Specializing in the DA tier, will Celestia's "home-stealing" of Ether succeed?

Celestia has positioned itself as the "best DA layer" for the modular blockchain narrative, and has built its own public chain, which is dedicated to providing the Rollup project with Data Publication, which ensures that individuals who need access to the most up-to-date data can get it quickly. In the past, many people have referred to Data Publication as Data Availability, confusing it with historical data retrievability, a misuse of the concept that is being continually corrected by the Ethernet Foundation and Celestia officials.

If you have a brief knowledge of Rollup, then what follows will be easy to understand: Celestia believes that a Layer2-like Ethernet scaling network can save over 90% of the fees by publishing newly generated data to the Celestia chain instead of directly to Ether.

Taking Arbitrum Orbit as an example, Orbit's sequencer Sequencer can publish the latest data from Layer2 into Celestia's blocks. Nodes that need access to this data (e.g., Orbit full nodes) can then run Celestia's light node to get the data posted by the sequencer from Celestia full nodes.

As for Celestia's token TIA, the main application scenario is data release fee + POS node pledge, if a Rollup project chooses Celestia as the DA layer, every time it releases data, it has to pay a fee; at the same time, Celestia's main chain, which is specially designed to host Rollup's released data, has at most more than 200 Validator nodes. At the same time, the Celestia main chain, which is specifically designed to host the data published by Rollup, has up to 200 Validator nodes, and the TIA token is the asset that Validators need to pledge in advance.

Although Celestia's official documentation mentions that TIA tokens can also be used as gas payment tokens for the Rollup project within the Celestia ecosystem, this proposal is not mandatory. TIA will also be used for Celestia's governance in the future, such as voting on some of the parameters of the Celestia network.

Comparing TIA with ARB and OP, it's easy to see that the former has one more seemingly high-frequency application scenario: as a handling fee for data release. If many future expansion projects really adopt Celestia as the DA layer, and these projects have abundant liquidity and users, and can continue to create conditions for the application of TIA tokens, then it is indeed possible for TIA to go strong. To take a step back, as long as Celestia is fully recognized by the industry and even the market, and the ecological construction is successful enough, even if TIA is simply used as a governance token like ARB, it can still be fully valued by the market.

But this article wants to throw out the opposite point of view: Celestia may not be fully recognized by the market or even the industry, and its attempt to attract liquidity from the Ether Layer2 system is likely to meet with resistance, and its situation may be just like EigenLayer.