there are no smart contracts running on the Celestia main network; instead, different projects run their own chains, leveraging Celestia's security and data. This structure makes it possible to specialize in different tasks of the blockchain, just like the specialization of departments in a company.

The Celestia project dates back to 2019. Mustafa Al-Bassam, one of the founders of the project, published an academic paper called “LazyLedger” during his PhD studies at the University of London. This paper is known as the work that sowed the first seeds of the modular blockchain concept. In the same year, Al-Bassam found two other co-founders to bring his ideas to life: Ismail Khoffi and John Adler. Although the project was initially called LazyLedger, it was later renamed Celestia. All three founders are blockchain veterans; Al-Bassam has an academic background in scalability and security, while Khoffi worked as an engineer in the Cosmos ecosystem (Tendermint, Interchain Foundation).

Adler gained experience as a researcher on the Ethereum side (at ConsenSys). Thus, the Celestia team, which combines different expertise, set out with the vision that “everyone can easily start their own blockchain”. The development of the project was carried out by building on the Cosmos SDK, so Celestia can actually be seen among Cosmos-based projects. Cosmos' Tendermint consensus mechanism is used in a customized way in Celestia (with innovations such as two-dimensional data encryption and Namespaced Merkle Tree). Since its inception, Celestia has caused a stir in the industry as one of the first modular blockchain networks.

Celestia's History: Important Milestones

When did Celestia launch and how did it grow? The Celestia project started to develop rapidly after the concept and team formation in 2019. Founded in 2019, the project continued its R&D efforts after changing its name from LazyLedger to Celestia. In 2020 and 2021, while infrastructure development continued, the community slowly started to form. Celestia was attracting attention in the industry, especially as its modular architecture concept was seen at the time as a new remedy for blockchain scaling.

In 2022, the testnet version started, receiving major investment

The year 2022 was a period of significant testing for Celestia. In May 2022, the first public testnet, code-named Mamaki, was released. The Mamaki testnet was one of the first to support data availability sampling (DAS), a key feature of Celestia. By testing their applications on Mamaki, developers were able to test the “send and retrieve data” API provided by Celestia. With this testnet, innovative ideas such as interactions between a full node and a light node, and fragmentation and reassembly of block data were successfully tested. Later in the year, Celestia Labs increased its financial strength with a significant investment.

In October 2022, a $55 million investment round was completed, led by major investors such as Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital. This gave Celestia both the financial resources and industry support to accelerate mainnet preparations. At the end of 2022, a developer-focused devnet called Arabica and a testnet upgrade called Mocha, which updates the existing testnet, were announced. These testnets were used to experiment with improvements to Celestia's protocol and gather developer feedback. In short, 2022 was a “year of rehearsals” for Celestia.

2023: Celestia mainnet launched, airdrop realized

2023 was the year the Celestia project matured and opened up to the world. In March 2023, the Celestia team launched an incentivized testnet program called Blockspace Race. In this nine-week long program, close to 1000 participants (validators, light nodes, etc.) completed various tasks and collected points. The Blockspace Race pushed the Celestia network close to full capacity, enabling scalability and resiliency tests. After this successful testing period, the Celestia team was ready to transition to the main network.

October 31, 2023 became the Celestia mainnet date. The network was officially launched. With the mainnet launch, the project's native token, TIA, was also introduced to the masses for the first time. Since Celestia is part of the Cosmos ecosystem, with the launch of the mainnet, it became possible to track the Celestia blockchain through Cosmos block explorers such as Mintscan. At the mainnet launch, Celestia conducted an airdrop of 6-7% of the total supply to select testnet participants and early backers. Through this airdrop, community members received TIA tokens and the network's first validators began staking their tokens.

From the early days of Mainnet, exchanges started listing the TIA token. Major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin, Bybit opened TIA trading in early November 2023, providing liquidity. Post-launch, market interest was so high that the TIA coin price rose significantly from $2 in the first few weeks to $2 in a few months. Especially in early 2024, with the popularization of the modular blockchain narrative, the TIA price reached a historic peak of $20 around February 2024. This period saw Celestia generate a great deal of excitement across the industry. However, due to the nature of crypto markets, such spikes were followed by corrections. By mid-2024, the TIA price had stabilized and hovered in the $3-5 range for the second half of the year. Still, Celestia's total market capitalization exceeded a billion dollars, placing the project in the top 50 most valuable crypto assets. In the chart below, you can see the fluctuations of the TIA price after the mainnet exit:

