CELESTIA STAKING INSIGHTS AND ANALYSIS: 2024 ANNUAL REPORT

Celestia, a modular blockchain network, experienced remarkable growth in staking, ecosystem expansion, and technical innovation over 2024.

This report analyzes the key developments that shaped the network’s progress during the year.

KEY INSIGHTS AND TAKEAWAYS

1. Staking and Network Growth

Celestia saw a 49.5% increase in total TIA staked, rising from 470 million to 703 million TIA, thus achieving one of the highest staking ratios among all Cosmos chains. The number of delegators also surged by 65%, surpassing 411,000 by the end of the year.

2. Modular Expansion

The modular expansion experienced rapid growth, with some of the leading Layer 2 solutions choosing Celestia for data availability.

3. Consensus-Breaking Upgrades

Celestia introduced several technical advancements aimed at improving scalability and performance, including 2 consensus-breaking upgrades, Lemongrass hardfork and Ginger upgrade, that doubled Celestia’s data availability throughput, halving block times from 12 to 6 seconds.

4. Progress in Celestia’s Broader Ecosystem:

- Blobstream was introduced to extend Celestia’s DA layer to Ethereum, thus strengthening modular interoperability.

- Rollchains enabled Cosmos L1 blockchains, such as Stride and Noble, to utilize Celestia’s data availability.

- The Celestia Foundation secured an additional $100 million in funding, thus bringing Celestia’s total fundraising to $155 million.

5. Celestia hosted multiple events throughout the year, such as the Modular Summit.

TOTAL STAKE AND DELEGATORS GROWTH

The total stake in Celestia increased by 49.5% (equivalent to an increase of 232 million TIA), rising from 470 million TIA to 703 million TIA.

With over $3.2 billion staked as of December 2024, Celestia had one of the highest staking ratios (64%) among all Cosmos chains. This made the network a lucrative choice for deploying mainnet rollups and decentralized applications.

The most notable increase in staking activity was recorded in April, marked by a 24.6% growth, equivalent to an additional 121 million TIA staked.

The total number of delegators saw a substantial rise, increasing by 65% over the year. The total count grew from 248,380 to 411,069, with the most significant surge occurring in January 2024.

REDELEGATION

SIn 2024, 96,560 Celestia delegators actively redelegated their stakes between validators, with the cumulative amount of redelegated funds reaching 15.3 million TIA. Notably, the overwhelming majority of those (92.32%) were allocated to validators offering lower commission rates.

CELESTIA CUMULATIVE DATA

Celestia serves as the data availability layer for rollups and Layer 2 solutions, enabling efficient transaction data publication and accessibility. This high-throughput data availability layer can be easily verified with a light node. Data submission to Celestia involves blob transactions (BlobTx), which include a standard Cosmos-SDK transaction (MsgPayForBlobs) alongside one or more data blobs.
Throughout 2024, data posted to Celestia expanded rapidly, eventually surpassing a cumulative total of 200 GB. The activity peaked in December, with the highest daily record registered on December 29.

ACTIVE ADDRESSES GROWTH

The number of active addresses on Celestia experienced a remarkable increase, rising from 308,728 in January to 851,775 in December 2024, more than doubling over the course of the year.

MODULAR BLOCKCHAINS

The year 2024 was the year of rapid modular expansion, with leading Layer 2 solutions like Aevo, Lyra Finance, Hypr Network, Orderly Network, Eclipse, and Public Goods Network choosing Celestia for data availability.

One of the key milestones was the introduction of Astra, a high-throughput Stargaze Layer 2 that leverages Celestia for data availability while utilizing Stargaze L1 as its liquidity and routing hub.

Another major development was the launch of Forma, the first sovereign rollup built with Celestia under the hood and powered by Astria Sequencing Layer.
In November 2024, Eclipse debuted its public mainnet, introducing Solana's performance to Ethereum. As an Ethereum Layer 2 leveraging the Solana Virtual Machine, Eclipse integrates Solana’s speed with Ethereum's liquidity, all while relying on Celestia for data availability. This approach combines the strengths of all three ecosystems, optimizing efficiency and performance.

