Celestia Co-Founder Addresses FUD About TIA, Cites Company’s $100M ‘War Chest’

Mustafa Al-Bassam, one of the co-founders of the modular blockchain network Celestia, has addressed the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) surrounding the project due to recent discoveries about its employees.

In an X post, Al-Bassam insisted that users of Celestia (TIA), the network’s native cryptocurrency, have nothing to worry about because the project has a $100 million war chest and is playing the long game.

FUD Surrounding Celestia

Celestia launched as the first modular blockchain network, enabling developers to easily deploy their blockchains with minimal overhead by utilizing data availability sampling.

The project unveiled its native token in November 2023, and since then, the asset has experienced significant price fluctuations, ranging from substantial gains to deep plunges. Data from CoinMarketCap shows that TIA rose 808% from $2.30 to $20.90 between the time of its launch in November 2023 and mid-February 2024. The coin also plummeted over 92% from that point to its current trading range of $1.58.

A pseudonymous market participant, 0xCircusLover, took to X to outline actions by the Celestia team that have led to the decline in the value of TIA. They revealed that all C-suite executives had TIA unlocks in early October 2024. There were also broader team unlocks later that same month, and Celestia employees have been constantly dumping TIA.

According to 0xCircusLover, Al-Bassam sold $25 million worth of TIA in over-the-counter (OTC) deals and moved to Dubai. Celestia fired Yaz Khoury, former head of developer relations, for sexual harassment reports. The project also allegedly attempted to stifle competition by offering the consumer crypto blockchain network Abstract a seven-figure sum in USD to abandon the Ethereum-based restaking protocol, EigenLayer.

Co-founder Dismisses The Claims

In addition to the accusations leveled against Celestia, 0xCircusLover mentioned that the project has been paying crypto key opinion leaders (KOLs) to promote TIA and consistently discuss the coin’s bull case. These KOLs include AyyyeAndy and David Hoffman, co-founder of the crypto media firm Bankless.

While other Celestia co-founders, Ismail Khoffi and John Adler, have refrained from addressing the claims by 0xCircusLover, Al-Bassam insists the company’s core engineers are still working as hard as they did when the project started five years ago. He believes that all cryptocurrencies experience a 95% drawdown at some point in their lifecycle, implying that Celestia’s situation is not unusual.

“I’ve been in crypto since 2010, and it’s not new to me that you have to have a thick skin and eat gravel to survive,” he stated.

This development comes as Adler proposes changing Celestia’s Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Governance to reduce token issuance by a factor of 20.

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