Celestia is a cryptocurrency project that recently launched within the last year, and this looks like it's going to zero to me. It is so full of critical, obvious problems that when you see them, you'll be like, how does everybody not know this? Why would anybody buy this? This is my opinion and my experience reviewing coins, not financial advice, but I want to walk you through exactly what I see.
A brand new coin riding on hype
First off, look at all the gains. This is a new coin. In the past, some of the coins that have pumped the most have been brand new. That said, the only reason that happens is because investors just plow their money into stuff and literally have no idea what they're investing in. The more you research what you're investing in, the less you're going to make bad decisions like that.
So this has a $6 billion fully diluted market cap, which is bigger than Internet Computer Protocol. I'm going to compare a lot there, because to me Internet Computer Protocol is the absolute best of the fundamentals, the technology, and the team in crypto. And Celestia, to me, is an exact example of something I would never invest in. Almost no team, worthless technology, and anything else is hype and speculation and gambling.
If you look at the price chart, people look at this and think, well, this might be a decent time to accumulate. In my opinion, wrong. It is never a good time, the way I see it, to accumulate something with weak fundamentals that has no realistic use case I can see going forward in the future.
What is Celestia, and why the pitch falls apart
So if you're like, well, what is Celestia? This is where you're going to see some critical problems. It says it's the first modular blockchain network that enables anyone to easily deploy their own blockchain. I mean, are we still deploying our own blockchains in 2024? There is literally no reason, to me, to build your own blockchain when on Internet Computer you can build almost anything you'd want fully on chain. You want your own chat application. You want your own web three social media platform. You want to build the next YouTube. You want to build a game, a metaverse. You can build all of it. My website is directly on it.
Then there's the architecture pitch: built from the ground up, building everything on chain, nodes around the world, governance that's fully on chain, 15% APR voting rewards for staking and voting on proposals. They say this actually rethinks blockchain infrastructure from the ground up. To me, this is BS. They're talking about tiny little differences in what's already being done, and basically closing their eyes.
If you look at their post about the modular ecosystem from a year ago, they're just closing their eyes like, yeah, this is the best technology in crypto, this is a fundamental rethinking. To me, no, it's not. And you know why they didn't put Internet Computer on there anywhere? Because Internet Computer would make all this other stuff look terrible. Internet Computer does almost all of this, and it makes Celestia look like junk by comparison. This is where they trick you in crypto: if you haven't found Internet Computer, you've got all this other jumble of stuff, but Internet Computer does almost everything. You can put a gigabyte straight on chain. Celestia, by comparison, talks about a departure from the status quo monolithic blockchain. To me it's not, it's barely different. It's a tiny bit different.
The documentation gives it away
How can I prove that? Same old stuff and lies that I see in every other altcoin you all asked me to review. If you don't research an altcoin and go to the documentation and look at the actual tech, then you have no business holding that altcoin. You are not doing your own research unless you learn how this actually works.
And look at this, right in the Celestia docs: now we'll be using IPFS to upload the content of the post. You can't do hardly anything meaningful on chain. You've got to take it off chain. Same old web two infrastructure, which makes everything they're talking about with web three, to me, a blatant in-your-face lie. When you want to see how this actually works, it's all this modular blah, blah, blah. A real world computer that can run a gigabyte of data on chain for a year for $5, that can run AI on chain, that's amazing. This, to me, is junk. It's basically slight variations on what we already have in blockchain. This is the same pattern I keep finding when I dig into these projects, like when I explained why I think Arweave (AR) is going to zero.
Who is actually building this?
And you know what else is worthless about this to me? Who's actually working on this? Who are the engineers? Well, I Google, and I'll find anything they put out themselves, except a post in October introducing the Celestia Foundation, talking about funding R&D and all this stuff. So who are the real engineers building this? You've got four names right here: the co-founder of Celestia and CEO at Celestia Labs, and then a couple of other people.
If we search for Celestia Labs, there's Celestia org. Why is there not a list? They've raised all this money, they've raised millions of dollars. Why do they not have one single page on their website, besides this one talking about the foundation, which is not the labs, dedicated to telling you the real people working on this? On the Celestia org website, there's nothing. The foundation council members are on blog.celestia.org, and many of you all accept this in crypto and think it's okay. You're just putting your faith into these invisible, anonymous people that you don't know, and you're just hoping for the best.
