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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Guest

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia Labs.
Previous appearance on Unchained: Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups

Links

Previous coverage of Unchained on modular blockchains:
Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
What Are Modular Blockchains? A Beginner's Guide

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