WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is set to return to his home country Australia as his long-running legal struggle with the U.S. government comes to a close. 

As he walks out as a “free man,” we examine the famed whistleblower’s connections to Bitcoin and how the digital currency came to his rescue during difficult times. 

What Happened: Wikileaks was censored by the administration over its damning report on the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under pressure from the authorities, financial giants like PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard imposed a financial blockade, cutting a substantial part of the company’s revenue. 

Left with no choice, Bitcoin was used to circumvent the banking ban. In June 2011, Wikileaks posted a Bitcoin address on Twitter, now X, appealing for donations. 

See Also: 54% Of Japanese Institutional Investors Plan To Invest In Crypto In The Next 3 Years

Thirteen years later, Bitcoin has matured into one of the world’s most valuable financial assets, with one Bitcoin being worth $61,636.87. This means that the 171 Bitcoins raised in the first week will be worth more than $10 million today, a whopping 2940x leap. 

Why It Matters: Julian Assange has long been a Bitcoin bull, explaining in one of his interviews with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt how the currency’s scarcity will increase its value over time. 

Aside from the financial benefits, Assange has complimented Bitcoin’s underlying decentralized technology, which is censorship-resistant and a powerful weapon against the monopoly of a few Internet businesses. 

In other news, Assange’s wife Stella Assange, made an emergency plea to cover the cost of his flight back home, which is worth $520,000. Apparently, the donations can be made via credit/debit card payments and also Bitcoin.

The native token of the Celestia blockchain, TIA has a market capitalisation of over $US1.3 billion. That places it in the top 100 coins globally, but the token’s value seems to be trending downwards.

TIA started the year at around $US12, reached an all-time high of over $US20 in February, and at the time of writing was worth $US6.90. Of course that’s still up over 200% on its initial listing price of $US2.08 around 240 days prior.

Celestia is a Layer 1 blockchain, designed to be ‘modular’ in nature with the goal of making it easy for developers to launch their own blockchain. Development time is primarily reduced by enabling developers to combine existing rollup (aka Layer 2 scaling solution) technology options to create their own customised stack. Celestia lets you can build an independent blockchain where:

• The ‘execution’ layer of the blockchain—where smart contracts and transactions happen—can be separate from the consensus mechanism.
• The blockchain’s consensus mechanisms and data availability functions leverage Celestia infrastructure, including its network validators.

The Celestia project was initiated in 2019 by co-founders Mustafa Al-Bassam and Ismail Khoffi and attracted considerable venture capital investment including a $US1.5 million seed round in 2021 and $US55 million raised in 2022. Celestia is built on the Cosmos SDK framework.

What Is the TIA Token?

One billion TIA tokens were created, with 20% for public allocation. Its current circulating supply is around 193 million. More tokens owed to initial investors will be gradually unlocked over coming years—which can be freely traded—with the first unlock event in October this year.

The TIA token’s role in the Celestia blockchain is three-fold:

1. Developers use TIA to pay gas fees on transactions and to publish data to what’s known as a ‘blobspace’ on the network’s data availability layer.
2. Network validators and delegators stake TIA to support network consensus activities—verifying and securing transactions across a decentralised network of computers—as Celestia is a proof-of-stake blockchain. Validators and delegators also earn staking rewards in the form of TIA.
3. TIA holders get some governance powers, being able to propose and vote on proposals to change a subset of network parameters.

Celestia’s TIA token is not to be confused with the token of the Tiamonds project, which also trades under the TIA symbol. The alternate TIA is a token distributed to owners of tokenised diamonds sold via the Tiamonds platform—which touts itself as the world’s largest tokenised diamond marketplace.