Celestia (TIA)
What do ‘modular’, ‘mammoths’, and ‘a Lazy Ledger’ have to do with rollups? Well, if you ask Celestia, it has more to do with the way blockchains operate. Funded up to 155 million, Celestia has risen with an aim to break some of the key pain points in blockchain, like scalability, by adopting a different approach from traditional blockchains—the modular design.
Join us in this article as we take you through Celestia from its foundational days and modular architecture, and see its role in transforming the blockchain sector.
Celestia is the world’s first blockchain network to offer data availability. It solves the scalability issues with monolithic blockchains by employing a modular blockchain structure that divides data availability from transaction execution. With this structure, rollups and other blockchain apps can expand effectively without being limited by a monolithic architecture.
Celestia was first described in their whitepaper titled ‘Lazy Ledger‘ (the name “LazyLedger” has been used because of the way their system distributes transaction execution work to client computers while keeping the ledger as a passive component).
In 2021, Lazy Ledger was rebranded as Celestia to better reflect its broader vision and appeal.
The concept of Celestia is attributed to two key personnel. The first one is Al-Bassam, who works as the CEO of Celestia Labs. His journey in blockchain is well-renowned, as he holds a PhD in blockchain scaling from University College London. Before starting Celestia, he acted as an early engineer on Chainspace, which was acquired by Facebook.
The other one is Ismail Khoffi, who acts as the CTO of Celestia Labs. He has been in the blockchain sector for a while, having previously worked as a senior engineer at Tendermint and the Interchain Foundation.
Together, they have managed to gather a team, which is now responsible for running and managing Celestia.
To fund its operations, Celestia has had several funding rounds spearheaded by its various investors. The first round was conducted in October 2022, where $55 million was raised. The funding round was made up of a combined Series A and B and was led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
The funding also had several other participants, like Jump Crypto, FTX Ventures, Placeholder, Galaxy, and others, as well as several angel investors. This funding saw it achieve its mainnet beta, which went live in October 2023.
Celestia raises $55M to launch modular blockchain network
Following the first round, Celestia announced that it had raised $100 million in a second funding round in September 2024, which was led by Bain Capital Crypto. This round saw participation from prominent investors such as Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures, and Placeholder, which led to additional capital, bringing the total amount raised to $155 million.
This review of Celestia (TIA) was created for informational purposes. This article is not intended for promotion.
As we have mentioned above Celestia is built on a modular architecture model. Therefore to get the general information about it, we will go through each of these layers and see how each plays out.
At this layer lies a feature known as Data Availability Sampling (DAS) that allows light nodes to verify the availability of block data without downloading the entire block. This is achieved through two technologies; 2-dimensional Reed-Solomon encoding and Namespaced Merkle trees (NMTs).
Celestia’s DAS block data is split into chunks and arranged in a matrix (structured arrangement of data shares). Therefore light nodes have to sample small portions of this data, verifying availability randomly. This is done through the 2-dimensional Reed-Solomon Encoding.
To understand how it works take this scenario as an example:
There are two coins where one always lands on heads, and the other has a 50% probability of landing on either heads or tails. You are given one of these two coins. Now, how do you figure out which coin you have? You keep flipping. You likely have the heads-only coin if the coin keeps landing on heads and if it keeps landing on either heads or tails, then you probably know you have the other coin.
In a similar way, through the 2-dimensional Reed-Solomon Encoding, data at Celestia is verified even with limited resources which results in a more scalable network.
Namespaced Merkle trees (NMTs) help Celestia organize data into different categories called namespaces. Each namespace represents a data set associated with one application or rollup.
By confirming the availability of data through the above mechanisms, light nodes can easily download it and index its contents, and then the DA layer sends the application with the requested data and proofs.
As we know, consensus in the context of blockchain refers to the process by which all nodes agree on the validity of new transactions and the current state of the blockchain. This therefore means that it is in this layer where verification happens.
On its side Celestia utilizes a consensus mechanism to allow block verification by multiple nodes in parallel. This ensures nodes agree on the order of transactions and the availability of underlying data which gives it increased throughput as compared to the most traditional blockchain, where only one node can verify each block in sequence.
In Celestia execution is entirely offloaded to external chains or rollups built on its network. These chains only post results to Celestia for DA and consensus. Moore on this is discussed below under ‘Celestia ecosystem’.
From the above information, it is quite clear that Celestia simply orders data and makes it available for others to utilize. One of the key beneficiaries of this data is rollups, which in Celestia are termed ‘Sovereign rollups’.
https://x.com/celestia/status/1785722529132523978
As we know, a rollup is a layer-2 scaling solution that improves the scalability of a blockchain network by bundling multiple transactions together ‘off-chain’ and then submitting them to the main blockchain as a single transaction.
In blockchains like Ethereum, rollups, which are in most cases termed ‘smart contract rollups’, publish their entire blocks to a settlement layer, in this case Ethereum. The settlement layer’s job is to order the blocks, check their data availability, and verify whether the transactions are correct. The smart contract rollup is only responsible for execution, while it offloads the work of consensus, data availability, and settlement to Ethereum.
When it comes to Celestia, a different approach is taken. It acts as a DA layer, handling only consensus and data availability, while the sovereign rollup is responsible for execution and settlement.
