Celestia

Layer 1 Updated May 2026

What is Celestia?

Celestia is the first modular blockchain designed exclusively for data availability (DA). Instead of doing everything a traditional blockchain does (execution, consensus, settlement, data availability), Celestia focuses on just one thing: making sure transaction data is published and available for anyone to verify.

This modular approach lets rollups (L2s) publish their data to Celestia instead of Ethereum, reducing costs dramatically while maintaining strong security guarantees.

The Modular Thesis

Traditional (monolithic) blockchains like Ethereum do everything in one layer:

Monolithic: Execution + Consensus + Settlement + Data Availability

Modular blockchains separate these functions:

Modular:
  Execution       → Rollup (Arbitrum, zkSync, custom appchain)
  Consensus       → Ethereum or Celestia
  Settlement      → Ethereum (or standalone)
  Data Availability → Celestia (or Ethereum Danksharding)

By specializing, each layer can optimize independently. Celestia optimizes for cheap, scalable data availability.

How Celestia Works

Data Availability Sampling (DAS)

Celestia’s key innovation is Data Availability Sampling. Instead of downloading all transaction data to verify it’s available, light nodes download small random chunks:

Full data: [chunk1] [chunk2] [chunk3] [chunk4] [chunk5] ... [chunk100]

Light node downloads: [chunk3] ✓ [chunk47] ✓ [chunk89] ✓
→ Statistically confident ALL data is available
→ Without downloading everything

This means you can run a Celestia light node on a smartphone. The more nodes sampling, the stronger the guarantee that data hasn’t been withheld.

Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs)

Celestia uses Namespaced Merkle Trees — a data structure that lets each rollup query only its own data from a block, ignoring other rollups’ data. This makes data retrieval efficient even as the number of rollups grows.

Celestia vs Ethereum for Data Availability

Feature	Celestia	Ethereum (with EIP-4844)
Primary purpose	Data availability	Execution + consensus + settlement + DA
DA throughput	~6.7 MB/s (growing)	~0.75 MB per blob
DA cost	Very low	Higher (but improving)
Security	Tendermint PoS (~$3B staked)	Ethereum PoS (~$40B+ staked)
Data sampling	DAS (light clients verify)	Full nodes must download blobs
Ecosystem	Rollups, sovereign chains	L2s, dApps, DeFi

Key tradeoff: Celestia is cheaper and purpose-built for DA, but Ethereum has far stronger economic security. Some rollups use Celestia for cost savings; others stay on Ethereum for security.

The TIA Token

Celestia’s native token TIA is used for:

Staking — secure the network via PoS
Gas fees — pay for data publication
Governance — vote on protocol upgrades
Bootstrapping — rollups can use TIA for initial gas before launching their own token

TIA launched in October 2023 with a large airdrop (~60M tokens to ~758K addresses).

Sovereign Rollups

Celestia introduced the concept of sovereign rollups — rollups that don’t settle on another chain. They publish data to Celestia but maintain their own settlement and governance:

Traditional rollup:  Execution → settles on Ethereum → data on Ethereum
Sovereign rollup:    Execution → settles on itself  → data on Celestia

This gives rollups more independence but also more responsibility for their own security.

Celestia Ecosystem

Projects building on Celestia for DA:

Ethereum L2s — Manta Pacific, Movement Labs
Sovereign chains — Dymension (RISC-V rollups), Fuel
Rollup frameworks — Rollkit (sovereign rollups on Celestia)
Modular DA — Blobstream (bridges Celestia DA proofs to Ethereum)

Competitors

Project	Approach
EigenDA	DA layer by EigenLabs (restaking-based)
Avail	DA chain by Polygon team (similar to Celestia)
Near DA	Data availability on NEAR Protocol
Ethereum Danksharding	Scaling L1 DA natively (in progress)

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Celestia an L1 or an L2? A: It’s a modular L1 — but it doesn’t run smart contracts or applications. It’s a specialized DA L1.

Q: Does Celestia compete with Ethereum? A: It’s complementary for most use cases. Rollups can use Celestia for DA while settling on Ethereum. But for DA fees, they do compete.

Q: Why not just use Ethereum for DA? A: Cost. Publishing data to Celestia is significantly cheaper. As Ethereum’s danksharding roadmap progresses, this gap may narrow.