TIA Rallies as Celestia Foundation Raises $100M in Push to Surpass Visa Transaction Capacity

Celestia (TIA) is the crypto with the strongest gains right now, rallying around 24% in the past 24 hours and 46% in the past week. The number 54 by market cap now trades for US$6.65 (AU$9.73), compared to just US$4.60 (AU$6.73) last week.

The price move comes amid favourable market conditions as Bitcoin and other major digital assets have enjoyed positive price action in the past few days. However, there is one major catalyst that is most likely responsible for TIA’s surge.

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Celestia Foundation Raises Funds in Scalability Push

TIA’s price increase comes on the back of a major development, as the Celestia Foundation just announced it has raised another US$100 million (AU$146.42 m). The total amount raised has now reached US$155 million (AU$226.9 m).

Celestia Mainnet Beta only launched in October 2023 and saw an all-time high (ATH) of US$20.91 (AU$30.61) for TIA in February of 2024. The price of TIA has been declining since the ATH, with a general lack of interest in altcoins.

Since its launch, Celestia has been busy creating a flourishing ecosystem, evidenced by the deployment of the first 20 rollup chains and Celestia data blobs accounting for over half of the data published by rollups.

This marks a shift from the traditional approach of scaling blockchains, which involved optimising a single-layered, monolithic L1 where all applications run on a shared execution layer.

Celestia Chases Visa’s Transaction Speeds

In a press release, the Celestia Foundation expanded on the blockchain’s capabilities:

But Celestia is not constrained by execution layer overhead, enabling a path to scale throughput beyond current monolithic constraints. Developers are not confined to a single smart contract language, virtual-machine, or even a rollup framework.

Celestia Foundation

The core developers recently revealed in a roadmap their plans to “relentlessly scale to 1 gigabyte blocks, bringing a massive increase in data throughput to Celestia’s rollup ecosystem”.

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And while Visa’s transactions per second (TPS) stand at an impressive 24,000 TPS, Celestia’s devs are not going to stop there:

In a previous era, the throughput of Visa (~24,000 TPS) was considered an impressive North Star. With 1 gigabyte blocks, Celestia is tracking to deliver the capacity of many Visa networks in parallel.

Celestia Foundation

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and Chairman of the Celestia Foundation said Celestia’s 2023 launch as the first data availability layer, “scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era”.

Al-Bassam added that the next step for Celestia is now taking it to fibre optic levels:

Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era – while keeping it verifiable and low latency.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and Chairman of the Celestia Foundation