Bankless: How Celestia works and an overview of TIA tokens

Source: Bankless; Compiled by: Songxue, Golden Finance

Celestia is a data availability (DA) blockchain designed to serve as an economical and efficient center for L2 Rollup to publish transaction data.

Celestia helps projects launch L2 by allowing the Rollup team to sidestep the need to manage their own DA solution and focus solely on the execution layer where transactions occur.

How Celestia works

The core of Celestia’s infrastructure is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain,which relies on celestia-core (a modified version of the Tendermint consensus algorithm). In addition to this architecture, Celestia is also centered around two main features:Data Availability Sampling (DAS) and Namespace Merkle Trees (NMT).

DAS is a technology that allows light nodes in the Celestia network to verify data availability without downloading entire blocks. This is achieved by splitting the block data into chunks, encoding them, and then sampling these fragments. Therefore, light nodes can effectively verify data availability by checking only a small portion of a block.

In addition, Namespace Merkle Tree (NMT) is another key feature of Celestia. They allow the network to classify data into different "namespaces," enabling applications to download only the data relevant to them. This selective data retrieval makes Celestia more efficient and scalable, especially for applications that require only a specific selection of blockchain data.

Celestia’s main network

The Celestia mainnet will launch a beta version in October 2023. Given the recent launch of the network, not many L2s are currently using it in production for DA needs.

However, many still Scaling solutions in development that have announced plans to leverage Celestia for DA include Hypr, Lyra Chain, and Nitrogen. More projects are expected to come online in the coming months.

$TIA Token

Celestia's native cryptocurrency is $TIA, with a genesis supply of 1 billion and a declining annual inflation rate. It started at 8% and stabilized at 1.5%.

The token is used by developers to pay DA fees on Celestia, and it is also available as a ready-made Gas token for new Rollups. Through its PoS system, $TIA holders can secure the network by delegating their tokens to validators, and the tokens also enable holders to participate in Celestia’s governance, allowing them to vote on network decisions.

At the time of this guide’s last update, $TIA was trading at around $17.48 and had a market cap of $2.77 billion, currently making it the 32nd largest cryptocurrency.

If you’re interested in staking $TIA to earn staking rewards and potential airdrops, it’s easy to get started here. The process looks like this:

• Create a Celestia wallet — Keplr is a good choice, it is a user-friendly browser wallet for Cosmos chains like Celestia and also offers a simplified staking interface.

• Get $TIA — The easiest way is to buy $TIA on a cryptocurrency exchange like Coinbase or Kraken. Once you have the funds you want to stake, deposit them into the Celestia address you generated in Keplr.

• Staking via Keplr — With your TIA dollars in hand, click the “Manage Portfolio in Keplr Dashboard” button in your wallet. In the Staking center, click on Celestia and select the validator you want to stake from the list provided. Enter the amount of $TIA you wish to stake and approve the final transaction using your wallet.

Getting Started with Celestia

To start learning more about the Celestia ecosystem, be sure to check out these helpful resources:

• Celestia Docs — The official documentation for Celestia.

• Modular Cloud — Block explorer for analyzing Celestia data.

• Celestia Ecosystem — Database of projects on Celestia.

Future Picture

Celestia has emerged as an L2 efficiency center looking to simplify data availability challenges. Its innovative features, such as data availability sampling and namespace Merkle trees, enhance scalability and selectivity of data access. With the role its native token $TIA plays in staking and network governance, Celestia not only paves the way to simplify blockchain development, but also stands out in the market with huge growth potential and influence in the crypto economy.