Not long ago, the modular blockchain Celestia announced an airdrop plan, intending to distribute 60 million Celestia tokens TIA. The airdrop targets include 7,579 developers and 576,653 active addresses on the chain. This airdrop accounts for 6% of the total Celestia tokens.

This valuation is calculated using Celestia’s price-to-sales model, assuming that layer 2 networks pay Celestia $25 per MB for data availability and that it achieves twice the data availability of Ethereum on layer 2.

Celestia’s Value Capture

Celestia is a bottom-layer protocol that provides data availability. Its revenue comes from fees paid by the second-layer protocol for storing transaction receipts or proofs.

Currently, the second-layer protocol built on Ethereum writes about 15,000MB of data per month, with an average payment of $700 per MB (note: calculated at $1,600 per Ethereum). According to the Ethereum upgrade roadmap, EIP-4844 will introduce new and cheaper data storage fields called "blobs", reducing Ethereum data availability costs by about 90%. This sets an upper limit on DA's unit revenue.

For Celestia, the gas fee revenue it generates gives a valuation of $2.75 billion, with its storage cost per MB being around $10-25.

The vertical lines represent different levels of Celestia adoption, presented as multiples of the current cumulative Ethereum Rollup data demand (15,000 MB is equivalent to 1x Ethereum). The diagonal lines are the price-to-sales multiples of other base-layer protocols, and the intersection is the FDV valuation of Celestia reflected within the selected revenue level and multiple range.

Like other L1 tokens (and to a lesser extent L2 tokens and L3 ecosystems), the value of the TIA token is derived from current transaction demand (revenue) and all future expected transaction demand. As TIA token adoption increases as a gas token in Rollups built on top of it, the token increasingly captures the value of future economic activity across the ecosystem, in addition to DA’s Celestia-specific fee revenue, pushing the valuation range to levels similar to emerging L1s like Solana.

Celestia Customer Profile

Financial businesses like DeFi tend to favor the Ethereum ecosystem with high security and huge liquidity, and financial users have cash and financial justifications for transactions (expected profits), and they are willing to pay some reasonable fees for transactions.

Consumer businesses such as social networks or games are based on a large number of low-value transactions. Lower transaction fee requirements mean less transaction fee revenue available for sharing with the DA layer.

Celestia's DA demand side values ​​its cheapness and cheapness, and initial Rollup customers will naturally seek lower transaction unit costs, such as more consumer-focused applications or low-value financial applications.

Since the DA layer acts as the base security layer for the Rollups above, the value of the DA layer must grow proportionally with the aggregate value of the largest Rollup and its associated applications to maintain an adequate level of security.

Celestia is undoubtedly impressive technology, but the core challenge facing Celestia will be to prove whether an independent DA network has sufficient value capture to justify a long-term place in the market.