According to https://insights.penumbra.zone/, Celestia’s native token (TIA) is one of the most popular assets in the shielded pool. In fact, it is has the third largest total value shielded behind two heavy hitters: USDC, and allETH.
TIA is bridged using IBC, and as such, benefits from light-client security and has no canonical representation competitors. Since the asset is popular, canonical, and securely bridged, I think it would make sense to add it as one of the gas tokens of Penumbra.
Anecdotally, I have seen a lot of usage of Penumbra by the Celestia community. First, during the Mammoth NFT mint, and later in various ways or another to custody assets. Adding TIA as a gas token would make life easier for future users, letting them deposit and withdraw from the shielded with minimal friction.
If you look into the future, an additional use case could also be rollup-to-rollup bridging routed from Penumbra.
Adding TIA as a gas token would make Penumbra more accessible to Rollup users who already hold TIA because they are on Celestia. That could enable routing through shielded assets and be part of users’ general onboarding route.
Take the example of the Mammoth NFT mint that OP mentioned, but streamlined.
I think the path of Penumbra → Celestia → Rollup could be much more used if TIA were a gas token on Penumbra. In addition to this change, some routing infrastructure and tooling would probably make it easier for apps and users to onboard through this path.
very exciting to see all of this excitement from prominent members of the Penumbra community toward making this happen
I’m in accordance: with Penumbra as a logical source for private assets across ecosystems, its connection to the ecosystems whose gas tokens after already accepted in the protocol is a signal toward this alignment.
the historical view of the Celestia community’s excitement around both privacy and Penumbra specifically demonstrates explicit alignment between these ecosystems, and as previous posters have mentioned—there are practical reasons for this to happen
I believe there is enough consensus among community members to see someone put up a governance proposal and vote on making this possible.
