The TIA crash and the disillusionment of the crypto industry narrative

Jessy, Jinse 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, which has fallen by more than 90% from the highest point of around 20U. As the former leader of modular blockchain, TIA is now deeply trapped in negative public opinion such as founder selling and internal management problems.

The fall of the former 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 just an appearance. The deeper fact is that the once lively narratives in the cryptocurrency circle are gradually being falsified.

On one side, the Nasdaq is setting new highs in the stock market carnival, while on the other side, the once popular narratives in the cryptocurrency circle are shattered and the price of the currency plummets. The traditional narrative of the cryptocurrency circle is no longer playable, and the industry has come to the moment of real landing and application.

From glory to fall

TIA, full name Celestia, is one of the most watched modular blockchain projects from late 2023 to early 2024. In the bull market in early 2024, the TIA token soared from the single digits after the airdrop to a high of $20. Its vision is to combine the sovereign interoperability zone of Cosmos with the aggregation-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 collective cashing out by its senior management. 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 for TIA, was exposed to charging 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 coins", which further caused the community to question whether "the project is just a marketing product manipulated by capital."

The deeper internal rift comes from the management. The former head of developer relations, Yaz Khoury, was fired for alleged sexual harassment, which triggered a public relations storm. CelesTIA was exposed to have bought out its competitor Abstract for seven figures in US dollars 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 on the path of expansion.

At a time when the price of the currency is collapsing and the trust of the community is on the verge of collapse, co-founder John Adler proposed a radical governance model of "governance is 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 the team's executives cashed out was gradually exposed, making the community generally believe that this is a governance cover-up aimed at "stabilizing prices and covering up problems." As of press time, its price ratio 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 narrative of the crypto industry

However, the collapse of TIA is not just the failure of a project and a token. It is a cross-section of the disillusionment of the new narrative of the entire crypto industry.

In the past cycle, 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 narrative, and the 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 following the trend 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 is no new narrative at the public chain level. Looking at other tracks in the industry today, there are still some voices: most of the projects combining AI and blockchain remain at the conceptual level, and RWA is not only a regulatory issue, but also a profound question of "is it a real demand?"

The former hot spots are being falsified one by one and quickly forgotten by people. At the same time, the traditional financial market continues to receive good news. Whether it is US stocks or Hong Kong stocks related to crypto compliance, such as stablecoins and compliant exchanges, they have ushered in a continuous rise.

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 the author believes that this is actually a warning to all project parties that only true technological innovation and application implementation can create real value. The traditional coin circle's old ways of telling stories, competing for traffic, and pulling up and then selling are no longer viable. Just like Web2 projects, the current Web3 projects are competing for implementation.