In 2024, the Celestia network continued to grow rapidly, technically and ecosystem-wise. In January 2024, Celestia rolled out its first major protocol update called Lemongrass. This update reduced the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds and doubled the network's data processing capacity. The faster block time significantly increased Celestia's transaction (or data) throughput per second. Later that year, another upgrade, codenamed Ginger, continued the scalability improvements. In addition to technical advancements, important steps were also taken on the ecosystem side. Leading platforms such as Polygon announced that they would integrate Celestia into their toolkits for developers. For example, the inclusion of Celestia in Polygon's Chain Development Kit at the end of 2023 was a critical step in the adoption of the modular blockchain concept. Celestia has also made a name for itself by partnering with projects such as StarkWare (StarkWare is known for ZK-rollup solutions such as StarkNet).

Integrated projects were launched with Cosmos' CosmWasm, EVM and Move

Since the Celestia mainnet was launched, the number of projects built on it has skyrocketed. In the early months of 2024, it was reported that the number of projects running their own application chains or rollups within the Celestia ecosystem exceeded 20. In total, these independent chains published more than 75 GB of data to Celestia from November 2023 to mid-2024. Projects in the ecosystem include Ethereum-compatible rollups, specialized chains for DeFi applications, gaming-focused blockchains, and various infrastructure protocols. Thanks to Celestia's flexibility, even chains using different smart contract environments such as EVM, Move or CosmWasm can be integrated into Celestia. In other words, a developer can build their own chain in any programming language/environment and entrust their data to Celestia.

By the end of 2024, Celestia had gone from strength to strength, both technically and financially. The Celestia Foundation raised an additional $100 million in an additional round of funding around October 2024, bringing the total capital raised to $155 million. This investment was a significant resource that will be used to support Celestia's long-term development plans and grow the ecosystem. Around the same time, some projects in the Cosmos ecosystem began to integrate with Celestia. For example, Stride, an L1 blockchain on a Cosmos network, integrated with Celestia, becoming the first “Rollchain” to send its data to Celestia. Similarly, Noble, a Cosmos-based stablecoin network, has also started using Celestia's data layer. These developments showed that Celestia can support not only its own ecosystem but also other blockchain ecosystems. Throughout 2024, Celestia's staking rate steadily increased; by the end of the year, nearly 60% of the total TIA supply was staked on the network and more than 400,000 accounts had delegated TIA to network validators. So the community was very active in security and participation in governance.

2025: What's next?

Entering 2025, Celestia was confidently moving forward with the goals on its roadmap. Indeed, in April 2025, the Celestia team announced a new testnet called mamo-1. Mamo-1 is a high-capacity testnet designed to push Celestia's technical limits. In this testnet, the block size was increased to an incredible 128 MB and the network's capacity to process data without permission reached a record high of 21.3 MB/s. By comparison, the Celestia mainnet currently supports a block size of 8 MB (block time ~6 seconds). The experience with Mamo-1 will provide guidance on how to increase the main network block size to a massive 1 GB in the future. Through this test network, Celestia is observing the behavior of the network under high data load and identifying optimizations that may be needed in the protocol. As of 2025, the Celestia development team and community are working. The most prominent issues are to further scale the network, reduce cost and improve the user experience, especially by working on the Celestia TPS value.

Why is Celestia valuable?

While traditional blockchains aggregate many tasks on a single chain, Celestia takes a different path: it separates and specializes tasks, thus restoring the balance of scalability, security and decentralization. This “divide and conquer” approach offers a whole new blockchain experience for both developers and users. Let's take a look at why Celestia is so valuable.

Modular architecture: A “divide and conquer” approach

Celestia's biggest difference is that it separates the core functions of blockchain. The consensus layer sorts blocks, while the data availability layer ensures that data is available on the network. The execution layer runs on independent chains outside of Celestia.

This structure allows applications to run freely on their own chains without disrupting the performance of the network. Instead of a truck carrying a giant load, we can think of Celestia as a train that distributes the load into wagons: more loads, faster transportation. The modular blockchain process can be visualized as follows:

Scalability with Data Availability Sampling (DAS)

With Celestia's DAS technology, it is possible to check whether data is available on the network with small samples without downloading the entire data of a block. This method allows lightweight nodes to easily utilize the network. Today, the Celestia network can process thousands of transactions, generating 8 MB blocks every ~6 seconds. This puts it several steps ahead of conventional chains. In addition, security is not compromised with mechanisms such as fraud proofs.

