OnchainDB Builds Pay-Per-Query Database on Celestia's 1Tb/s Infrastructure
Joerg Hiller Feb 03, 2026 15:54
OnchainDB leverages Celestia's upcoming Fibre upgrade to create micropayment-enabled database infrastructure for AI agents, turning every API call into a monetizable transaction.
Celestia's modular blockchain thesis is getting its first real stress test. OnchainDB, an independent project building on the network, has unveiled a pay-per-query database designed for a future where AI agents make millions of micropayments per second for data access.
The timing isn't coincidental. Celestia announced its Fibre Blockspace protocol on January 13, 2026, achieving 1 terabit per second throughput in testing across 498 nodes—a 1,500x improvement over original roadmap targets. OnchainDB is essentially betting that bandwidth will finally be cheap enough to make per-query payments economically viable.
The Economics of Every API Call
Here's the pitch: instead of paying monthly cloud bills, developers store application data on Celestia's data availability layer and earn revenue when that data gets accessed. OnchainDB's current design splits revenue 70/30 between app developers and the platform on every read and write operation.
The use cases are straightforward. A prediction market could charge for historical odds data. Social platforms could monetize their graph data for third-party queries. Analytics providers could sell aggregated metrics without building billing infrastructure from scratch.
But the real target is machine-to-machine commerce. OnchainDB positions itself as a discovery layer for AI agents—letting them find datasets, pay per query, join information across multiple apps, and process results without human intervention. The project calls this a "Collective Intelligence Database."
Why Traditional Blockchains Won't Cut It
The math doesn't work on existing infrastructure. A database serving thousands of AI agents making queries every second generates transaction volumes that would crush current Ethereum blob capacity and costs. Micropayments for data access only make sense when the underlying blockchain cost per byte is trivial.
OnchainDB posts every write operation to Celestia—new entries and updates alike. Reads hit materialized views synced with that canonical onchain state. Users get blockchain guarantees (immutability, cryptographic verification) while the indexing layer handles query performance.
At Fibre's projected 1Tb/s scale, a fraction-of-a-cent payment for a database read can cover onchain costs with margin remaining. That's the theory, anyway.
Market Context
TIA currently trades at $0.38, down 5.6% over 24 hours with a market cap of roughly $332 million. The token has been under pressure despite the ambitious Fibre announcement three weeks ago.
The gap between Celestia's technical roadmap and current market sentiment is notable. Fibre represents infrastructure designed for use cases that don't exist yet at scale—agentic payments, pay-per-crawl markets, onchain orderbooks for traditional assets.
OnchainDB is one of the first concrete applications built for this hypothetical future. Whether AI agent economies materialize fast enough to justify the infrastructure investment remains the open question. The project's success depends entirely on whether the "everything markets" vision plays out within a timeframe that matters to current token holders.
Celestia's Ginger upgrade in October 2024 doubled throughput by cutting block times from 12 to 6 seconds. Fibre takes a different approach, running parallel to the existing L1 with different blob specifications—256KB minimum to 128MB maximum, versus standard L1's 8MB cap with no minimum.
For developers watching this space, OnchainDB offers an early template for what high-bandwidth data availability actually enables. For traders, it's a reminder that Celestia's value proposition hinges on applications that won't exist until the infrastructure does.
Image source: Shutterstock- celestia
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