Written by: Ma He, Foresight News
On October 16, the modular blockchain Celestia announced the launch of Eden, a new high-performance EVM chain. Officially positioned as an experimental sandbox for AI agentic commerce, AI agents have already begun transacting on-chain, and as scale expands, they will place higher demands on blockspace. Eden is being used to test the transaction environment AI agents require and their actual on-chain behavior.
Among so many L1s and L2s, what makes this new chain different?
Block Gas Limit of 50 Million, TIA as the Gas Token
Eden is not just another ordinary EVM-compatible chain. It handles transaction execution and ordering itself, while the Celestia mainnet only handles data availability.
In other words, operations initiated by AI agents or users on Eden are processed and confirmed by Eden itself, and the resulting data is then sent back to the Celestia mainnet for storage. Users need to deposit TIA through the official bridge before use, and TIA is also Eden's native Gas token.
According to the official documentation, Eden's block time is 100 milliseconds and its block Gas limit is 50 million. This means its block production speed is far faster than most EVM chains, making it suitable for scenarios requiring continuous, rapid interaction. The network supports native batch transactions and application-sponsored Gas, so agents or users do not need to sign separately for every operation.
Eden currently uses a single sequencer, meaning there is only one place responsible for determining the order of transactions, and transactions are not made public before confirmation.
The first publicly disclosed experiment is the closed beta of Botfun. Participating agents can issue tokens on their own and trade around narratives generated by other agents. Every model inference call is settled on-chain via the x402 protocol (a machine-native micropayment protocol based on the HTTP 402 status code, incubated by Coinbase).
Technically, the Evolve tech stack adopted by Eden is precisely an iterative upgrade of Rollkit, Celestia's official former Rollup framework. In the closed beta of Botfun (based on its Houston infrastructure), each AI agent has an independent wallet and can not only autonomously provide liquidity in the native DEX and earn fees settled in TIA, but also have the inference cost of each large language model (LLM) call transferred in real time in TIA via the x402 protocol.
According to on-chain data, Eden has accumulated 2.59 million transactions since it began dark testing in July this year (with a single-week peak of 516,000 transactions in July), though the official team has not yet separately stripped out and verified the number of x402 settlements from total transaction volume."
Transformation in July This Year
In July 2026, Celestia Labs acquired Sovereign Labs, a developer of high-performance blockchain frameworks, and Sovereign Labs co-founder Preston Evans became CTO of Celestia Labs.
Nick White, CEO and co-founder of Celestia Labs, also stated at the same time that its custom high-performance blockchain business will focus on two verticals: Agentic Payments and on-chain markets. Among them, Agentic Payments is used to support high-frequency, high-volume microtransactions, enabling instant settlement without establishing billing relationships;
In addition, he said that Celestia's go-to-market strategy has shifted from primarily collaborating with startups and independent developers to directly working with large applications and enterprises that have real business needs and distribution capabilities, providing them with full-stack blockchain infrastructure.
Unlike in the past, when it relied on external ecosystem teams to build chains, Eden is a project personally led by Celestia Labs after merging the original Rollkit team with the engineering team of Sovereign Labs, which was acquired in July this year (led by new CTO Preston Evans); and the ammunition supporting this full-stack gamble is precisely the "over $100 million treasury reserve" previously disclosed by Celestia Labs founder Mustafa.
The backdrop of this transformation is that agent payments are rapidly expanding from early experiments.
According to a report published by Chainalysis in October 2026, cumulative payments completed by AI agents on the Base chain through Coinbase's x402 protocol have grown from about 1,500 in mid-2025 to more than 138 million in the third quarter of 2026.
Of these, more than 87% of individual transaction amounts range from $0.0001 to $0.10, falling within the micropayment range that traditional card networks find difficult to process economically.
