There has been much anticipation for Celestia’s mainnet launch, which is expected to go live tomorrow.
The native token of the modular blockchain network, $TIA, has already climbed to $3.15 on the futures market, as seen on decentralised derivatives exchange Helix.
Following the mainnet launch, the token will become available for trading on centralised exchanges. The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, has set a tentative listing date of 31 October at 16:00 UTC.
Other leading platforms like KuCoin and Bybit have also shown their interest in listing the token and have said that it will be available to trade at 14:00 UTC.
With a total supply of 1 billion, $TIA holds a fully diluted value of $3.1billion based on the futures price.
Back in September this year, Celestia revealed its Genesis Drop. It invited 7,579 developers and 576,653 on-chain addresses on Ethereum rollups, Cosmos Hub, and Osmosis to join Celestia, allowing them to pay for blobspace and secure the network from the first block.
Eligible developers and addresses were given time till 17 October to add their address to the Celestia genesis block. The announcement stated that the tokens claimed via the Genesis Drop will be accessible directly in-wallet from the first block.
The team has allocated 60 million $TIA, which is 6% of total supply, to early adopters who will receive it via airdrop. This will be distributed amongst different categories like $20m for research and public goods, and an early modular ecosystem.
The rest of the 40 million of tokens will be equally distributed between early adopters of Ethereum rollups and stakers and IBC relayers on Cosmos Hub and Osmosis.
However, there has been no clarity on how much of the remaining total supply will be circulating on release. Liquidity for $TIA also stands quite low on Helix with daily trade volume equating to around $3,000.
Nevertheless, the community eagerly awaits the mainnet launch which will see a maximum of one billion tokens being minted on the network. This means the airdrop accounts for 6% of the total supply.
As per the official website, Celestia calls itself a modular data availability network that securely scales with the number of users, making it easy for anyone to launch their own blockchain.
Its architecture is designed in such a way that nodes will reach consensus on transactions in parallel across chains, executed in an off-chain manner. These blockchains will be verified through a system of fraud and data availability proofs.
Last year in October, the blockchain raised $55m at a valuation exceeding $1bn. The Series A and B funding round was led by venture capital firms Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
