Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam claimed that the team remains committed and financially equipped to weather the storm despite escalating accusations of misconduct, insider profit-taking and community mistrust.
โDespite the FUD (which is getting more ridiculous by the day), all Celestia founders, early employees and core engineers are still here and working as hard as we did when Celestia started 5 years ago,โ Al-Bassam wrote in a Monday post on X.
Al-Bassam claimed that major token drawdowns were a normal part of the industry. He added that Celestia (TIA) has strong long-term viability, citing a โ$100M+ war chest and a 6+ year runway.โ
The comments follow growing criticism from tokenholders and independent researchers who allege the Celestia team and insiders offloaded large quantities of TIA tokens as retail investors bore the brunt of the tokenโs 95% drawdown.
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Insider profit-taking and misconduct
Al-Bassamโs post likely came in response to a scathing X thread by Startup Anthropologist. The post, which attracted over 200,000 views, accused the Celestia team of coordinated financial misconduct.
โAll c-suite had unlocks in early Oct. 24… Mustafa sold 25M+ in OTC, moved to Dubai,โ the post alleged. The thread further claimed that prominent figures were paid to promote the TIA token while employees quietly offloaded holdings.
Another X user, Shrutebuck, criticized the timing of the unlocks. โThey rewarded their early investors and themselves at the expense of retail, then they cry on the timeline about the โridiculous FUDโ when the token is down 98%.โ
Criticism also targeted Celestiaโs token unlock schedule. โWhy do you have a token unlock that lasts 3/4 years?โ asked another X user. โI believe in $ETH and little else… but I donโt believe in those who unlock all my supply in 3 years.โ
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Celestiaโs market strategy under scrutiny
The criticism of Celestia is not new. In May, investor Larry Sukernik described Celestia as a cautionary tale in attempting to brute-force market traction through narrative and marketing. He argued that appchains and vertical integration only succeed with loyal user bases, something Celestia may lack at scale.
โThe problem was there arenโt enough apps with PMF [product-market fit] that are motivated to vertically integrate,โ Sukernik wrote, pointing to poor timing in Celestiaโs go-to-market push.
At the time, Al-Bassam responded by saying that Celestia was launched before rollups became central to blockchain scaling, and thus the team couldnโt have anticipated the โrollup industrial complexโ growing so large.
He defended the projectโs relevance, citing over 30 rollups deployed on Celestia and claiming it controls around 50% of the data availability (DA) throughput market. โWeโre basically the default solution for alt-DA these days,โ he wrote.
Despite that, Sukernik questioned whether Celestia jumped into the DA space prematurely, given the still-nascent demand from rollups. He noted that while Celestia has market share, it may not translate into real economic traction.
At the time of publication, Celestiaโs TIA is trading at $1.61, up 14% over the past day. However, the token is down more than 92% compared to its all-time high of $20.91, registered in June last year.
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