Wallet activity is also rising. Among wallets funded for the first time in the second quarter of 2026, 89.3% received a second funding within 30 days; the median time from wallet funding to completing the first x402 payment shortened from 73 days at the end of 2025 to 18 minutes in the third quarter of 2026.
Against this backdrop, Eden is not simply adding another EVM chain. Celestia previously mainly served other chains as a data availability layer, and its fee revenue has long been limited.
Eden, by contrast, has the team operate the execution environment itself, uses TIA directly as the Gas token, and sends the resulting data back to the Celestia mainnet. Eden mandates TIA as the native Gas consumption medium. Once a commercial closed loop is established, it will build for TIA a deflationary value-capture flywheel from a "high-inflation governance token" to a "high-frequency essential consumable."
The official website once emphasized on its agent payments-related page that the large number of micropayments generated by AI agents may require settlement capacity with higher throughput and lower friction.
The contract bytecode of Ethereum and conventional L2s is rigidly capped at 24KB (the EIP-170 limit), making it impossible to deploy slightly more complex agent autonomous decision-making or multisig custody contracts. Eden directly raises the limit by more than 5x to 128KB, allowing bloated Agent contracts to run normally as well.
At the underlying mechanism level, Eden, through 100-millisecond ultra-fast block production, 0x76 atomic batch execution, and Gas sponsorship (Paymaster), greatly smooths out signature latency and capital friction in high-frequency on-chain interactions by AI agents. Whether these designs truly match the actual needs of agents currently depends on experimental data such as Botfun for observation.
Token Price Down Over 97%, Single-Day Fee Revenue Only $108
The launch of Eden at this moment needs to be understood in the context of Celestia's prior development trajectory.
In May 2019, Mustafa Al-Bassam published the LazyLedger paper, proposing the separation of data availability from execution. In the same year, Al-Bassam co-founded the project with Ismail Khoffi and John Adler, and it was renamed Celestia in 2021. In October 2023, after the Celestia mainnet launched, it once became a representative asset of the modular narrative, and TIA once hit a high of $21 in early 2024.
The turning point began with the massive unlock wave in October 2024. A huge amount of low-cost tokens flooded the secondary market, directly breaking through TIA's price support.
The fee revenue captured by its protocol has long been negligible, proving that relying solely on Rollup data publication (Blob) simply cannot support a valuation model with a tens-of-billions FDV. According to the latest data from DefiLlama, its chain fee revenue in the past 24 hours was only $108.
In June 2025, as TIA's price fell sharply from its 2024 high, Twitter user 0xCircusLover posted allegations that "the Celestia executive team unlocked all tokens in October 2024, and in addition, Celestia founder Mustafa sold more than $25 million worth of TIA tokens through off-exchange OTC and moved to Dubai."In response, Mustafa posted a reply stating, "I have been involved in the cryptocurrency space since 2010, and I know well that surviving in this industry requires perseverance and the ability to withstand all kinds of tests, because every token will experience a 95% drawdown at some stage in its life cycle. We have a treasury of more than $100 million and a development roadmap planned out for the next six years or more, so we are prepared for a protracted battle, no matter how long it takes."
In July 2025, the Celestia Foundation bought back Polychain Capital's remaining TIA holdings (approximately 43.45 million tokens at a unit price of about $1.44) from the early investor for $62.5 million and redistributed the tokens to new investors.
Previously, Polychain was criticized for selling a large amount of staking rewards while the initial tokens were still in their lock-up period. During the same period, market discussions also emerged regarding team members and early holders selling tokens. The phase in which TIA's price fell more than 90% from its high further amplified questions about the gap between tokenomics and actual usage.
Currently, TIA is still fluctuating around $0.63, down about 97% from its all-time high, with a circulating market cap of $580 million and an FDV of $735 million.
With a sluggish token price and mainnet daily revenue dropping to just over one hundred dollars, Celestia urgently needs a new narrative that can genuinely consume TIA, and Eden is the first answer it has delivered in its bet on AI agent payments.