Can Celestia Turn the Tide with AI Payments After a 97% Drop?

Written by: Maher, Foresight News

On October 16, the modular blockchain Celestia announced the launch of its new high-performance EVM chain, Eden. The official positioning is as an experimental sandbox for agentic commerce, where AI agents have begun conducting transactions on-chain. As the scale expands, it will place higher demands on block space, and Eden is used to test the transactional environment needed by AI agents and their actual behavior on-chain.

What makes this new chain different among so many L1 and L2 chains?

Block Gas Limit of 50 Million, TIA as Gas Token

Eden is not just another ordinary EVM-compatible chain. It is responsible for executing and ordering transactions itself, while the Celestia mainnet only handles data availability.

In other words, operations initiated by AI agents or users on Eden are processed and confirmed by Eden itself, and the generated data is then sent back to the Celestia mainnet for storage. Users need to deposit TIA through the official bridge to use it, and TIA is also the native gas token of Eden.

According to official documentation, Eden has a block time of 100 milliseconds and a block gas limit of 50 million. This means its block generation speed is much faster than most EVM chains, making it suitable for scenarios requiring continuous and rapid interactions. The network supports native batch transactions and application gas payments, so agents or users do not need to sign each operation individually.

Eden currently employs a single sequencer, meaning there is only one entity responsible for determining the order of transactions, and transactions are not publicly disclosed until confirmed.

The first publicly available experiment is the closed testing of Botfun. Participating agents can issue their own tokens and trade based on narratives generated by other agents. Each model inference call is settled on-chain via the x402 protocol (a machine-native micropayment protocol incubated by Coinbase based on HTTP status code 402).

Technically, the Evolve technology stack used by Eden is an iterative upgrade of Celestia's original Rollup framework, Rollkit. In the closed testing of Botfun (based on its Houston infrastructure), each AI agent has an independent wallet, allowing them to provide liquidity in the native DEX and earn fees settled in TIA. Each time they call a large language model (LLM), the inference cost is also transferred in real-time in TIA via the x402 protocol.

According to on-chain data, since the dark test began in July of this year, Eden has accumulated a total of 2.59 million transactions (with a peak of 516,000 transactions in a single week in July), although the official has not yet separated the x402 settlement count from the total transaction volume for verification.

Transformation in July This Year

In July 2026, Celestia Labs acquired the high-performance blockchain framework developer Sovereign Labs, and Sovereign Labs co-founder Preston Evans was appointed as the Chief Technology Officer of Celestia Labs.

Nick White, CEO and co-founder of Celestia Labs, also stated that its custom high-performance blockchain business will focus on two verticals: Agentic Payments and on-chain markets. Agentic Payments are used to support high-frequency massive micropayments, achieving instant settlement without establishing billing relationships.

Additionally, he mentioned that Celestia's market entry strategy has shifted from primarily collaborating with startups and independent developers to directly partnering with large applications and enterprises with actual business needs and distribution capabilities, providing them with full-stack blockchain infrastructure.

Unlike the past reliance on external ecosystem teams to build chains, Eden is a project personally handled by Celestia Labs, which merged the original Rollkit team with the engineering team of Sovereign Labs acquired in July this year (led by the new CTO Preston Evans). The ammunition supporting this full-stack gamble is the over $100 million treasury reserve disclosed earlier by Celestia Labs founder Mustafa.

The background for this transformation is that agent payments are rapidly expanding from early experiments.

According to a report released by Chainalysis in October 2026, the cumulative payments completed by AI agents through Coinbase's x402 protocol on the Base chain have grown from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to over 138 million in the third quarter of 2026.

More than 87% of the single transaction amounts fall between $0.0001 and $0.10, which is a micropayment range that traditional card networks find difficult to process economically.

Wallet activity is also increasing. Among wallets that made their first deposit in the second quarter of 2026, 89.3% made another deposit within 30 days; the median time from wallet deposit to completing the first x402 payment has shortened from 73 days at the end of 2025 to 18 minutes in the third quarter of 2026.

