Celestia (TIA)

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Historical price evolution of Celestia

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Celestia has its origins in the academic research of Mustafa Al-Bassam, a computer scientist at University College London who in 2019 published the "LazyLedger" whitepaper during his doctoral studies. Al-Bassam, who as a teenager had been part of the LulzSec hacker group and was prosecuted by the US government at 16 years of age, proposed a blockchain that would only guarantee data availability without executing or validating transactions. That same year, his previous company Chainspace, a smart contracts platform, had been acquired by Meta (then Facebook).

To develop the project, Al-Bassam recruited in 2019 two key co-founders: Ismail Khoffi, former software engineer at Tendermint Inc. and the Interchain Foundation with experience in Cosmos SDK, and John Adler, applied researcher at ConsenSys specialising in optimistic rollups. In June 2021, the project changed its name from LazyLedger to Celestia, thus consolidating its commercial identity.

During 2022, Celestia completed its testnet phases and closed a Series A+B funding round for 55 million dollars led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, Delphi Digital, Placeholder and Galaxy, reaching a valuation of 1,000 million dollars. On 31st October 2023, the Celestia mainnet launched under the name "Lemon Mint" alongside the TIA token, which debuted at approximately 2.30 dollars. The genesis airdrop distributed 6% of the total supply amongst testnet participants, developers and early validators, whilst major exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin and Bybit listed TIA in the first weeks.

In December 2023, TIA experienced a rally of more than 500% in a few weeks following the launch, coinciding with Polygon's announcement about the integration of Celestia in its Chain Development Kit (CDK). The token reached its all-time high of approximately 21 dollars on 10th February 2024. During this growth period, in January 2024 the Lemongrass update was implemented, which reduced block time from 12 to 6 seconds and doubled data processing capacity.

In February 2024, Celestia became the first external project to contribute to the Arbitrum Orbit protocol, allowing the use of Celestia as a data availability layer for Arbitrum rollups. Development continued in 2025 with the launch in April of mamo-1, a public testnet to test performance with 128MB blocks that achieved results of 21.33 MB/s of throughput. In May 2025, Lotus (Celestia v4) was announced, which integrates Hyperlane to enable TIA interoperability between Celestia rollups and external ecosystems such as Ethereum. By 2026, despite TIA trading in the range of 0.35-0.55 dollars (more than 95% below its all-time high), Celestia had managed to control approximately 50% of the alternative data availability market with more than 30 rollups deployed.

Celestia functions as the first modular blockchain specialised exclusively in two functions: consensus and data availability. Unlike traditional blockchains that handle all operations in a single layer, Celestia separates the four main functions (execution, settlement, consensus and data availability) into independent layers. Its specific role consists of guaranteeing that transaction data is available to any participant who wishes to verify it, without processing or validating the content of said transactions. Rollups and second-layer blockchains publish their transactional data in Celestia's space called "blobspace", thus inheriting its security without the need to maintain their own consensus infrastructure.

The core technology that enables Celestia's scalable operation is Data Availability Sampling (DAS), a mechanism whereby light nodes can verify that a block's data is available by downloading only small random samples instead of the complete block. This approach allows the network to scale without increasing hardware requirements for participants. Celestia is built on Cosmos SDK and implements a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, where validators secure the network through staking of TIA tokens.

The TIA token fulfils three main functions within the ecosystem: serving as a means of payment for data publication fees in the blobspace, enabling participation in staking to contribute to network security, and enabling participation in protocol governance through voting. The total supply is fixed at 1,000 million TIA tokens, with an inflationary emission model that begins at 8% annually and decreases gradually until stabilising at 1.5%.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.