Celestia is stepping directly into the ring to compete for AI payment settlement rights.
Written by Ma He, Foresight News
On October 16, modular blockchain network Celestia announced the launch of Eden, a new high-performance EVM chain. Officially positioned as an experimental sandbox for agentic commerce, the network is built to support AI agents that are already transacting on-chain, with higher block space demands expected as usage scales. Eden is designed to test the transaction environment required for AI agents, as well as their real-world on-chain behavior.
Amid the crowded landscape of L1 and L2 networks, what makes this new chain stand out?
50 Million Block Gas Limit, TIA as Native Gas Token
Eden is far from a generic EVM-compatible chain. The network is responsible for transaction execution and ordering on its own, while the Celestia mainnet only handles data availability duties.
Put simply, actions initiated by AI agents or users on Eden are processed and confirmed by Eden itself, with generated transaction data posted back to the Celestia mainnet for permanent storage. Users need to bridge TIA to Eden via the official bridge to access the network, and TIA serves as Eden’s native gas token.
Per official documentation, Eden has a 100-millisecond block time and a 50 million block gas limit. This means its block production speed is far faster than most EVM chains, making it well-suited for use cases requiring continuous, high-speed interactions. The network supports native batch transactions and application-sponsored gas payments, meaning agents or users do not need to sign every individual operation separately.
Eden currently uses a single sequencer, meaning a single entity is responsible for determining transaction ordering, and transactions are not publicly disclosed before they are confirmed.
The first publicly announced experiment is a closed beta test for Botfun. Participating agents can issue their own tokens and trade based on narratives generated by other agents. Every model inference call is settled on-chain via the x402 protocol — a machine-native micropayment protocol incubated by Coinbase, built on the HTTP 402 status code.
Technically, the Evolve technology stack powering Eden is an iterated upgrade of Celestia’s official original Rollup framework, Rollkit. In the Botfun closed beta, which runs on Botfun’s Houston infrastructure, each AI agent has an independent wallet. Agents can autonomously provide liquidity on the native DEX and earn fees settled in TIA, while the cost of each large language model (LLM) inference call is also transferred in real time in TIA via the x402 protocol.
Per on-chain data, Eden has processed 2.59 million cumulative transactions since launching its dark test in July this year, reaching a single-week peak of 516,000 transactions in July. That said, the team has not yet separately verified and disclosed the count of x402-settled transactions pulled from the total transaction volume.
Strategic Pivot Launched in July This Year
In July 2026, Celestia Labs acquired Sovereign Labs, a developer of high-performance blockchain frameworks, with Sovereign Labs co-founder Preston Evans appointed as Chief Technology Officer of Celestia Labs.
Celestia Labs CEO and co-founder Nick White noted at the time that its custom high-performance blockchain business would focus on two verticals: agentic payments and on-chain markets. Among these, agentic payments is built to support high-frequency, high-volume microtransactions, enabling instant settlement without the need to establish formal billing relationships.
He added that Celestia’s go-to-market strategy has shifted: instead of primarily partnering with startups and independent developers, the network now focuses on direct partnerships with large-scale applications and enterprises with real business demand and distribution capabilities, providing them with full-stack blockchain infrastructure.
Unlike its past model of relying on external ecosystem teams to build chains, Eden is a project directly developed and operated by Celestia Labs itself, formed after merging the original Rollkit team with the engineering team from the recently acquired Sovereign Labs, led by new CTO Preston Evans. The capital backing this full-stack bet comes from the over $100 million in treasury reserves previously disclosed by Celestia Labs founder Mustafa.
The context for this pivot is the rapid expansion of agent payments, moving quickly beyond early experimental stages.
Per a report published by Chainalysis in October 2026, cumulative payments completed by AI agents on the Base chain via Coinbase’s x402 protocol have grown from roughly 1,500 transactions in mid-2025 to over 138 million transactions in Q3 2026.
Over 87% of these transactions have a value between 0.01 cent and 10 cents, a micropayment range that traditional card networks cannot process cost-effectively.
