Every project on this site carries one of three verdicts about whether it is worth holding for the next ten years.
Hold. A project likely to still be here in a decade, with a token that does real work and no finding that its holders are being extracted from, misled, or replaced by insiders.
Watch. A project that could go either way over the same horizon. The business may be real, but how the project is owned, run, or growing sits in a gray area that keeps the case from settling.
Avoid. A project where specific reasons not to hold have been found. Either the token has no clear reason to exist, or the way it works or is governed carries a defect that survives every argument in its favour.
None of these verdicts is a price call: a Hold does not mean buy now, and an Avoid does not mean sell now. Each is a judgment about the token itself, not the company or the technology behind it. A company can sign a client every week, and none of that revenue has to reach its token; a technology can be sound while the token routed through it has no clear job.
The token is what a person is buying, and the token is what these pages judge.
What Celestia is
Celestia is a blockchain that other blockchains build on top of. It does not process transactions or settle payments for its own users. What it does is store the transaction data of newer blockchains that rely on it, and make sure that data is available for anyone in the world to read and verify.
The newer blockchains are called rollups. A rollup runs its own programs and settles its own transactions, but it publishes a summary of what it did to Celestia. Celestia stores that summary in a way that anyone can retrieve and check, and that is what lets the rollup's own users trust that their transactions actually happened.
The technical name for this job is data availability. Celestia was designed for it, from the ground up, and is the first blockchain built with data availability as its only purpose. The network launched in October 2023 and has been operating continuously since then.
Why TIA exists
TIA is the token of the Celestia network, and it does three jobs.
The first is payment. Every rollup that wants to publish data to Celestia pays a fee in TIA. That is where the network's fee revenue comes from.
The second is bond. Celestia is secured by a set of independent operators called validators. To become a validator, an operator has to lock up TIA as a security deposit. If they act honestly, they earn income. If they misbehave, the network can take the deposit.
The third is share. Anyone who holds TIA can delegate it to a validator and receive a share of the fees that validator earns, in proportion to how much they delegated. This is called staking, and it is the way TIA holders participate in the network's economy.
The money the network earns
Celestia earned $40,813 in transaction fees during the year to 24 August 2026. Over its whole life, from December 2023, the network has captured $3,289,913.
The two numbers do not sit comfortably beside each other. About ninety-nine per cent of the fees Celestia has ever earned were earned before the last twelve months. The rest of the record shows a decline, and the last several months have averaged less than three thousand dollars each.
A closer measure of the current state is the ninety-day annualised run rate, which reports what the network is earning right now: about $27,172 a year. That is thirty per cent below the trailing twelve months, and about two orders of magnitude below the network's own launch period.
The reason to state the numbers precisely, rather than smooth them, is that they are what they are. Celestia is a real network with real applications built on it, some of them substantial. But the amount that anyone is paying to use the underlying data availability service is small, and the trend has not been upward.
Source: DefiLlama chain fees
Fees on Celestia, month by month
Celestia's monthly transaction fees, December 2023 to August 2026. The launch month of December 2023 captured most of the fees the network has ever earned. Every month since has been a fraction of it, and recent months have averaged less than three thousand dollars each.
Where the money goes
Every dollar of fee revenue that Celestia collects flows to validators and to the TIA holders who have delegated their tokens to those validators. Nothing is burned, nothing is held by the protocol, and nothing goes to a company or foundation.
The mechanism is called fee distribution, and it is part of the software framework Celestia was built on. When a validator produces a block, the transaction fees inside that block are split between the validator and everyone who has delegated TIA to them. The split is proportional to how much each delegator contributed. A holder who owns TIA and does not delegate it receives nothing; a holder who delegates receives their share of whatever their validator earns.
The protocol itself keeps nothing. There is no fee switch, no cut for a foundation, no share taken by a company. What the network earns, the network pays out.
Source: DefiLlama methodology
The supply is uncapped
Celestia does not have a fixed maximum supply. New TIA is created every day and paid out as staking rewards to validators and their delegators, and this issuance has no scheduled end.
