Is there a reason to keep holding TIA
Good morning/evening
OK so you may have caught the odd grumble about the TIA that I have my posts, I know it is my own fault, I FOMO'd in when you were getting airdrops left right and centre for holding TIA, so I DCA'd into it and by the time I had enough, yep you guessed it there was no more airdrops! Oh well, so the TIA was staked and although I did earn on my staked TIA, I also was too late unstaking and missed the boat and all it did after the 30 days it took to unstake was go down, way down......
https://coinmarketcap.com
Now I do have some hopium for Q4, but if there is no real ALT season, then I thought I should take a look and see if it is worth selling at a loss or if it has a chance.
What is Celastia and TIA
Celestia is a modular blockchain rather than a full-stack monolithic chain. Instead of doing everything (execution, smart contracts, etc.), it specialises in providing secure data availability and consensus, letting other chains or rollups use it to publish their data.
TIA is its native token. It has several roles: staking, securing the network, paying fees and data space (when rollups/chains publish data)
Total supply is 1 billion TIA. There are inflation schedules, unlocks for early investors, foundation, devs. The inflation starts higher and declines annually to a lower rate
What’s been happening.Usage, Adoption, Signals
Since its mainnet launch (October 2023), there has been some growth. Transactions on chain have increased, with rollups and independent chains beginning to use Celestia's data availability services, which are rising and Celestia has made some upgrades such as reducing block times and increasing block size to improve performance.
Challenges and risks
Token unlocks, There were large unlocks which have caused downward pressure on the price. A big cliff unlock (of many millions of tokens) triggered negative sentiment with holders.
Inflation and supply issuance, while the inflation schedule reduces over time, the early periods have higher emission, which could dilute value unless demand for staking, and usage keeps up
Concentration of token holdings means a large allocation of tokens are allocated to early investors, the team and the foundation. The dictator DAO rears its head again!
Network adoption
It has been reported that 20–50+ independent rollups/chains are using or experimenting with Celestia’s DA layer. Celestia itself has highlighted an early ecosystem of rollups and blobs (a blob is a chunk of user-submitted data short for Binary Large Object) that is published to the network for data availability representing a meaningful share of published data.
On-chain demand
fees, chain fees and network revenue are still small compared with major L1s, DeFiLlama’s Celestia page shows very low daily chain fees, recent snapshots show $100–$300/day range for chain fees/revenue), meaning current blobspace demand is real but modest in absolute dollar terms. That’s important because token value ultimately links to economic activity, fees help fund producer/validator rewards.
Staking & security
There is roughly 340M TIA staked which is around 40% with staking reward rates around 11% APR. That’s a large amount locked in security, which both reduces circulating liquidity and signals validator commitment, but it also means staking rewards dilute supply as rewards are paid.
When I was dabbling with Celestia, my tokens were staked but I also put some extra funds into Milky Way (yes I missed out on that airdrop too!) and Quasar.
MilkyWay is the flagship liquid staking platform on Celestia, and it’s currently the biggest source of locked value in the ecosystem. The idea is simple in theory, instead of staking your TIA and leaving it frozen, MilkyWay issues a liquid staking derivative, which is stTIA, that represents your staked position. This token can then be used elsewhere in DeFi, meaning you’re not forced to choose between staking rewards and liquidity. It’s effectively trying to replicate what Lido did for Ethereum, but tailored to Celestia’s modular design. MilkyWay reports around $14 million in liquid staking deposits and an even larger figure, roughly $80 million in restaking. Restaking is where things get tricky, it allows users to take their liquid staking tokens and pledge them again into additional protocols, effectively layering yield on top of yield. Now I see this as a house of cards and quite risky, so I only invested a small amount and although I did get rewards, they were minimal.
Quasar approaches things from a different angle than MilkyWay. Instead of focusing on liquid staking, Quasar is a DeFi platform designed for vault strategies and yield aggregation. Think of it as a hub where users can deposit assets and let automated strategies work to optimize returns across multiple opportunities. The project takes advantage of Celestia’s modular architecture, meaning it can scale more flexibly and experiment with cross-rollup strategies that wouldn’t be as smooth on a monolithic chain. While Quasar doesn’t command the same level of TVL as MilkyWay, it represents an important layer in the Celestia eco system, again although I did earn some rewards, I missed out on any airdrop. Perhaps my timing with everything to do with Celestia was off!
My Conclusion
Is TIA a Hold… or Just a another lesson learned?
Celestia is an ambitious project with cutting edge tech and a vibrant ecosystem forming around it, but when it comes to the TIA token itself, it feels less convincing. (unless you are here for the tech and not to make money, yes the tech side of crypto is great but I am here in the space for profits!) I see no sustained upside for holders and although protocol adoption is growing, much of the TVL is concentrated in a single protocol like MilkyWay, and other sectors are still shallow in terms of capital deployment. Pair that with a market that thrives on hype cycles, and TIA looks more like a speculative bet with no current momentum. I did trade TIA for a while and accrued more tokens, but even that has not offset the price depreciation.
All in all I see nothing that will make the TIA token worth holding, so will plan on selling it all if we have an ALT season, even if it is at a loss. I could be wrong, if so tell me in the comments. What are your thoughts about TIA or the Celestia chain? Do you think I am missing something that can make TIA a viable hold?
As always, thank you for reading and feel free to comment.