Following its mainnet launch, Eclipse played a crucial role in the December surge of data posted to Celestia, making a significant contribution to the record-breaking spike.

LIQUID STAKING ON CELESTIA

Launched in October 2023, the Celestia network quickly attracted a substantial number of TIA delegators, securing the blockchain and achieving a 64% staking ratio—one of the highest rates among all Cosmos chains.

The ecosystem further expanded into liquid staking, with two protocols currently offering liquid staking services for Celestia.

The first liquid staking solution for Celestia’s TIA, MilkyWay, officially launched in December 2023. Within the first 12 hours of the launch, over $1,2 million of milkTIA were issued, while the milkTIA pool on Osmosis exceeded $1,4 million. By the end of 2024, the total value of TIA liquid staked via Milky Way reached $11 billion.

On February 1, 2024, Stride introduced the second liquid staking solution for TIA, accumulating a total value locked (TVL) of $6.24 million over the year (the total value of TIA deposited on Stride in exchange for stTIA).

MAIN ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATIONS AND MILESTONES

• Rollchains
  March saw a major advancement for Celestia with the introduction of rollchains, which allow any Cosmos Layer 1 blockchain to post its data to Celestia. Stride became the first blockchain to adopt this model, soon followed by Noble. Noble’s transition enhanced interoperability within the modular ecosystem by enabling Celestia rollups to seamlessly interact with Noble assets such as USDC.

• Blobstream
  Also in March, Celestia Labs launched Blobstream, a solution designed to stream Celestia’s modular data availability layer to Ethereum. This expanded the potential for high-throughput applications on Base, with Celestia underneath.

• New Funding to Support Long-Term Growth
  In September, the Celestia Foundation secured $100 million in new funding, with Bain Capital Crypto leading the investment round. Additional contributions came from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and others. This latest capital infusion brought Celestia’s total fundraising to $155 million.

CELESTIA ROADMAP

In September 2024, Celestia unveiled its technical roadmap, structured around three primary areas.

1. Abundant Blockspace implies scaling to 1-gigabyte blocks, which will massively increase data throughput in Celestia’s rollup ecosystem.

The goal of supporting 1GB blocks aims to provide sufficient capacity for scaling a wide range of rollups, including those with high-demand use cases such as Visa-scale payment networks, fully on-chain games, and high-throughput DeFi. The roadmap outlines two key paths to scale data availability (DA) throughput:

• Consensus optimization, which enhances Celestia's consensus network to handle larger blocks and enables user access to abundant blockspace.

• Data Availability advancements that improve the DA network to facilitate sampling and reconstruction of larger blocks while lowering resource demands for nodes. This ensures users can run nodes on low-resourced devices or even within wallets in the background.

2. Verifiable Blockspace

This ensures that anyone can verify the correctness of blockspace secured by Celestia—anywhere and on any device.

• Light nodes on every device: Expands light node functionality to all devices, including user wallets, thus boosting security while reducing reliance on centralized or third-party systems.

• Enhanced security for light nodes strengthens security for both end users and node operators.

3. Frictionless Blockspace

This focuses on eliminating barriers for rollup developers and users. This goal is divided into three key components.

• Lazybridging (streaming assets from anywhere) enhances interoperability between rollups on Celestia and the base layer, addressing modular fragmentation challenges.

• Developer experience optimization prioritizes creating an unparalleled development experience for rollup developers.

• Blobstream supports ecosystem growth by enabling Celestia’s data attestations to stream into other Layer 1 networks.

Pic: Celestia blog

CONSENSUS-BREAKING UPGRADES AND THE CHANGES THEY BROUGHT TO THE NETWORK

Throughout 2024, Celestia introduced a series of technical innovations and consensus-breaking upgrades, ensuring the implementation of its roadmap while enhancing network scalability and efficiency.