In this context, Eden is not simply adding another EVM chain. Celestia has primarily served as a data availability layer for other chains, with limited fee income over the long term.

Eden, on the other hand, operates its execution environment, directly using TIA as the gas token and sending the generated data back to the Celestia mainnet. Eden enforces TIA as the native gas consumption medium. Once the commercial closed loop is established, it will create a deflationary value capture flywheel for TIA, transitioning from a "high-inflation governance token" to a "high-frequency essential consumable."

The official website has emphasized on the agent payment-related page that the large number of micropayments generated by AI agents may require higher throughput and lower friction settlement capabilities.

Ethereum and conventional L2 contract bytecode are strictly limited to 24KB (EIP-170 restriction), making it impossible to deploy slightly more complex agent autonomous decision-making and multi-signature escrow contracts. Eden directly raises the limit more than fivefold to 128KB, allowing bulky agent contracts to operate normally.

At the underlying mechanism level, Eden significantly smooths out the signature delays and funding frictions in high-frequency interactions of AI agents through 100-millisecond rapid block generation, 0x76 atomic batch execution, and gas payment (Paymaster). Whether these designs truly match the actual needs of agents currently relies on experimental data observations from Botfun and others.

Coin Price Drops Over 97%, Daily Fee Income Only $108

The launch of Eden needs to be understood in the context of Celestia's previous development trajectory.

In May 2019, Mustafa Al-Bassam published the LazyLedger paper, proposing the separation of data availability and execution. In the same year, Al-Bassam, along with Ismail Khoffi and John Adler, co-founded the project, which was renamed Celestia in 2021. In October 2023, after the launch of the Celestia mainnet, it briefly became a representative asset of the modular narrative, with TIA reaching a high point of $21 in early 2024.

The turning point began with the massive unlocking peak in October 2024. A large number of low-cost chips flooded into the secondary market, directly breaking through TIA's price support.

The fee income captured by its protocol has long been negligible, proving that relying solely on Rollup data publication (Blob) cannot support a valuation model of tens of billions in FDV. According to the latest data from DefiLlama, its chain fee income in the past 24 hours was only $108.

In June 2025, as the price of TIA significantly fell from its 2024 peak, Twitter user 0xCircusLover revealed that "Celestia's executive team unlocked all tokens in October 2024, and additionally, Celestia founder Mustafa sold over $25 million worth of TIA tokens through OTC and moved to Dubai."

In response, Mustafa stated, "I have been involved in the cryptocurrency field since 2010 and know that to survive in this industry, one must have resilience and be able to withstand various tests, as all tokens will experience a 95% drop at some stage in their lifecycle. We have over $100 million in reserves, and our development path for the next six years has been planned, so we are prepared for a long battle, no matter how long it takes."

In July 2025, the Celestia Foundation repurchased its remaining TIA holdings (approximately 43.45 million tokens, at a price of about $1.44) from early investor Polychain Capital for $62.5 million, redistributing the tokens to new investors.

Previously, Polychain had faced criticism for selling a large amount of staking rewards while the initial tokens were still locked. At the same time, discussions arose in the market regarding team members and early holders selling tokens. The price of TIA fell over 90% from its peak, further amplifying doubts about the gap between token economics and actual usage.

Currently, TIA is still hovering around $0.63, down about 97% from its historical high, with a circulating market cap of $580 million and an FDV of $735 million.

With the coin price languishing and the mainnet's daily income dropping to just over a hundred dollars, Celestia urgently needs a new narrative that can truly consume TIA, and Eden is its first answer to the bet on AI agent payments.

This content is provided for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Any events, rewards, online promotions, or related information mentioned herein should not be considered a recommendation, solicitation, or invitation to purchase, sell, trade, or otherwise deal in any crypto assets. Crypto assets are highly volatile and may result in loss. The availability of WEEX services, products, and related events may vary by region. You are responsible for ensuring that your participation is in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations.