Celestia’s mainnet is expected to launch tomorrow, along with its own token, which will become available for trading on centralized exchanges.
Centralized exchanges including KuCoin and Bybit have announced their respective plans to commence trading of Celestia (TIA) tokens at an estimated time of 10am EST. Both platforms stated that they will initiate trading for TIA against the USDT stablecoin.
A Celestia employee confirmed The Block’s launch timeline. Celestia’s GitHub repository also lists a due date for the mainnet launch: October 31.
The project has reserved 60 million tokens for an airdrop to active users on Ethereum Layer 2s, stakers on Cosmos Hub and Osmosis, and developers in the broader crypto space. The snapshot for the airdrop was taken on January 1, 2023.
At the expected mainnet launch tomorrow, up to 1 billion tokens will be minted on the network. This means that the airdrop represents 6% of the total supply.
What is Celestia?
Unlike monolithic Layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum and Solana, Celestia aims to be a modular network. This design aims to make it easier for developers to create new blockchains using their platform.
The Celestia architecture is designed so that nodes reach consensus on cross-chain parallel transactions, which are executed off-chain. These blockchains will be verified through a system of fraud and proof of data availability.
In October 2022, Celestia Labs announced it had raised $55 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, in a funding round led by Bain Capital and Polychain.