A modelled projection puts the eventual supply at around 1.34 billion TIA, but this is a forecast rather than a rule. The actual figure depends on how much inflation the network runs over how many years, and both are subject to change through on-chain governance.
Two things are happening to the supply at the same time. The rate of staking inflation is scheduled to rise from 16.2% of the current supply to 25.2% at full modelled dilution. And there is a daily release of newly-created TIA from an ecosystem and research allocation, amounting to about 183,562 TIA per day, or roughly 67 million TIA per year at current rates.
Both of these are disclosed in the network's own economic records. Neither is a hidden allocation and neither can be adjusted upward by insiders. But together they mean that the total supply of TIA is growing, and that a holder who does not stake sees their share of the total shrink over time.
Source: DefiLlama emissions
The supply of TIA, current and modelled
The amount of TIA that exists now, and the amount projected to exist at full dilution of the current emission schedule. Neither figure is a hard cap. Supply is uncapped, and the modelled amount can be exceeded if the network keeps inflating past the current schedule.
Who owns TIA
At full dilution, insiders and early backers of Celestia will hold about 39.8% of the total supply between them. Right now they hold 47.9%, and that share is scheduled to decline over the coming years as new TIA is issued into the network for staking rewards and ecosystem development.
The breakdown, using the network's own categories: the initial core contributors hold 15.2% of current supply, and the earliest investors (Series A and B rounds plus the seed round) hold 32.8%. Airdrop recipients hold 18.4%, ecosystem programs hold 17.4%, and the remainder is staking inflation issued since the network launched.
The dilution is structural. As new TIA is created and paid out, the proportion held by early participants gets smaller, and this is enforced by the schedule rather than by anyone's promise. There is no cliff unlock, no lump-sum vesting event, and no undisclosed allocation bucket. The reduction from 47.9 to 39.8 percent is expected, gradual, and on the record.
Almost all of the concentration story is here. About half of Celestia's supply is held by parties who received TIA before the network was public, and that fact is disclosed openly.
Source: DefiLlama emissions
Who owns TIA today, and at full dilution
The share of TIA held by each category of allocation, now and when the current emission schedule completes. Insider and private-sale share shrinks from 47.9% to 39.8%; ecosystem and staking inflation grow to make up the difference.
The price, against the earning
Celestia's market value is $368,135,598, and the fees the network is currently earning are running at about $27,172 a year.
Divide one by the other and you get a price of roughly 13,549 times the current annual takings. That is a very high ratio by any ordinary measure. It means that buying the whole of Celestia at today's price would cost more than thirteen thousand years of what it currently earns.
The framework does not read this as evidence of fraud or misrepresentation. Celestia has a real product, real applications built on top of it, an open codebase and a working economy. What the ratio does say is that the market is not pricing Celestia on the basis of what it earns today. It is pricing Celestia on the basis of what it might become if data availability turns out to be as valuable to future blockchains as its architects have argued.
For scale, a wireless network project once traded near 87,000 times its annual fees, a level often cited as what a runaway crypto valuation looks like when a price becomes disconnected from any measurable business underneath. Celestia sits below that but well above most infrastructure businesses that have measurable revenue at all. The number is stated here so a reader can take the harder view. Even taken at face value, the ratio does not on its own change the verdict; what would change it is either a sustained decline in whatever activity remains, or a discovery of the kind of concealment the other tests are designed to catch.
Source: DefiLlama fees, CoinGecko market cap
Market value against annual earnings
How much the market pays for each dollar the network actually earns in fees. Celestia at 13,549× means the market is paying more than thirteen thousand years of current fees for the whole network. A wireless network project once traded at 87,000×, an example often cited as what a runaway crypto valuation looks like.
Who runs Celestia
Celestia's software rules are decided by the people who hold TIA and the validators who secure the network. There is no company that can force a change through on its own, and no founding team that holds a special override. Software upgrades happen through on-chain voting where every TIA holder can participate, with voting power scaled to how much TIA each participant has staked.
