Celestia’s TIA Token Tumbles Amid Accusations as Founder Fires Back

Celestia’s modular blockchain is the subject of much controversy after its native TIA token crashed dramatically, losing more than 92% of its value since its all-time high. People on social media have said that the team is poorly managed and is using strategy to its advantage, but co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam has come forward to defend the project.
Al-Bassam called the accusations “ridiculous” in a strongly worded post on X. He said that volatility is a normal part of crypto markets and that Celestia is still financially safe with more than $100 million in reserves. He also stressed that the team is still fully committed, even though there are rumors that the leaders have sold their assets and moved operations offshore.
Startup Anthropologist posted something that went viral and said that the co-founder sold almost $25 million worth of tokens and moved to Dubai. Some people said the team was artificially raising interest by paying for ads, which left retail investors with the bill.
Concerns Mount Over Token Strategy and Long-Term Viability
There was more criticism of the team’s plan to slowly unlock tokens over the course of several years. Some investors say that the release schedule favors insiders, while retail holders have to deal with the effects on the market.
Investor Larry Sukernik intensified the criticism by accusing Celestia of prioritizing marketing over expanding its ecosystem. He asked if the project would be used in the real world, saying that its appchains don’t have many active users and that Celestia’s data availability layer might not be able to support rollups, which are a key solution for scaling blockchains.
Al-Bassam said that Celestia still supports more than 30 rollups and has about half of the data availability market, though. The recent rise in TIA’s price, which went up 11% to $1.58 in the last 24 hours, may show that investors are hopeful. However, the big drop from its previous peak of $20.91 shows that the market is more skeptical.
This backlash brings up bigger problems with trust, transparency, and tokenomics—big problems that a lot of blockchain projects need to deal with if they want to keep their value and credibility in a crypto world that changes quickly.
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