Celestia's mainnet expected to go live tomorrow, including TIA airdrop and exchange listings

Celestia’s mainnet is expected to launch tomorrow along with its native token, which will become available for trading on centralized exchanges.

Centralized exchanges, including KuCoin and Bybit, announced their respective plans to initiate trading for Celestia (TIA) tokens at an estimated time of 10 a.m. EST tomorrow. The trading platforms stated that they will initiate trading for TIA against the USDT stablecoin. Binance also confirmed it would list TIA and tentatively open trading at 12 p.m. EST.

A Celestia contributor confirmed the launch timeline to The Block. Celestia’s GitHub repository also indicates a due date for the mainnet launch of Oct. 31.

The project has set aside 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 Jan. 1, 2023.

Upon the anticipated mainnet launch tomorrow, a maximum of 1 billion tokens will be minted on the network. This means the airdrop accounts for 6% of the total supply.

What is Celestia?

Unlike monolithic Layer 1 blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana, Celestia aims to be a modular network. This design intends to make it easier for developers to create new blockchains using its platform.

The Celestia architecture is designed so 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.

In October 2022, Celestia Labs announced it had raised $55 million at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, in a funding round led by Bain Capital and Polychain.