This is a common design pattern in the Cosmos family of blockchains, which Celestia is a part of. Its strength is that it eliminates unilateral team authority. Its weakness is that voting power tracks stake, and the network offers no structural protection against a single party accumulating enough TIA to dominate votes. At current prices, half of the circulating supply of TIA could be purchased for approximately $184 million, an amount within reach of a well-capitalised institution.
That risk is not hypothetical, and it has been named openly by one of Celestia's own co-founders. John Adler, writing in the Celestia forum in 2025, argued that the current governance design would make it "challenging to construct a protocol for voting that actually involves end-user voting vs large validator operators, the very entities we don't want capturing all votes since they would simply vote for themselves." The proposal he put forward would move Celestia away from stake-weighted proof-of-stake and toward a different model. The proposal is under discussion; nothing about the current governance has been changed.
Source: John Adler, Proof-of-Governance as the Endgame for LSTs, Celestia Forum, June 2025
What Hold means for someone holding TIA
Celestia is a working blockchain built for a specific job. The design is honest, the fees pass through to holders who stake, and no finding on the record shows that its holders are being extracted from, misled, or replaced by insiders. What is missing is the activity that would make the network's price make sense on ordinary terms.
The case in favour rests on structure. There is no take rate; the protocol collects nothing. There is no company sitting behind Celestia that owns the network or can force a change to it. Insiders hold a large share of supply and that share is scheduled to shrink rather than grow. The code is open, the whitepaper is a serious piece of engineering, and applications built on Celestia are real and named. Every question directed at whether the project extracts unfair value, misrepresents itself, or enriches insiders at the expense of holders came back clean.
The case against rests on scale. The network's transaction fees have declined roughly to a floor over the last two years, and current activity is small enough that any comparison against the network's market value produces a ratio that is very high by any ordinary measure. Whether Celestia grows into that price depends on whether data availability turns out to be valuable to the newer blockchains that would use it, and how much of that value flows back to Celestia rather than to competing providers.
Hold does not mean buy now. It is a judgment about whether Celestia is still standing in ten years, and it says nothing about today's price or about whether this is a good week to own it.
Hold is what that combination is worth. A network with clean structure and a real product, whose economics have not yet materialised at scale, and whose survival over a decade turns on whether a specialised piece of infrastructure finds the customers its design was built for.
Someone who owns TIA owns a share of a working data availability network, and the right to receive a portion of its fees by staking their tokens. What they do not own is protection against the supply of TIA growing over time, and what they do not own is the growth in usage that the current price of TIA has already assumed. Both facts are on the record, and both should be part of the decision to hold.
ROI through the years
Bought and held to 9 September 2026, never traded. CELESTIA has not existed long enough for a three, five or ten-year answer, so there is one row: everything since it started trading.
Bought at listing, October 2023
−85%
Returns and falls are measured on daily closing prices, so a one-minute crash that did not settle cannot enter them. The worst drop is the largest peak-to-trough fall inside that row's window, not the token's all-time worst. Bars sit on a log scale of what one dollar became. Sources: Kraken, Binance.
What could not be answered
Three things about Celestia are not answered on this page, because the information needed to answer them was not available.
How TIA is spread across the people holding it. The distribution of TIA across individual wallets, how the total sits between large and small holders, and how much is currently staked as opposed to sitting on exchanges was not accessible for this page. Concentrated ownership and broad ownership look different from each other in ways that could not be reported.
Formal security audits of the core software. Audit records for the Celestia node software were not available in the sources this page reads. Independent verification of the code that produces and validates Celestia blocks, if it exists in the public record, could not be found.
What Celestia's core contributors publish about their own targets. The organisation that maintains Celestia's software publishes ecosystem updates and technical documentation, but a structured account of the network's own performance goals, and how progress against those goals is being measured, was not available in the sources this page reads.
Karinva takes no payment from any project it covers.