Well, you don't have to do that. If you look at DFINITY at dfinity.org, they're a major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain, the largest research and development team in blockchain. This is a real team of real people. Look how far down that page I went, like 10 rows down, and we still have a software engineer. The sheer depth of technical talent. This is why Internet Computer is different from everything else in crypto, because unlike everything else I see in crypto, they don't have a real team, or a team that's big enough and has people with enough experience in blockchain, in engineering, in all the stuff you have to put together: databases, all these programming languages, PhDs in computer science. Nobody else has a team like this in crypto that I see anywhere.
And this is why you get a page like Celestia's, where there are only even four people listed. They don't even have pictures. These people, to me, are putting on a show. Almost all these coins, and Celestia included from what I see, they're putting on a show. They're doing the least amount of work possible. To me, they're running a well-templated script to rip you off that has been proven time and time again to rip crypto investors off all over the world using the exact same blueprint. You basically copy the other technology out there, make tiny little changes, use language to make it sound super hyped up and successful, somehow different. But unfortunately, in the documentation, which almost nobody even looks at, you can quickly see it's more of the same. And you make sure everything you put in there makes yourself look good by comparison, and leave off anything that would make your chain look like absolute garbage. And make sure not to put the majority of the people working on this, because either they don't even exist, or they're not even working on this, or they're embarrassed they're even working on this project and they don't want to get sued when it comes out to be an obvious fraud and a bad investment. So you only get a couple of people, four people here, who are willing to even put their names on this project in a way that's easily discoverable publicly.
The on-chain activity tells the same story
And when you go to the FAQ, look at this tiny little FAQ. Then you go to the Explorer, and there's almost nothing happening on this. This is how ugly crypto is, and how easy it is to do your own research. Two minutes ago, 13 transactions. These blocks have hardly anything going on in them. There's almost nothing happening on here. And you've got gas fees. I mean, really, this is so much different than when you're having regular users have to pay gas fees. Seriously, is it 2009? We're paying transaction fees now, and that's the business model? There's very little happening on chain on Celestia. To me, it's almost all hype and smoke and mirrors and invalid comparisons that leave off Internet Computer.
This is outrageous, because there are so many of you out there, my brothers, my sisters, who are getting tricked and cheated into these cryptos, because you don't know what Internet Computer does, because you don't do your own research, because other people are getting paid to talk about stuff like this, and then other people are copying them because bots come push the videos. If you say it's going to 100x, it's a mess. If you want to compare notes with people who actually dig into fundamentals, I keep that conversation going inside the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share what I'm finding in real time.
What I'd look at instead
So if you want to see what I see as the truth in crypto, look at internetcomputer.org. Look at the DFINITY team, use the technology, go to my website, jerrybanfield.com. This is hosted on Internet Computer Protocol, not something that I see as possible to do on Celestia. You'd have to stick this on IPFS, if you could even try and make it work.
The problem, too, is that nobody wants to sit here and tell you every one of these cryptos is going to zero. Why? Because if I told you this was going to 100x instead, then I'd get more views, because Celestia, if they have bots, which many of these cryptos do, would all push my video, and all the other people holding Celestia would want to watch my video to try and prove they're not making a bad decision, which to me they appear to be. And then I'd get sponsored from all these garbage altcoins that want to give me money to promote their junk coin too. So I'm here taking out the trash in crypto, because somebody needs to do it. And Celestia, to me, appears to be more trash in crypto, more stuff that I would absolutely not hold. If I somehow got some in my possession, I would immediately dump it. I don't even care what the price could be in the future. To me, there's no point in holding onto something that's fundamentally worthless. This is the same conclusion I keep reaching with projects like Aleph.im and Arcblock (ABT), where the fundamentals just aren't there for me.
I did this critical review of Celestia because you all asked me to do it live. If you enjoyed it and want more breakdowns like this, you can watch the newest ones in my Money playlist, where I take the same skeptical, fundamentals-first look at coin after coin.