An Introduction to Sovereign Rollups
Since mainnet, Celestia has incorporated several rollups in its ecosystem, such as Eclipse, which is also built on a modular architecture. It uses Celestia as the data availability layer, Ethereum as the settlement layer, and the SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) as the execution layer.
https://x.com/celestia/status/1585240619655761922
Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) refers to a platform that allows developers to easily build, deploy, and manage their own custom ‘rollup’ chains on a blockchain network without the need to develop the complex infrastructure from scratch.
In its ecosystem, Celestia has incorporated these platforms to allow the creation of blockchains with minimal cost and time. In short, blockchains can bootstrap without validators, token distribution mechanisms, or consensus mechanisms. Examples of these platforms include Altlayer, Caldera, and Snapchain.
These are a set of tools and protocols that enable developers to build and deploy ‘rollups’. They provide frameworks that simplify development by providing the necessary infrastructure and components for rollup operation.
Celestia has incorporated several rollup frameworks, such as Rollkit, which provides a modular node for running rollups on top of its data availability layer.
Although most of its ecosystem is made up of rollups, Celestia has expanded its reach in other areas such as:
Within the Celestia ecosystem, projects like Dymension offer settlement layer and bridging hub services. Settlement layers help to process and finalize transactions,
while bridging hubs enable cross-chain interaction by allowing the transfer of assets and data between disparate blockchain networks.
Celestials are modular usernames that natively simplify how users and developers interact with and across different networks, offeri
ng a unified identity system within the Celestia modular blockchain environment. This is achieved through the use of decentralized identifiers (DIDs), which give users control over their digital identities.
In addition, the Celestial names can be turned into visual artworks through the matrix of a grid and can be auctioned off.
In its design, Celestia has embraced the mammoth as a symbol within its ecosystem. This has been done through initiatives like the ‘Mammoth Mini Testnet’, which was conducted in October 2024 for a period of three weeks. The main goal was to see how much data throughput the network could achieve via initial impleme
ntations of improvements outlined in the community’s protocol roadmap.
On its first iteration, it achieved 88 MB blocks with an average data throughput of 27 MB/s with 3s block times, which was an increase of more than 160x compared to Celestia’s throughput at launch.
Initial results from Mammoth Mini: 27MB/s of permissionless data throughput
The second instance where mammoth was used was in ‘Mammothon’, a hackathon that lasted from Feb 1-28th 2025, which was focused on building scalable applications on Celestia’s modular architecture. But you might be wondering why Celestia loves to use mammoth as a symbol in its ecosystem.
The official $TIA Contract address: bc/D79E7D83AB399BFFF93433E54FAA480C191248FC556924A2A8351AE2638B3877
The $TIA token is a fundamental part of the Celestia network. Its core uses are:
TIA is an essential part of how developers build on Celestia’s modular network. To use its data availability layer, developers submit PayForBlobs transactions on the network for a fee, denominated in $TIA.
A core part of the Celestia vision is that deploying a blockchain should be as easy as deploying a smart contract. It notes that in the modular era, developers should no longer struggle to issue a token to launch their own blockchain.
In addition to paying for data availability, they may use their $TIA as a gas token and currency to create their application or execution layer.
As a permissionless network, Celestia uses proof-of-stake to secure its consensus. Like in other proof-of-stake networks, any user can help secure Celestia by delegating their TIA to a validator and, in return, secure a portion of the validator’s staking rewards.
The first step is to select a wallet of your preference, as we have seen Celestia supports a wide range of wallets. For this purpose, we will use the Keplr wallet.
First, you need to navigate to Staked and select Stake with Keplr Dashboard. This will open the Keplr dashboard in a new browser page, since it is a browser extension. Once in the Keplr dashboard, select the Celestia network and pick a validator of your choice.
Once you have selected a validator, a screen will appear asking you to enter the amount of TIA tokens you wish to stake.
Then, a Keplr popup will appear, requesting your approval for the transaction. Select Approve.
After the transaction is confirmed, you will see an overview dashboard where you can now claim rewards, unstake, redelegate, or stake additional tokens.
The Celestia network had a total supply of 1,000,000,000 TIA at Genesis, which was diversified across five key categories:
Celestia Network has positioned itself as a leader in the modular blockchain ecosystem, serving as a data availability layer for rollups. With 45% of the data availability market share among live rollups and $1 billion in value across 83 rollups, its adoption is strong for a one-year-old chain.
This momentum aligns with broader trends, as even competitors like Solana are pivoting toward rollup-friendly architectures, reducing the likelihood of rollup adoption stagnating.
Celestia’s Data Modularity Dominance and the Road Ahead
The network’s scalability roadmap, which targets a 1GB block capable of supporting Visa-level transaction throughput, further supports its appeal to become a prime leader in this space. This could drive demand for block space and increase the value of its TIA token.
However, risks also remain: if rollup adoption fails, Celestia’s infrastructure may face underutilization, but this seems unlikely since the blockchain sector is only gearing up for a massive explosion of users.
Celestia has come to disrupt the conventional approach to the concept of the blockchain based on at least the modular architecture phase. While many blockchains are designed as one structure, Celestia approaches its design on a distributed model.
Through this, it has been able to address several challenges often experienced in traditional blockchains which has made it a central hub for rollups. By allowing them to operate independently while only leveraging it for DA and consensus.
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