It orders bytes without running the program inside them. That refusal created scalable blobspaceāand divided responsibility among rollups, samplers, validators, TIA voters and an offchain social layer.
In 2019 Mustafa Al-Bassam proposed a ledger that would order data and prove it available while interested clients executed applications. Less base-layer knowledge meant less duplicated work.
Mainnet Beta turned that thesis into Lemon Mint in October 2023. Celestia still runs its own payment, staking and governance state machine; what it refuses is interpreting each application blob.
Validators arrange shares, ReedāSolomon-extend the square and commit every row and column. A light node asks for unpredictable coordinates and checks their proofs.
Enough successful samples make withholding unlikely, not impossible. Security needs broad sampling and an honest bridge route for bad-encoding proofs; an eclipse attack can remove that route.
An NMT orders leaves by namespace and proves that the returned slice is complete. A rollup can fetch its lane without downloading every neighbor.
The namespace is neither a private folder nor an authenticated app identity. Celestia confirms the commitment and publication rules, not whether a trade, game move or rollup state transition was correct.
DAS answers whether fresh block data was published. Since v6, light nodes sample a rolling seven-day window and may prune older blobs.
A rollup that needs history for syncing, explorers or users must preserve it itself or contract with archival providers. Free public archive service is not a protocol promise.
One billion TIA began across public, ecosystem, backer and contributor buckets. Inflation expands supply; after Lotus, rewards earned by locked accounts follow the unelapsed vesting schedule instead of all becoming immediately liquid.
Holders vote on selected parameters and a community pool receiving 2% of block rewards. Core changes additionally need CIP discussion, development and software adoption. Core upgrades use validator readiness signals weighted by voting power, not ordinary TIA parameter votes. The standard mainnet delay after the 5/6 threshold is one week; individual upgrade records can specify exceptions, as v5 did with one block.
The Foundation funds development and directs its own stake, including a validator delegation program. That is material influence, but different from a unilateral token admin key or ownership rights for every TIA holder. Separating application execution did not remove coordination: it made the work left to rollups, storage operators and the upgrade process more explicit.
Execution moves to interested clients.
Lemon Mint makes blobspace live.
Backer and contributor cliffs open.
Inflation falls and locked-account rewards enter vesting.
Inflation falls again; sampling window becomes seven days.
Three-second, 32 MiB operating settings activate.
Last evidence review: 2026-09-05
Celestia is a proof-of-stake data-availability network descended from the 2019 LazyLedger design. Validators order blocks and commit application blobs; light nodes can sample coded shares. Rollups bring their own execution and settlement. TIA is the native fee, staking and limited-governance asset.
Rollups need transaction data published so users can reconstruct and challenge state, but making every base-layer node execute every application recreates a throughput bottleneck. Celestia narrows the shared job to consensus and availability, leaving each rollup responsible for what its bytes mean and whether its state transition is valid.
A BlobTx pays in TIA and places bytes under a namespace. Celestia erasure-codes shares into a two-dimensional square and commits row and column roots; random samples give light clients probabilistic confidence that fresh data can be recovered. Namespaced Merkle proofs return a complete namespace slice. Staking selects consensus validators, while parameter votes, offchain CIPs and node adoption split governance across different actors.
Since v3, validators signal readiness for a version within the protocol. The documented standard mainnet process schedules activation one week after validators representing 5/6 of voting power signal the same version. This follows CIP discussion and software preparation, rather than an ordinary TIA parameter vote. Individual upgrade records can specify exceptions: mainnet v5 used a one-block delay.
No. It validates payment, namespace, size and commitment rules, then makes bytes available. The rollupās execution and settlement systems interpret them.
Repeated successful samples raise confidence that a fresh blockās coded data was published and recoverable. The result is probabilistic and does not prove application correctness.
The protocol does not guarantee permanent storage. Light nodes use a rolling seven-day sampling window, so rollups must arrange archival storage and retrieval when they need older history.
They let an application fetch a complete proof for its own ordered slice without downloading every other blob. They provide neither privacy nor identity.
Transaction and blob fees, proof-of-stake delegation or validation, and votes on selected parameters and community-pool spending. Rollups may optionally use it as gas.
No fixed maximum is documented. One billion existed at genesis and protocol inflation adds supply under a schedule now heading toward a 1.5% floor.
Since v3, validators signal readiness for a version within the protocol. The documented standard mainnet process schedules activation one week after validators representing 5/6 of voting power signal the same version. This follows CIP discussion and software preparation, rather than an ordinary TIA parameter vote. Individual upgrade records can specify exceptions: mainnet v5 used a one-block delay.
No. Official materials establish protocol uses, not equity, redemption, revenue sharing or ownership of applicationsā assets.
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