Zug, November 2, 2023 – as the first Swiss crypto-financial service provider and one of the first worldwide, Bitcoin Suisse announced today the full support of Celestia from day 1, offering custody, trading, and staking of its native token TIA. TIA’s utility includes interacting with the network, paying for data availability, providing cryptoeconomic security to the network via staking, and participating in decentralized governance. Mainnet launch of Celestia happened as planned on October 31, 2023 at 14:00 UTC.

Celestia has been developed by the team that first envisioned the benefits of a modular blockchain ecosystem. The modular thesis identifies layers of functionality traditionally integrated in a single monolithic blockchain, which are data availability, consensus, settlement, and execution. Modular blockchains delegate at least one of these layers to other networks, and thus can be optimized for the specific functionality they offer.

In particular, Celestia is optimized on data availability and consensus, offering a decentralized trust layer for modular execution layers such as rollups. Rollups can then focus on execution throughput and custom features while inheriting security from Celestia in exchange for a fee paid in TIA. The modular thesis earned strong support over time, as proven by Ethereum adopting a rollup-centric roadmap and shifting focus from execution sharding to Danksharding for scaling data availability.

Armin Schmid, Chief Product Officer at Bitcoin Suisse, said: “We are delighted to participate in the Mainnet launch of such a promising protocol. In addition to the benefits derived from the modularism of Celestia, its data availability can easily integrate with Ethereum settlement via blobstreams. Thereby, rollups are allowed access at the same time to the highly secure and fee efficient data layer of Celestia as well as to the Ethereum native assets and liquidity. Bitcoin Suisse’s readiness to support Celestia from day 1 proves once again our technology track record, drive for innovation within the crypto space while further enhancing our institutional-grade product palette.”

The early vision and efforts from Celestia resulted in the first network going live on mainnet with data availability sampling and block reconstruction from light nodes. This is a massive scalability breakthrough, as it allows Celestia to offer more data availability bandwidth as more light nodes join the network. Optimized for data availability and without needing to dedicate resources to execution, Celestia is an ideal base layer for a modular ecosystem that can eventually scale to millions of rollups and billions of users.

Trading and Staking of TIA is available via Relationship Manager and Bitcoin Suisse Online. Further information on the protocol can be found here. Read the interview of COO of Celestia Labs Nick White with Bitcoin Suisse Researcher Dominic Weibel here.