Celestia is a brand new blockchain within the Cosmos Ecosystem. Long have I been a fan of the Cosmos Ecosystem and have been staking many important coins within the ecosystem. This was an eligibility criteria for $TIA airdrop and I’m a happy camper of Cosmos again.

What is Celestia blockchain?

Celestia is a modular blockchain — and these are quite different from monolithic blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, SUI, or Binance Smart Chain.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin had put forth an ideal called Blockchain Trilemma. This is a trifecta of issues persisting in blockchains — security, speed, and decentralization. Achieving all three at once was a big problem in traditional/monolithic blockchains.

To address this issue, layer 2 solutions came up on Ethereum. Namely, these are Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, and so on. Layer 2 chains handle the front end (execution) of the transaction and let Ethereum handle the settlement of the transaction, thus improving speed and cost on layer 2. However, transaction finality still is slow on Ethereum.

Modular chains are similar to layer 2 chains on Ethereum. Essentially, it is one blockchain with different layers to handle execution, settlement, and data availability, thus reducing the stress on one layer.

Celestia brings in a solution for another complex blockchain problem called the Data Availability Problem. I’m not going to explain it here, as it would take so much time to go through each concept. But, you can read a great explanation here. Long story short, Celestia’s modular stack enables people like you and me to operate light nodes that can check block transactions to ensure all the transactions in a block are available in the blockchain. This enables the blocks to contain more transactions without increasing the cost to validate them.

To summarize, Celestia brings in;

• modular blockchains that offer developers their own execution space within a blockchain, while also being backed by Celestia consensus security,
• magnify the scalability of the chain,
• high speed of transactions while keeping costs low.

Celestia airdropped $TIA tokens

$TIA is the native token of the Celestia ecosystem used mainly for transaction fees and governance.

1,000,000 $TIA was minted at Genesis and 20% of this was allocated to the public. Of this allocation, 7.4% was allocated to Genesis airdrop and incentivized testnet participants. The remainder is allocated for future programs.

Eligibility criteria for airdrop at genesis were;

• Protocol public goods and infrastructure — 4,600,000 TIA
• Eth Research — 1,400,000 TIA
• Early modular ecosystem — 8,350,000 TIA
• GitHub super-contributors — 5,650,000 TIA
• Early adopters of Ethereum rollups — 20,000,000 TIA
• Stakers and IBC relayers, Cosmos Hub and Osmosis — 20,000,000 TIA

For a full breakdown of the above criteria and exclusions check out the official airdrop announcement page by Celestia.

Thanks to these carefully handcrafted airdrop criteria, the $TIA price held quite well since the Genesis airdrop.

I received a cool 250+ $TIA from the genesis drop as a staker of $ATOM and $OSMO tokens in the Cosmos Ecosystem. At the height of the price so far, this is a value of $700. Not too shabby for doing nothing other than just staking tokens.

If you, too, want to receive these free airdrops in the Cosmos Ecosystem, make sure to read my article on what tokens you should be staking and by how much.

Check out more on Celestia here.

Update: Dec 29, 2023

$TIA price has been absolutely skyrocketing since launch and since my original article.

Naturally, my airdrop value grew to a little over $3,500. I have most of my $TIA staked in the blockchain for future airdrops and the 16% APR $TIA earnings at the moment.