Mustafa Al-Bassam was a teenage hacktivist who outsmarted a US government contractor, shamed the Westboro Baptist Church, hacked Sony a record number of times, and eventually got arrested—though his 80 transgressions got halved for a funny reason.
At the Modular Summit in Brussels, Laura had a fireside chat with Mustafa to discuss how he went from his teenage years as the head of LulzSec and member of Anonymous to founding Celestia, a project aiming to solve key issues in blockchain scalability by going with a modular approach.
He also discussed data availability sampling, why he believes Celestia has achieved significant product-market fit since its launch, and the three key components of Celestia’s road map.
Show highlights:
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:47 Mustafa’s origin story and how he became a developer who ended up hacking FBI affiliates and Fox News
- 05:32 How he hacked a military contractor to the US Department of Defense and Sony
- 09:16 Why Mustafa was arrested at the age of 16
- 11:14 What about Bitcoin attracted his attention and got him interested in the industry
- 15:22 Why he founded Celestia, after doing a PhD in scaling blockchains and understanding the problems of sharding
- 21:16 What data availability sampling is and why it is important
- 23:52 Why Mustafa believes that Celestia has had “extreme product market fit” since the launch
- 26:16 What’s next for Celestia and why Mustafa is so excited about the possibilities that increased block size can enable
- 29:36 How Celestia is working with zero knowledge accounts for defragmenting liquidity in rollups and access liquidity even within the Cosmos ecosystem
- 30:57 What the endgame for Celestia and the overall industry looks like, according to Mustafa
- 37:36 Q&A with the audience
- 44:44 Crypto News Recap
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