Flexibility and adaptability: There is a place for everyone

Celestia positions itself as a “data layer” and does not interfere with the technology of the chains running on top of it. Whether it's an optimistic rollup infrastructure, a zk-rollup, a custom application chain... They can all be hosted on Celestia. Especially compared to optimistic rollups running on L1s like Ethereum, Celestia offers a much lower cost alternative. Moreover, the sovereign rollups running here benefit from security and can act freely in their own execution environments. In short, if you are a developer, no matter what language or infrastructure you use, Celestia opens its doors to you.

What does the TIA token do? The engine that runs the network

Celestia's native token, TIA, is used both to pay for data publishing fees and for staking. Initially, the total supply of TIA coins was 1 billion. In other words, TIA started with an annual inflation rate of about 8% and is designed to be reduced over time to a range of 2-5%. As of 2025, the circulating TIA supply is around 613 million. Users who secure the network by staking can get a share of newly minted tokens and transaction fees. The Celestia token price is also hovering around the $2 mark as of 2025, with a market capitalization in excess of a billion dollars.

Strong community and expanding ecosystem

Just as important as the technology is the community. Celestia has quickly built a vibrant ecosystem of thousands of developers, validators and users. With tools like Celestia Explorer, the network can be monitored transparently and governance decisions can be participated in. It has also been integrated into the Ethereum ecosystem with solutions like Blobstream and into the Cosmos world with projects like Stride. In this way, Celestia has gone beyond being just a technical project and has become an important player in the sector. The image below shows the most important projects in the Celestia ecosystem:

Who is the Founder of Celestia?

Celestia stands out not only for its technical vision but also for the strong founding team behind it. If you ask “Who is the founder of Celestia?”, the answer consists of three names: Mustafa Al-Bassam, Ismail Khoffi and John Adler. All three have solid experience in the blockchain and software world. Mustafa Al-Bassam is the CEO of Celestia Labs and one of the brains behind the project. A “white hat” hacker who made a name for himself in the tech world at a young age, Al-Bassam wrote the LazyLedger paper that laid the foundation for Celestia while pursuing a PhD in blockchain scalability at the University of London. He also co-founded the Chainspace project, which was acquired by Facebook. In short, Al-Bassam's academic and practical experience lies behind Celestia's scalability-focused structure.

Ismail Khoffi is Celestia's technical lead as CTO. Coming from a Cosmos and Tendermint background, Khoffi played a key role in shaping Celestia's Cosmos SDK-based structure. Referred to as a “technical wizard”, Khoffi is focused on making the user experience simple and straightforward while improving Celestia's complex infrastructure. John Adler is the director of research and development. An expert on Layer-2 solutions and optimistic rollup technologies in the Ethereum ecosystem, Adler contributed greatly to the theoretical underpinnings of Celestia's modular blockchain architecture. He is also a critical advisor on issues such as the integration of different execution layers into Celestia.

These three founders have shaped all of Celestia's building blocks, from security to data scalability to cross-chain compatibility. Their knowledge and experience in different fields have played an important role in Celestia's solid position in the industry today.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Here you can find the most frequently asked questions about Celestia and short answers:

• What is Celestia, how does it work?: The Celestia mainnet was launched on October 31, 2023 and the TIA token was released on the same day. Project foundations were laid in 2019, and testnet phases were completed in 2022. By 2024, the ecosystem grew rapidly and matured.
• What does the TIA token do?: TIA is used to pay for data transmission and staking on the Celestia network. It is also used to participate in governance votes, allowing users to have a say in the network.
• What does Celestia modular architecture mean? A modular blockchain is the separation of core tasks into different layers. Celestia is referred to as a “modular” network because it separates the data and consensus layer from execution.
• Who founded Celestia?: The founding team consists of Mustafa Al-Bassam, Ismail Khoffi and John Adler. All three are experienced in blockchain technologies; they developed Celestia's modular architecture together.
• Which networks does Celestia integrate with? Celestia integrates specifically with Cosmos-based projects and the Ethereum ecosystem. Thanks to the IBC protocol, it can communicate directly with Cosmos chains, and Ethereum-compatible rollups can also use Celestia as a data layer.
• How to buy TIA and where to store it: The TIA token can be purchased on major exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin and Bybit. To store it, Celestia-compatible wallets such as Keplr, Leap or Ledger are preferred.

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