Catenaa, Saturday, August 02, 2025- Polychain Capital has sold its remaining Celestia (TIA) holdings to the Celestia Foundation for $62.5 million, the foundation announced last Thursday, as the blockchain protocol prepares to overhaul how staking rewards are distributed.
The transaction, which took place at roughly $1.44 per token, marks Polychain’s complete exit from its investment in Celestia.
The foundation said the repurchased tokens will be reassigned to new investors, with a rolling unlock schedule from August 16 to November 14.
The sale comes amid mounting criticism of Polychain’s aggressive selling of liquid staking rewards tied to its locked token allocation.
One onchain analyst in July estimated the VC firm had sold up to $242 million in TIA tokens, largely through staking rewards, off an initial investment of $20 million across Series A and B rounds.
TIA was trading down 5.2% at $1.86 as of Thursday, significantly off its all-time high of nearly $20 reached in early 2024.
In response to backlash from the crypto community, the Celestia network’s upcoming v4 mainnet upgrade, dubbed “Lotus,” will implement changes requiring staking rewards to follow the vesting schedule of their associated locked tokens.
The move is intended to prevent early investors from extracting outsized profits while their principal allocations remain restricted.
