Celestia Goes Live, Unibot Gets Hacked (?), and Circle Starts Blocking Users

The much awaited Celestia Network mainnet is live as of this morning, along with its native token $TIA (trading at ~$675 million market cap at time of writing).

Celestia is a modular data availability layer that lets any rollup or blockchain use it to store transaction (or any other type of blockchain) data. The idea here starts with the core concept of modularity, where different parts of the blockchain stack are distributed to different parties that handle the execution of that layer. These separate, modular, components then come together and create robust, performant blockchains that can be purpose built for the applications they are meant for.

Celestia paints a picture of what the modular blockchain stack looks like in 2023 and how far it has come just this year:

As you can see here the modular stack has grown quite a bit of late and received funding on par (or outpacing) that growth. Most of the prominent projects you hear about today are on the graphic above.

Right now most of these projects are using either Ethereum for data availability (in a roundabout way - posting transaction data as Ethereum network calldata) or not posting transaction data at all.

Celestia, as a layer of the stack meant specifically for data availability, will create a fast and cheap solution for this that any rollup or chain can plug into. A new developer coming in to create an app-chain or their own rollup could use a lot of the tooling that exists today to get started and build something robust very quickly.

One interesting thing worth noting here is the early performance of the token itself. These days it is rare to see a network go live on mainnet and its token be released on the exact same day. We did not see this happen with Scroll, zkSync, or many others. $TIA will be an interesting test case to watch not only in terms of network adoption but also token performance.

Users have rightly pointed out that over 50% of the token supply was held for insiders. It remains to be seen whether that sort of overhang will prevent the token from seeing broad demand - that is of course if the network itself sees any demand to begin with.

Unibot Suffers Exploit, Loses Customer Funds

Popular Telegram trading bot Unibot suffered an exploit overnight, resulting in an unknown loss of customer funds. It is unclear what led to the exploit but the team has said they will be making customers whole:

The most interesting element of this whole saga has been the reaction from crypto Twitter. As you can imagine, half of the crowd feels absolutely no remorse for a set of users that decided to trust an anon team running a Telegram bot with their private keys.

“Not Your Keys Not Your Coins” was the crypto mantra I grew up with, but it is hard to take such a hard line stance here. Of course, private key management is of the utmost performance, but we are talking about a bot made for shitcoin trading made to attract retail users and normies. Unibot was made so that people would start using the chain without having to worry about private key management and get in to the action as quickly as possible. I can not blame retail traders for keeping funds on the platform.

Now, if you were the person who kept over 6 figures and your life savings on a Telegram bot, that is a different story. Repent and may God be with you.

Deep Dive: Tron

Tron is one of the most interesting stories in all of crypto. It processes more transactions than any blockchain, has more USDT on it than Ethereum, and is #2 in TVL in the whole space.

Yet nobody ever talks about it.

What’s the biggest DEX on TRON? Who are the biggest players in the ecosystem? I bet you have no idea.

Don’t worry, we are here to fix that. Join us in our latest Decent Deep Dive on Tron:

Join us on Telegram

The Decent community is growing! Subscribe to our newsletter and join our Telegram channel here!

See you next time. Stay Decent!