Celestia, a modular blockchain network conceived as the “data availability layer” of the Ethereum rollup and L2 world and built on the Cosmos SDK, announced a few days ago the launch of the crypto TIA, which will be accompanied by an interesting airdrop.
All early adopters of the Cosmos ecosystem such as Stakers and Relayers, contributors on Github and users of the major Ethereum rollups are eligible to redeem the cryptocurrency until 17 October.
Let’s find out together how to check your eligibility, how to claim and how to predict the price of each TIA.
All the details below.
Celestia announces crypto airdrop for active users on Ethereum’s L2
Cosmos SDK-based modular blockchain Celestia recently announced that it is in the process of launching its native TIA crypto with airdrop to a specific group of individuals.
The crypto network, which acts as a ‘data availability layer’ in Ethereum’s rollup world to facilitate the use of data space for compressed TXs, will be giving away a total of 60 million tokens to all those who have lent their support to the growth of the Cosmos ecosystem and layer 2 context, as well as key contributors to the Github repository platform.
To be more specific, we can look at this table summarising 4 categories of users considered eligible for Celestia’s airdrop, which is due to 576,653 different addresses and 7,579 developers.
In particular, it is interesting to note that within the “Early Adopters of Ethereum Rollups” category, the main criterion is to be in the top 50% of active users of the top 10 TVL rollups as ranked by L2beat.
This means that even those who are unfamiliar with the Celestia project and those who may never have been interested in the Cosmos ecosystem BUT have been using Ethereum layer-2s for some time will receive the airdrop of the crypto TIA.
It should be noted that the snapshot was taken on the 1st of January 2023 (Ethereum block 16308181) and that all addresses that had an ETH countervalue of less than $50 on that date were excluded.
In general, all eligible Cosmos stakers and rollup users will receive between 50 and 110 TIAs, while developers will receive between 1200 and 5000 TIAs.
Given this huge disparity in the pre-determined allocation, many have criticised the criteria adopted by the Celestia team as being completely unbalanced in favour of one category of stakeholder over the other.
How to check if you are eligible to redeem the TIA token
As reported above, many users who are active in Ethereum roll ups before 1 January 2023 will be eligible for the Celestia airdrop and will be able to redeem between 50 and 110 TIA cryptos.
To check if you are one of the lucky early users, you need to go to the project’s official website and click on “Check TIA Eligibility”.
Be careful, as you will only be able to claim the tokens until 14:00 Italian time on 17 October 2023: all “unclaimed” tokens will be distributed to developers and other eligible addresses at a later date.
By connecting your wallet and accepting the terms and conditions, you can instantly check if your address is eligible for the Celestia Airdrop and how many tokens you will receive.
This requires a cryptographic signature from your wallet (Ethereum network) for which there is NO fee.
If you do not wish to link your wallet, you can still manually verify the eligibility of a specific address.
If you are found eligible to redeem the crypto TIA, you will need to link a Celestia address to your account.
If you do not have a Celestia address (currently still in testnet under the name “Mocha-4 testnet”), you can easily install a Keplr or Leap wallet to create one.
If you have any doubts about how to connect the network in question to Keplr or Leap wallets, you can consult the Celestia documents which explain all the necessary steps step by step.
Once you’ve entered your address, you can click on “Claim TIA” and that’s it: the tokens will automatically be sent on 17th October to the address you’ve entered, corresponding to Block 1 of the new network that will be launched in parallel with mainnet.
Crypto TIA price predictions: how much is Celestia’s airdrop worth?
All that remains at this point is to talk about crypto TIA price predictions to see how much Celestia’s much-criticised airdrop will be worth.
In order to be able to talk about prices, it is first necessary to take a look at the token’s tokenomics.
The maximum supply is infinite, while the Genesis supply is set at 1 billion TIAs, divided as follows
- Investors: 35.6%
- Foundation: 26.8%.
- Community: 20%.
- Team: 17.6%
The team and investors will only receive 33% of their respective allocations at the launch of the main network, with a vesting period of 2 to 3 years.
In the first year, the crypto TIA will be subject to inflation of 8%, which will decrease by 10% to 1.5% each year.
According to information published by the Celestia team on their blog, the initial supply available at launch (the one that can be openly traded on the market) will be around 250 million TIAs, a 25% reduction compared to the Genesis supply.
Now that we know the context in which TIA is positioned and have some information on tokenomics, we can try to make a prediction on the initial price of the cryptocurrency.
Let’s assume that the Celestia project falls within the top 100 cryptos on Coinmarketcap, so its market capitalization is over $265m (mcap of ZIL, which is in 100th place).
So, knowing that the supply in circulation is TIA 250 million, we can conclude that the token will be worth at least $1.06.
However, it is difficult to imagine that the new token will rise above the 40th position in CoinMarketCap, where ARB currently sits with a capitalization of $1.128 billion.
Therefore, we can assume that the maximum price will be around $4.5.
It is also very interesting to note that on the decentralised perpetual trading platform Aevo, TIA’s Perp, which can be traded in advance of the actual listing, is currently quoted at $2.7 per token, but was opened at $7.
More or less the entire Celestia community agrees that the $1-4.5 range is an acceptable price for early trading.
There are those who are shooting for prices above $10-15, but this is probably done to generate hype and speculation, given that not even the top projects launched via airdrop have been successful enough to take the initial capitalisation above $3 billion.