TIA plummets, has the traditional crypto industry narrative been shattered?
Author: Jessy, Golden Finance
TIA, which once rose tenfold after listing on the exchange and shone in the bull market in early 2024, has now fallen below the price when it was listed on the exchange. As of press time, the price is 1.62U, down more than 90% from the highest point of around 20U. As the former leader of modular blockchain, TIA is now deeply mired in negative public opinion such as founder selling and internal management issues.
The fall of the once-star TIA token is not only a symbol of the decline of the modular blockchain track. The fall of a leading track project that was popular last year is only a superficial phenomenon. The deeper fact is that the once lively narratives in the currency circle are gradually being falsified.
On one hand, the Nasdaq is hitting new highs in the stock market, while on the other hand, the once popular narratives in the cryptocurrency circle are shattered and the price of coins plummets. The traditional narrative of the cryptocurrency circle is no longer viable, and the industry has come to the moment of real implementation and application.
From glory to fall
TIA, full name Celestia, is one of the most watched modular blockchain projects in late 2023 and early 2024. In the bull run in early 2024, the TIA token soared from single digits after the airdrop to a high of $20. Its vision is to combine the sovereign interoperability zone of Cosmos with the rollup-centric Ethereum with shared security.
However, starting from the second half of 2024, as the market heat declined and the project ecology progressed slowly, CelesTIA's governance and team issues gradually surfaced. The most controversial is the question of its senior executives collectively cashing out. Twitter user @0xCircusLover broke the news that as early as early October 2024, all C-level executives of CelesTIA completed the unlocking and began to sell tokens on a large scale. Co-founder Mustafa was even pointed out to have sold more than $25 million in tokens off-site, and then quietly moved to Dubai.
At the same time, CelesTIA's marketing operations also suffered a backlash. KOL @ayyyeandy, who once stood up for TIA, was exposed to have charged a lot of promotion fees. Although David Hoffman, co-founder of the media platform Bankless, frequently recommended TIA, he was inconsistent on the key issue of "whether to hold the currency", which further caused the community to question whether "the project is just a marketing product manipulated by capital."
The deeper internal rift came from the management. The former head of developer relations, Yaz Khoury, was fired for alleged sexual harassment, which caused a public relations storm. CelesTIA was exposed to have bought out its competitor Abstract for seven figures and forced it to withdraw from its cooperation with EigenLayer. This type of "exclusive merger and acquisition" is controversial and also exposes the team's anxiety about the expansion path.
As the price of the currency collapsed and community trust was on the verge of collapse, co-founder John Adler proposed a radical governance model of "governance as proof" in early 2025, advocating to replace the traditional proof-of-stake mechanism with off-chain governance voting to cope with continued inflationary pressure. However, before this subversive proposal was implemented, the fact that team executives cashed out was gradually exposed, making the community generally believe that this was a governance cover-up aimed at "stabilizing prices and covering up problems." As of press time, its price has fallen by more than 90% from its high point. The on-chain activity is also terrible. According to defillama data, its on-chain Gas income was only $231 in the past 24 hours.
Behind the fall of TIA, the collapse of the crypto industry narrative
However, the collapse of TIA is not just the failure of a project and a token. It is also a glimpse of the disillusionment of the new narrative of the entire crypto industry.
In the past cycles, modularization, AI Agnet, DePIN, GameFi, NFT, etc. have blown up huge bubbles one after another, ushering in rounds of collective carnivals for capital and retail investors. But in 2025, we have ushered in the collective collapse of the previous narratives, and altcoins are in mourning.
Similar to TIA, the leaders of various tracks, such as WorldCoin and Helium, which were once very popular and favored by capital, have quickly accumulated a large amount of traffic and skyrocketed in the short term by riding on the east wind of narrative. But they were all just a wave of heat and then quickly cooled down.
The fall of these star tokens, including TIA, reflects a deeper crisis in the crypto industry: the industry lacks real technological innovation and user landing, and narratives and trust will be repeatedly consumed and diluted. After modularization, there are no new narratives at the public chain level. Looking at other tracks in the industry today, there are still some voices: most projects combining AI and blockchain remain at the conceptual level, and RWA is not just a regulatory issue, but also a profound question of "is it a real demand?"
The former hot spots have been falsified one by one and quickly forgotten by people. At the same time, the traditional financial market continues to receive good news. Both U.S. and Hong Kong stocks related to crypto compliance, such as stablecoins and compliant exchanges, have seen sustained increases.
On one hand, there is a lack of native crypto innovation and a sharp drop in coin prices, while on the other hand, Hong Kong and US stock compliant crypto projects are being favored by capital and the market. Some people think this is a sign that "the industry is finished", but I think this is actually a warning to all project parties that only real technological innovation and application implementation can create real value. The traditional coin circle's old ways of telling stories, competing for traffic, pulling up the market and then selling it are no longer viable. Like Web2 projects, the current Web3 projects are competing for implementation.
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