Celestia went to mainnet today. Huge accomplishment and the team should be proud. Not only is it a technical feat, but they successfully memed the modular stack into existence and made altDA socially acceptable. I’d also argue they increased awareness of what DA and DAS are 10-100x.

Soon after the launch, a pair was spun up on Osmosis, and trading was enabled on Kucoin and Bitmex. Osmosis was trading closer to $2.50 / TIA whereas Kucoin was oscillating between $2.00 and $2.30. Bybit pushed their launch a few times. Binance opened exactly when they said they would. The pre-launch to post-launch transition of the TIA perp on Hyperliquid was seamless though someone was hedging a ton (annualized funding was -4000% for a while) Current price at time of writing is $2.33 on Binance. After Binance went live, the price didn’t really dip below $2.20. I would not be surprised if this is where the market maker strikes are at. Overall, think this was probably below where people expected today to be, especially in light of recent bullishness.

In spite of making it to mainnet, the launch was not the smoothest.

Ren’s tweet around the experience summarizes it well:

i'm happy that celestia hit mainnet but some things that are usually left unsaid should be said, some observations from the trenches/anon group chats (aka the actual dedicated crypto users who touch the chain daily):

the amount of services ecosystems need to work in unison today is increasing, wallets, block explorers, bridging, frontends rendering assets properly, etc… if they’re not up when trading is live, people panic, imagine depositing money or bridging and it not showing up

having a lot of gas tokens is painful, for example normally bridging to osmosis is fine, but in this case when the swap pool wasn’t live, a lot of users had their TIA in limbo

metamask snaps are barely functional for non-evm chains, users should probably not being using them unless they’re willing to go through a lot of pain

having native usdc cex integration is really important for ecosystems, if you’re airdropping to ethereum users, don’t expect them to want to hold ATOM or OSMO to get back to CEX

but all of this is solveable, as new ecosystems emerge instead of letting transfers/trading happen at genesis, lock the transfers for 1-2 days to let infrastructure spin up and be stable, dydx is doing a great job at making sure all the infrastructure surrounding their chain is up before launching the product for users

Couldn’t say it any better. There’s a lot of money at play when a new chain launches, and it should be the norm to slow rollout to ensure as good UX as possible. I think slow rollouts make the most sense, but think dry runs on testnets could also go some ways here. Using the chain is painful for most users. Lots to be desired here. Pls reach out if you’re working on or thinking about this.

Some other thoughts/observations…

We’re entering the era of commoditized DA. DA costs are going to 0 and it’s gonna be a fun time to be a developer of a rollup or of an application on a rollup.

I wonder if Celestia launch will light a fire under folks working on DA (cough cough ETH core devs). When will Avail launch? When does EigenDA launch? Will 4844+ get prioritized in Electra?

The explorer experience still leaves much to be desired here. While it’s not hard to see the status of a tx, it would be great ot see more about the blobs that have been paid for sorted by namespace. Celenium seems a bit better here, but the blob viewer doesn’t always seem to show blobs. Modular Cloud seems to be a bit better here.

About 12 hours in, Celenium shows that total fees are 13.2K TIA ($30,756). I don’t know if all fees are just paid to block producers or if there’s some burn mechanism on Celestia. Assuming they are all paid to validators, current usage is similar to what Solana validators are earning from tx fees daily ($64,732).

What appears below may be incorrect, pls correct me if it is

Someone posted a bunch of blobs 507 bytes in size for .013 TIA ($.03029). Arbitrum/Optimism do ~100MB in calldata today, so at current prices and assuming cost scales linearly, this would be $6k / day which is much less than the $20-30k paid today. I’m not confident about this as it’s very likely the person who sent these txs may have overpaid. Someone else, earlier in the day, paid 0.79 TIA for 921.32 Kb which at 100MB/day would net out to ~$1600/day. Still room for improvement.

Nothing written here should be perceived or taken as financial advice. Everything I write is my own opinion and does not reflect the opinion of my employer.