• Lemongrass Hardfork
  Celestia’s first upgrade, the Lemongrass hardfork, introduced in H1 2024, brought about a number of changes, including the state-breaking CIPs (Celestia Improvement Proposals) listed below:

• CIP-6: Price Enforcement

• CIP-9: Packet Forward Middleware

• CIP-10: Coordinated Upgrades

• CIP-14: Interchain Accounts

• CIP-20: Disable the Blobstream module

• The Shwap upgrade
  While Lemongrass introduced a new set of features to the consensus network, Celestia further advanced its data availability (DA) network with the implementation of its first upgrade, Shwap.

  Shwap significantly enhanced DA sampling speed, making it 12 times faster while reducing storage demands by 16.5 times, enabling larger block sizes and smaller nodes.

  Having introduced a new messaging protocol and an optimized storage system, Shwap aligned with Celestia’s broader vision of scaling towards 1-gigabyte blocks, as was outlined in the Celestia roadmap. By substantially increasing DA throughput while maintaining minimal light node demands, Shwap accelerated the performance of existing applications and paved the way for brand-new applications across any VM. Moreover, the reduced requirements made it feasible for users to operate light nodes directly within browsers and wallets, advancing the development of truly verifiable web apps.

• Mammoth Mini
  Another significant milestone toward scaling to 1-gigabyte blocks was the introduction of the Mammoth Mini testnet, designed to evaluate early-stage optimizations from Celestia’s roadmap. In its first iteration, Mammoth Mini demonstrated a serious throughput increase, achieving 88 MB blocks and 27MB/s of permissionless data throughput, with 3s block times, thus surpassing Celestia’s performance at launch by over 160 times. For comparison, as of October 2024, Celestia had a maximum throughput of 2 MB blocks every 12 seconds, or 0.167 MB/s.

• Ginger
  Celestia’s second consensus upgrade, Ginger, introduced the Doubling, a 2x increase in Celestia's data availability throughput. This improvement was achieved by reducing block times from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, thus ensuring faster transaction finality.

  Beyond increasing throughput, Ginger laid the groundwork for community-driven governance to increase the block size, allowing for expansion up to 8 MB per 6 seconds, equivalent to 1.33 MB/s. A comprehensive breakdown of the modifications introduced in the Ginger upgrade is available in the official documentation.

EVENTS

• Infinite Space Bazaar Hackathon
  Announced on March 18, the Infinite Space Bazaar Hackathon ran from April 2 to May 17 and offered over $100,000 in prizes. The event attracted a diverse range of participants working on various projects and workshops.

• Modular Summit
  Modular Summit 3.0 2024 served as a key industry gathering, bringing together leading experts for a three-day event focused on advancements in the modular blockchain space. The summit featured a diverse lineup of speakers who offered valuable insights. The Modular Summit Presentation Library by Modular Media provides a structured archive of recorded sessions organized by specific categories for seamless navigation.

• Celestia in Bangkok
  November was also an active month for the modular community, with a range of events, discussions, and initiatives taking place alongside Devcon 2024.

  Modular Bangkok provided a dedicated space for developers, featuring a full day of workshops and discussions.

  Following this, the "Rejected" event offered a unique and unconventional gathering. It featured talks that Devcon had rejected and combined technical discussions with diverse activities.

FUTURE PROSPECTS

As the 2024 event calendar concluded, Celestia introduced its next major global initiative—Mammothon, a month-long hackathon set to run from February 1 to February 28, 2025.

Mammothon is designed to bring together teams from around the world to develop innovative applications leveraging modular infrastructure. Participants will have the opportunity to compete for a prize pool of $250,000.

Beyond Mammothon, Celestia is set for another year of continued technical advancement in line with the ambitious roadmap introduced in September 2024. This roadmap is structured around three core pillars that will define Celestia’s further evolution:

1. Abundant blockspace

2. Verifiable blockspace

3. Frictionless blockspace

Working on those areas is set to give the modular blockchain ecosystem a major boost and reinforce Celestia’s position as the backbone of innovative decentralized applications and rollups.