Wallet activity is also growing: 89.3% of wallets that made their first deposit in Q2 2026 made a subsequent deposit within 30 days. The median time between a wallet’s first deposit and its first completed x402 payment has dropped from 73 days at the end of 2025 to just 18 minutes in Q3 2026.
Against this backdrop, Eden is not merely another added EVM chain. Historically, Celestia has operated primarily as a data availability layer serving other chains, with limited long-term fee revenue.
By contrast, Eden is operated by the Celestia team itself as a dedicated execution environment, using TIA directly as its gas token and posting generated data back to the Celestia mainnet. Eden mandates TIA as the native medium for gas consumption. If the commercial closed loop is successfully established, it will create a deflationary value capture flywheel for TIA, transforming the token from a "high-inflation governance token" to a "high-frequency, in-demand consumable".
The official website has emphasized on its agent payment-related pages that the high volume of micropayments generated by AI agents may require settlement capabilities with higher throughput and lower friction.
Ethereum and standard L2 networks cap contract bytecode size at 24KB per the EIP-170 limit, making it impossible to deploy slightly more complex contracts for agent autonomous decision-making or multi-sig custody. Eden has directly raised this limit more than five-fold to 128KB, allowing even bloated agent contracts to run normally.
At the underlying mechanism level, Eden leverages 100-millisecond ultra-fast block production, 0x76 atomic batch execution, and gas sponsorship via Paymaster to significantly reduce signature delay and capital friction for AI agents conducting high-frequency on-chain interactions. Whether these designs truly match agents’ real-world needs remains to be validated through experimental data from use cases like Botfun.
TIA Price Down Over 97%, Daily Fee Revenue Only $108
The launch of Eden at this moment must be understood in the context of Celestia’s historical development path.
In May 2019, Mustafa Al-Bassam published the LazyLedger whitepaper, proposing the separation of data availability and execution. Later that year, Al-Bassam co-founded the project alongside Ismail Khoffi and John Adler, which was renamed Celestia in 2021. After its mainnet launched in October 2023, Celestia quickly became a flagship asset representing the modular blockchain narrative, with TIA reaching an all-time high of $21 in early 2024.
The turning point came with the massive token unlock wave in October 2024, when huge volumes of low-cost tokens flooded the secondary market, directly breaking TIA’s price support levels.
The protocol’s captured fee revenue has long been negligible, proving that relying solely on rollup blob data posting cannot support a valuation model with tens of billions in fully diluted valuation (FDV). Per the latest DefiLlama data, the network’s chain fee revenue over the past 24 hours was only $108.
In June 2025, as TIA’s price fell sharply from its 2024 high, Twitter user 0xCircusLover published a post alleging that "Celestia’s executive team fully unlocked all their tokens in October 2024. In addition, Celestia founder Mustafa sold over $25 million worth of TIA via over-the-counter (OTC) trades and moved to Dubai."
In response, Mustafa published a post stating: "I have been involved in the crypto space since 2010, and I know that surviving in this industry requires a resilient mindset to weather all kinds of tests, because every token experiences a 95% drop at some point in its lifecycle. We have over $100 million in reserves, and our development roadmap for the next six years or more is fully mapped out, so we are prepared for a long-term battle, no matter how long it takes."
In July 2025, the Celestia Foundation repurchased the remaining TIA holdings (approximately 43.45 million tokens, at an average price of $1.44 per token) from early backer Polychain Capital for $62.5 million, and reallocated the tokens to new investors.
Prior to this, Polychain faced criticism for selling large volumes of staking rewards while its initial token allocations were still in the lock-up period. Around the same time, market discussion also emerged regarding token sales by team members and early holders. The period when TIA’s price fell more than 90% from its high amplified scrutiny of the gap between the project’s tokenomics and real-world utility.
Currently, TIA is trading around $0.63, down approximately 97% from its all-time high, with a circulating market cap of $580 million and a fully diluted valuation of $735 million.
With sluggish token prices and daily mainnet revenue falling to just over $100, Celestia urgently needs a new narrative that can drive real TIA consumption, and Eden is its first deliverable as it bets on AI agent payments.