As the first modular blockchain, Celestia once shone brightly, especially after its launch, with a large-scale airdrop that ignited enthusiasm across the entire sector. However, a recent exposé revealed controversies surrounding Celestia's executives cashing out, transferring benefits, and manipulating public opinion, plunging this star project into public scrutiny. Although its co-founder responded that these claims are FUD, the undeniable fact is that Celestia's ecosystem activity and token performance have both experienced a sharp decline, market enthusiasm has cooled rapidly, and the modular narrative is facing severe challenges. Accused of executives cashing out and manipulating public opinion, Celestia responded that its cash reserves exceed $100 million. On June 23, a lengthy post by Twitter user @0xCircusLover sparked widespread attention in the crypto community, and although these allegations have not all been confirmed, they have thrust Celestia into the spotlight. Regarding token unlocking and cashing out, @0xCircusLover pointed out that all C-level executives at Celestia completed their token unlocking as early as the beginning of October 2024, while other team members unlocked and continued to sell tokens in the latter half of the month. Among them, co-founder Mustafa was accused of selling more than $25.00 million worth of tokens off-exchange before relocating to Dubai. It is worth noting that in October 2024, Celestia's $TIA token began a large-scale token unlock of $1.00 billion, with the unlocked amount accounting for approximately 80% of the circulating supply at the time, which once triggered market panic. More controversially, on the eve of the unlock, the Celestia Foundation announced the completion of a $100.00 million financing round, and its token soared on the same day due to this positive news. However, it was revealed that this financing was actually an off-exchange sale completed with some institutions through OTC several months prior, but it was repackaged as a financing announcement before the unlock, and Celestia's manipulation intentions were questioned by the community. At the same time, the post also revealed potential "gray areas" in Celestia's marketing strategy. Among them, crypto KOL @ayyyeandy was accused of receiving large sums of money to endorse Celestia and even deeply participate in project marketing. @0xCircusLover said that specific evidence is still to be disclosed later. Bankless co-founder David Hoffman has also been questioned for frequently recommending TIA. @0xCircusLover pointed out that he is not an end-user of the project, has not built any DA protocols, and has not tweeted about other alt-DAs so frequently, and there was even a contradictory statement about "whether he holds a position." In response to the questioning, David subsequently publicly stated, "I first bought $TIA on February 26, 2024, and disclosed the relevant holdings on the Bankless page; I sold this part of the assets on May 30 and updated the disclosure page accordingly. Neither I nor Bankless have ever accepted any undisclosed consideration from the Celestia team." In addition to the cashing out and promotion controversies, the post further revealed internal problems at Celestia. Former Head of Developer Relations Yaz Khoury was fired for "alleged sexual harassment" and has left the crypto industry. @0xCircusLover claims to have victim testimony and related evidence. Celestia is also accused of buying out competitor Abstract for seven figures in US dollars, forcing it to abandon its cooperation with EigenLayer, which is also in the modular direction, thereby suppressing potential competitors. Facing the public opinion storm, Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam recently responded, stating that despite the current FUD, about 50 employees, including all Celestia founders, early employees, and core engineers, are sticking to their posts, working with the same enthusiasm as when the project was founded five years ago. He bluntly stated that even if someone spreads absurd FUD that Celestia was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, he would not care. Mustafa said that he has been involved in the crypto field since 2010 and knows that survival in the industry requires a strong heart and the ability to withstand pressure, after all, all tokens will experience a 95% drop in their life cycle. At the same time, Mustafa emphasized, "We have more than $100.00 million in cash reserves, enough to support more than 6 years of operation, and are ready to fight a protracted war." Multiple data points show a comprehensive decline, and the modular narrative has failed? As the modular narrative craze gradually fades, Celestia is now experiencing a dual test of market and technology. According to CoinGecko data, as of June 24, the price of $TIA has fallen to $1.56, a sharp drop of 91.75% from its historical peak of approximately $19.07. The market cap has also fallen from over $3.90 billion at its peak to approximately $1.00 billion, and market attention has cooled significantly. On-chain activity has also cooled down simultaneously. Blockworks data shows that Celestia's actual usage has declined significantly. Among them, daily revenue was as high as $1.60 million during the hottest period of the modular concept, but as of June 22, daily revenue plummeted to $99.70, a drop of 99.9%; the number of transactions also fell from a peak of 5.80 million to only tens of thousands per day, which indicates that the activity of ecological users has declined sharply; the amount of data transmitted to Blobs has also decreased sharply from a peak of 279,934 MB to 21,135 MB, and the core usage of the DA layer has experienced a cliff-like decline; in addition, the $TIA staking scale has also fallen from the level of tens of billions of dollars to over ten billion dollars, and the enthusiasm for capital lock-up has weakened, which may be closely related to token price fluctuations and declining investor confidence. These data not only confirm the cyclical cooling of the modular narrative but also reveal the bottlenecks of projects like Celestia in terms of actual use case implementation. Of course, Celestia is not lying flat. Despite the sluggish market performance, Celestia has made progress in technical research and development and ecological development in recent months. For example, in terms of technology, in April this year, Celestia released the mamo-1 public test network, which increased the block size to 128MB, which is 16 times the 8MB block of the existing mainnet, and supports 21.33MB per second of unlicensed data throughput. The test network consists of 21 validator nodes distributed in Amsterdam, Paris, and Warsaw, simulating a real-world network environment. In terms of governance, in June, Celestia co-founder John Adler proposed Proof-of-Governance (PoG) as the ultimate solution for liquid staking tokens (LSTs). The proposal plans to drastically reduce the unnecessary token issuance ratio in the Celestia protocol from 5% to 0.25%, fundamentally alleviating inflationary pressure. More importantly, the PoG solution will ensure seamless integration with LSTs on the premise of ensuring protocol security, enabling $TIA to be more conveniently used in the Celestia native DeFi ecosystem, improving the actual application scenarios and liquidity of the token, and helping Celestia accumulate value through revenue (REV) and fees. In terms of ecology, in April, the Converge chain jointly created by Ethena and Securitize, Celestia became its data availability layer; VanEck listed a new exchange-traded product tracking $TIA on Euronext Amsterdam and Euronext Paris; in May, Celestia announced the integration of Hyperlane as its native interoperability solution; $TIA was listed on the Korean exchange Upbit, etc. Celestia's current predicament is actually the real state of most crypto projects after experiencing a narrative boom. After experiencing the "storytelling" stage, the market is beginning to return to rationality, and only products that are truly used and verified have the ability to survive the cycle. [PANews]