Despite the market slump, how high can the "Golden Shovel" TIA still go?
The recent frenzy of investment around TIA is more likely driven by its "golden shovel" attribute. For many users who are buying TIA, what they are purchasing is not just the TIA token itself, but also the potential additional benefits that may be airdropped to the TIA staking community in the future.Original source: Odaily Planet Daily
The hot market for Celestia (TIA) continues.
According to OKX market data, as of the time of writing, TIA is quoted at 19.23 USDT, maintaining a strong performance despite the overall downturn in the market.
The modular narrative may be the foundational value supporting Celestia, but the recent frenzy of investment around TIA is more likely driven by its "golden shovel" attribute— in other words, many users buying TIA see themselves not just purchasing a single token, but also gaining potential additional benefits from future airdrops to the TIA staking community.
TIA Staking Craze
Recently, several Cosmos ecosystem projects, including Dymension and Saga, have officially announced governance plans and have coincidentally included TIA stakers in the proposed airdrop scope; in addition to the confirmed airdrop allocations mentioned above, there are rumors (some have been officially announced) that several non-Cosmos projects, such as Manta, Movement, and U Protocol, which have adopted Celestia's data availability (DA) solutions, also intend to airdrop to TIA stakers.
To glimpse the potential value of these airdrops, we can take Dymension, which has launched pre-launch contract trading on Aevo, as a simple example.
Dymension's airdrop rule states that staking 1 TIA will yield an airdrop reward of 205 DYM, while DYM is currently priced around 4 dollars on Aevo. This means that by staking a TIA for just over ten dollars, one can obtain at least several hundred dollars in additional DYM airdrop rewards from just the Dymension project. The emphasis on "at least" is because Dymension has announced that unclaimed airdrop shares will be allocated to claimed addresses, with a focus on large TIA and ATOM stakers, so it can be expected that the actual benefits for TIA stakers after the Dymension airdrop ends will further increase.
Note: The pre-launch contracts on Aevo are highly volatile with low trading volume, providing some reference value but not fully representing the real market price after TGE.
With such a promising trend in expected returns, a large number of users have begun to choose to purchase and stake TIA.
Smart Stake data shows that the current staking rate for TIA across the network has reached 48%. Considering that TIA's genesis has only been a little over two months, this figure is quite impressive, even surpassing many established PoS networks (such as 35% for Polygon and 34% for Harmony); meanwhile, the number of unique addresses staking TIA is also rapidly increasing, having surpassed 300,000 as of January 14. These two data points clearly demonstrate the current enthusiasm of TIA holders for staking.
In pursuit of more potential airdrops, some TIA holders have even begun to attempt staking across multiple addresses. However, this approach clearly has its pros and cons; the advantage lies in the opportunity to gain more "low-income" airdrops, but as the scale of TIA staking expands, there is also the risk of being filtered out due to staking thresholds.
As for whether it is still possible to continue purchasing TIA at this time, we cannot predict the trends in the secondary market, but based on the general staking rates of mainstream tokens in the Cosmos ecosystem (SEI 68%, ATOM 64.9%, OSMO 55.3%), it seems that there is still some room for growth in TIA's staking scale.
The Collective "Shovelization" of the Cosmos Ecosystem
In addition to TIA, the fact is that mainstream project tokens within the entire Cosmos ecosystem have recently shown a trend of "shovelization." However, compared to Celestia, which can cover a broader ecological range through its DA solutions (such as other ecosystem Rollups that use Celestia DA), the potential earnings that other project tokens can "mine" are still temporarily concentrated on upcoming projects within the Cosmos ecosystem.
Among the many mainstream tokens in the Cosmos ecosystem, for now, the "shovel" attributes are strongest for the Cosmos native token ATOM and the liquidity hub token OSMO of the ecosystem. The former has been criticized for its insufficient value capture ability, yet it remains the most consensus-driven token within the ecosystem, while the latter serves as the initial liquidity gathering place for new coins launched within the ecosystem. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why new Cosmos ecosystem projects choose to view the staking communities of ATOM and OSMO as potential community users.
In just the past few months, Celestia, Namada, Dymension, and Saga have announced airdrops to ATOM and/or OSMO stakers. Considering that a large number of projects such as Berachain, Nibiru, and Penumbra are set to launch in the near future, the Cosmos ecosystem may be on the verge of a wave of airdrop excitement.
The allure of the wealth effect should not be underestimated; while the airdrop strategy may seem somewhat simplistic and crude, it may very well be the key to unlocking new opportunities for the Cosmos ecosystem.
