Celestia Genesis Airdrop in TIA

Bitcoineo is sharing his insights with us to benefit from airdrops and DeFi opportunities. We welcome him whole heartedly! We start today with an important airdrop from Celestia, a major project in the Cosmos ecosystem! Indeed, the Genesis airdrop in tokens TIA was just announced. Beware scams, the only valid URL to claim it is the official link: https://genesis.celestia.org/

Warning This article does not constitute investment advice or an invitation to invest. It is for information purposes only. You are solely responsible for your trading and investment decisions.

TIA airdrop from Celestia

Eligibility criteria for 3 types of audience

60 millions of tokens $TIA (6% of total supply) will be distributed to 3 types of audience:

• 20M $TIA to developers thanks to Github verification
• 20M $TIA to the most active users of Ethereum rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Starknet, zkSync, …)
• 20M $TIA to Cosmos and Osmosis stakers and IBC relayers

In order to limit farmers, bots and other type of abuse, sybil addresses were excluded to a certain extent:

Thus, the Genesis Drop invites more than 7K developers and 576K on-chain addresses to claim TIA, the native asset of Celestia. Not everyone will claim their rights to receive the airdrop though, you have until 17 October, 2023 to check if you are eligible and to do it here. The tokens claimed will be accessible in the wallet at the launch of mainnet, in other words probably at the end of the year.

Utility of TIA

Firstly, TIA enables participation in:

• Network consensus
• Decentralised governance of network parameters
• Community pool

The core mission of Celestia is empowering anyone to launch their own blockchain, similarly to the Polygon CDK. To do so, TIA can pay for blobspace available thanks to Data Availability Sampling (DAS) that scales with the number of users. Therefore, it enables developers to quickly bootstrap a new rollup. Otherwise, devs also have the flexibility to choose another asset as a gas token or currency for their rollup.

What do you think about the Genesis Drop?

First of all, I’m glad to see a tier 1 project do its airdrop in these market conditions. I thought it wouldn’t be possible in a “dead market,” and Celestia proved me wrong!

Celestia is at the top level in terms of modularity tech and research. I would have easily seen them as a 5 B$ FDV project last year. Now, I think it will trade around 1 B$ FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) after the airdrop hype. In the first few days, I could see their token (6% circulating, 1 B$ TIA as total supply) trading around 2-3 $. For most of us who received of 50 – 90 TIA per eligible address, it’s not a lot, to say the least. In other words, we’re only getting tens or hundreds of dollars for a AAA project airdrop. Why? Because, as active users, we only got 2% airdropped. That’s SUPER low.
Devs got the same share of the pie, even though they’re 100 times less numerous. As an airdrop farmer, it MIGHT be time to start farming Github accounts and pretending to be a dev. I can definitely see a new trend where technical projects airdrop a huge portion, which used to go to the users, directly to devs.
Also, the snapshot date is interesting: 01/01/2023. Why this early? They could have AT LEAST used the ARB airdrop announcement date if they wanted to exclude sybil addresses that started farming after that. They probably filtered out more genuine users than those who didn’t deserve this share. We’ll see if those users boycott Celestia or not.

Conclusion

Overall, I think Celestia could have planned their genesis distribution better. Give fewer tokens to devs, more to users. In the end, the goal of an airdrop is to decentralize the token supply, not to make devs wealthier, they’re already doing fine anyway.

I like the ATOM/OSMO staking criterion as it can’t be sybilled. I just don’t know if I wouldn’t have prioritized Ethereum users a bit more. Distributing only half to the community seems wrong to me. We’ll see a lot of farmers trying to game the dev meta, and Github accounts are going to get messy. Not cool for real builders. If the team wanted to go that way, I think rewarding specific POAP holders would have been a better solution.

Have a good day all, hope you were eligible! ❤️