Celestia

Celestia is a modular blockchain network that provides data availability rather than execution. Its purpose is to let developers launch their own blockchains without having to bootstrap a validator set, by handling the part of the stack that is hardest to decentralize: making sure transaction data is published and retrievable.

Most blockchains bundle execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability into a single system. Celestia separates them and specializes in one, on the argument that a chain which only orders and publishes data can do so far more cheaply than one that also executes every transaction.

Data availability sampling

The technical mechanism that makes this work is data availability sampling. Light nodes download small random samples of each block rather than the full block, and if enough samples are available, the data is almost certainly published in full. This means security scales with the number of light nodes rather than requiring every participant to store everything, which is what allows the network's capacity to grow as it is used.

Rollups and application-specific chains post their transaction data to Celestia and handle their own execution, inheriting data availability guarantees without inheriting Celestia's execution environment.

Supply and the TIA token

TIA has no fixed maximum supply. Total supply currently sits at roughly 1.17 billion tokens with about 955 million circulating, and new issuance rewards stakers, with an inflation rate that declines over time under the network's parameters.

TIA is used to pay for blobspace, the data posted by rollups, and for staking to secure the network through its proof-of-stake consensus. The network launched in October 2023 and is built with the Cosmos SDK.