OnchainDB Builds Pay-Per-Query Database on Celestia’s 1Tb/s Infrastructure

Celestia’s modular blockchain thesis is getting its first actual stress take a look at. OnchainDB, an impartial undertaking constructing on the community, has unveiled a pay-per-query database designed for a future the place AI brokers make hundreds of thousands of micropayments per second for information entry.

The timing is not coincidental. Celestia introduced its Fibre Blockspace protocol on January 13, 2026, attaining 1 terabit per second throughput in testing throughout 498 nodes—a 1,500x enchancment over unique roadmap targets. OnchainDB is basically betting that bandwidth will lastly be low cost sufficient to make per-query funds economically viable.

The Economics of Each API Name

Here is the pitch: as an alternative of paying month-to-month cloud payments, builders retailer software information on Celestia’s information availability layer and earn income when that information will get accessed. OnchainDB’s present design splits income 70/30 between app builders and the platform on each learn and write operation.

The use circumstances are easy. A prediction market might cost for historic odds information. Social platforms might monetize their graph information for third-party queries. Analytics suppliers might promote aggregated metrics with out constructing billing infrastructure from scratch.

However the true goal is machine-to-machine commerce. OnchainDB positions itself as a discovery layer for AI brokers—letting them discover datasets, pay per question, be a part of info throughout a number of apps, and course of outcomes with out human intervention. The undertaking calls this a “Collective Intelligence Database.”

Why Conventional Blockchains Will not Minimize It

The maths would not work on current infrastructure. A database serving 1000’s of AI brokers making queries each second generates transaction volumes that will crush present Ethereum blob capability and prices. Micropayments for information entry solely make sense when the underlying blockchain price per byte is trivial.

OnchainDB posts each write operation to Celestia—new entries and updates alike. Reads hit materialized views synced with that canonical onchain state. Customers get blockchain ensures (immutability, cryptographic verification) whereas the indexing layer handles question efficiency.

At Fibre’s projected 1Tb/s scale, a fraction-of-a-cent cost for a database learn can cowl onchain prices with margin remaining. That is the speculation, anyway.

Market Context

TIA at present trades at $0.38, down 5.6% over 24 hours with a market cap of roughly $332 million. The token has been beneath stress regardless of the bold Fibre announcement three weeks in the past.

The hole between Celestia’s technical roadmap and present market sentiment is notable. Fibre represents infrastructure designed to be used circumstances that do not exist but at scale—agentic funds, pay-per-crawl markets, onchain orderbooks for conventional belongings.

OnchainDB is likely one of the first concrete purposes constructed for this hypothetical future. Whether or not AI agent economies materialize quick sufficient to justify the infrastructure funding stays the open query. The undertaking’s success relies upon totally on whether or not the “every thing markets” imaginative and prescient performs out inside a timeframe that issues to present token holders.

Celestia’s Ginger improve in October 2024 doubled throughput by slicing block instances from 12 to six seconds. Fibre takes a unique method, working parallel to the present L1 with totally different blob specs—256KB minimal to 128MB most, versus customary L1’s 8MB cap with no minimal.

For builders watching this area, OnchainDB provides an early template for what high-bandwidth information availability truly permits. For merchants, it is a reminder that Celestia’s worth proposition hinges on purposes that will not exist till the infrastructure does.

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