Celestia founder dismisses FUD, cites $100M war chest amid backlash

Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam has claimed that the team remains committed and financially equipped to weather the storm despite escalating accusations of misconduct, insider profit-taking and community mistrust.

“Despite 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,” Al-Bassam wrote in a Monday post on X.

Al-Bassam claimed that major token drawdowns are a normal part of the industry. He added that Celestia (TIA) has strong long-term viability, citing a “$100M+ war chest and a 6+ year runway.”

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 token’s 95% drawdown.

Al-bassem dismissing FUD on X. Source: Mustafa Al-bassemRelated: 1inch launches global hackathon to fix DeFi UX, with $525K in bounties

Insider profit-taking and misconduct

Al-Bassam’s post likely came in response to a scathing X thread by Startup Anthropologist. The post, which attracted over 200,000 views, accuses the Celestia team of coordinated financial misconduct.

“All c-suite had unlocks in early Oct. 24... Mustafa sold 25M+ in OTC, moved to Dubai,” the post alleges. The thread further claims that prominent figures were paid to promote the TIA token while employees quietly offloaded holdings.

Bankless founder David Hoffman has been promoting Celestia. Source: Startup AnthropologistAnother X user, Shrutebuck, criticized the timing of the unlocks. “They rewarded thief early investors and themselves at the expense of retail, then they cry on the timeline about the ‘ridiculous FUD’ when the token is down 98%.”

Criticism also targeted Celestia’s token unlock schedule. “Why do you have a token unlock that lasts 3/4 years?” asked another X user. “I believe in $ETH and little else... but I don’t believe in those who unlock all my supply in 3 years.”

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Celestia’s 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.

“The problem was there aren’t enough apps with PMF [product-market fit] that are motivated to vertically integrate,” Sukernik wrote, pointing to poor timing in Celestia’s 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 couldn’t have anticipated the “rollup industrial complex” growing so large.

He defended the project’s relevance, citing over 30 rollups deployed on Celestia and claiming it controls around 50% of the data availability (DA) throughput market. “We’re basically the default solution for alt-DA these days,” he wrote.

Source: Al-bassemDespite 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, Celestia’s 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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