I remember looking into Celestia earlier this year, or was it the end of last year? It had piqued my interest as part of a suite of potential Ethereum scaling solutions... one of many! Anyway, the idea was that Celestia (as part of the Cosmos ecosystem) would provide decentralised data availability for other networks.

Now, how does that scale other networks? Well, one of the big pain points is network congestion... and this is often most apparent on Ethereum as it is the network that actually is being used most of the time. Sure, the other Layer 1 networks seem faster... but the painful truth is that they are just nowhere near being stressed to the same level as Ethereum.

With the constellation of Layer 2s and coming Layer 3s around Ethereum... as well as the incoming zk-rollups and EVMs, there is more and more need to offload the data availability to a different place. Celestia is one of the leading projects in this space... but it is going to competing heavily with the internal proto-danksharding that is on Ethereum's roadmap and coming in fast.

At one point in time, competing against Ethereum's roadmap was sort of okay... Ethereum developed slowly and in a decentralised manner, was a bit "when its ready". So, centralised teams could run faster and try to capture market share before the internal solutions were in place.

These days... Ethereum is progressing fast a project, and Celestia might be on the wrong end of that. But still, proto-danksharding is still in development... and Celestia is planning to launch in October!

... and with any genesis of a new decentralised network comes the airdrop, and in the case of Celestia the airdrop heavily favours those who have been running network infrastructure on the Ethereum and Cosmos networks. This is probably pretty prudent... as much as "users" (cough... airdrop hunters...) complain, you need the infrastructure before the users! Especially mercenary users who are only there to collect the tokens and dump...

However, there are still smaller allocations for Cosmos and Osmos stakers, as well as active users of Ethereum rollups. All the snapshots were taken at the start of 2023... so, a long time ago... that hopefully will rule out a few of the more opportunistic accounts that have little interest in the long-term vision of Celestia as an infrastructure project.

If you are a user of these chains... or if you are a developer or node operator, you might find that you have TIA tokens available to claim. In a bit of an annoyance, the drop is at genesis... which is in less than 20 days. You can check the Celestia blog that outlines all the information and criteria here: https://blog.celestia.org/genesis-drop/

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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