Celestia Proposal Would Burn 100% of Base Data Fees and Tie Them to Network Congestion
Key Facts
A user on the Celestia forum proposed on November 7, 2026, changing the network’s data-publishing economics by combining a full burn of the variable base fee with a TIA stake by rollup networks. The post proposes that the base fee per byte of block data rise when data-space is congested, with the proceeds burned rather than distributed. Priority fees would remain separate from the base fee under the proposal. Its stated aim is to capture value from network use during periods of congestion while guaranteeing rollups a dedicated data-throughput capacity. The post remains an invitation to discuss the idea, not an approved change to the Celestia protocol.
The model separates a base fee that varies with network conditions from a tip or priority fee that can affect transaction ordering. The document calls for burning 100% of the base fee, drawing on the pricing mechanism in Ethereum’s improvement proposal known as EIP-1559. That means the proposed burn would be tied to fees for using data space, rather than to a separately announced decision to reduce supply. Celestia’s documentation says data-publishing fees are paid through “PayForBlobs” transactions and currently consist of a fixed fee per transaction and a variable fee determined by the size of each data blob. The documentation also says validators give higher-fee transactions priority in the transaction queue, a feature relevant to the proposal’s separation of the priority fee from the base fee.
The proposal would also require rollup networks to deposit and stake a specified amount of TIA in a dedicated module in return for securing a targeted data-throughput rate over defined periods. But the post did not specify how much currency each network would have to stake or how that amount would be calculated. The proposal’s author asked whether the staking requirement should rise linearly with data volume or be divided into tiers. As a result, the proposal provides no formula for estimating how much TIA could be staked or the effect on available trading liquidity. The text links staking to securing network capacity, while the proposed burn remains tied to the base fee paid by data-space users.
Congestion thresholds also remain unresolved: the proposal did not specify the block saturation levels that would trigger fee increases or a rising burn. The post asks what limits could trigger an exponential fee burn without hindering Layer 2 applications from moving to the network. Its author sought feedback from the community, core developers and node operators on appropriate economic thresholds. The discussion page showed one post when viewed, indicating that the proposal remains at an early stage of public discussion. The forum text announced no vote or implementation date for the mechanism.
The proposal comes within a network that uses TIA to pay data-publishing fees and whose governance allows token holders, including non-stakers, to propose and vote on changes to a range of network parameters. Since its launch, Celestia has allocated 2% of block rewards to the community pool, and stakers can vote on funding ecosystem initiatives. The network’s documentation says upgrades proceed through improvement proposals, implementation by core teams and software releases for testing on test networks before node operators move to the test mainnet. Under the signaling mechanism described in the documentation, an upgrade activates only after 5/6 of validators signal the same version. The published fee proposal set no timetable for these stages and did not say it had entered the upgrade process.
Current transaction limits set a technical ceiling on data-space use: Celestia’s documentation puts the maximum data transaction size at 8 MiB, or 8,388,608 bytes, since release v6. The cap includes the transaction, PayForBlobs data, blobs themselves and additional data, limiting the maximum amount of data that can be included in a single transaction. In market trading, TIA against the dollar closed at $0.4424 on November 7, the day the proposal was published, and at $0.4298 on November 9. These prices show the closes for the two sessions cited, without attributing the price move to the proposal. The next step in the discussion is to define staking requirements and congestion thresholds before the details of the proposed mechanism can be assessed.