What is Celestia (TIA)? Coin created by CIA Hacker Spikes 800%

Now that Bitcoin ETF fever has broken, investors big and small are looking for the next hot asset. Until it shakes up the Bitcoin half of things, many crypto-watchers are watching Celestia, a new coin with interesting architecture and a controversial top 50 entry.

TIA, a native of Celestia, went live following an October 2023 airdrop. Since then, he has lived up to his name and skyrocketed with an incredible 800% appreciation. The token has been one of the best-performing digital assets over the past 30 days, gaining more than 10% in the past week and currently sitting near the $18 price range on CoinGecko.

The green candles have made it a hot topic in the community basis To CoinMarketCap, but Celestia has become hot in the crypto ecosystem due to its founder's controversial background. CEO Mustafa Al Bassam, known by his former hacker alias “tFlow”, was a core member of the notorious hacking group Lulzsec when he was a teenager.

In the year Before its arrest in 2011, the group was responsible for major cyberattacks on targets such as the CIA and Sony.

Since then, al-Bass has been open about his hacking past, and says his favorite exploit was hacking the Westboro Baptist Church live on a radio show.

Despite early cybercriminal activities, Al Bassam continued to study computer science at university and is now building Celestian, a novel modular blockchain system. But with such reform work, it is clear that his return is creating waves in the community.

How does Celestia differ?

Celestia is a modular blockchain network that differs from conventional blockchain architectures in that it resolves consensus in execution. This distinction is critical: in classical blockchains, each node verifies both consensus (via block headers) and execution (all transactions are valid and result in valid state transitions). Celestia, however, focuses on ensuring the presence and consistency of transactions in the block header without executing the transactions itself.

This means that the chain does not verify the content of the transactions, but verifies their availability for others to verify.

Execution in Celestia is done in so-called “wrap-ups”. Unlike monolithic blockchains where all transactions are verified on one chain, state transitions in Celsia are verified on these rolls. The architecture uses several key technologies: base-layer hashing code, namespace Merkle trees, and data availability sampling to allow light clients to efficiently verify transaction ordering and availability without running everything on-chain.

Rollups can post transactions to the underlying layer in namespaces, and clients only need to download data relevant to their application.

By distinguishing between communication and performance, Celestia aims to achieve scalability and a modular architecture.

Celestia's model is important because it doesn't want everything to happen on one chain. By splitting components into separate layers, Celestia aims to allow multiple packages and applications to efficiently share a base consensus layer.

This modular approach allows for greater scalability as it offloads the computational burden of executing transactions from the main chain. It also allows different applications to run on their own without being constrained by the rules and performance of the main chain. This could lead to a diverse and robust ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps).

The team says they'll soon be able to handle 1GB blocks, which would allow them to support global deployments—though that goal seems like a stretch right now.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.