Celestia team discusses the launch of Celestia mainnet, DA layer, Blobstream, community building, modular vision, payment mechanics, CIP process, upcoming developments, and events.
Celestia serves as a data availability layer, allowing applications to post data and receive attestations on the network, offering choices for developers in terms of sovereignty and settlement layer preference.
Blobstream is a one-way bridge from Celestia to Ethereum, enabling verification of data availability on Celestia through attestation on Ethereum, making it more efficient and cost-effective for developers and leading to cheaper transaction costs for layer two solutions.
Celestia has implemented a Celestia Improvement Proposal (CIP) process, involving working groups and external teams to achieve rough consensus on technical specifications, allowing for community participation in proposing and discussing changes to Celestia off-chain and materializing them on-chain.
Deep dives
Celestia is a data availability layer and live P2P network
Celestia is a data availability layer and live P2P network that ensures transactions are published to the network and can be downloaded and executed. It allows for validity proofs or optimistic rollups using state fraud proofs. Applications can post data on Celestia instead of on the settlement layer, such as Ethereum, and receive attestations that the data was published. Celestia offers choices for developers to determine the level of sovereignty and settlement layer they prefer.
Blobstream enables data posting and verification
Blobstream serves as a one-way bridge from Celestia to Ethereum, allowing applications to post data on Celestia and receive attestation on Ethereum. It enables verification that a specific piece of state is available publicly. Blobstream is not a rollup, but a way for Ethereum-based contracts to verify the availability of data on Celestia. The fees for using Celestia as a data availability layer depend on who posts the data, such as the sequencer or the user, and the fees are separate from the settlement fees on Ethereum.
Celestia's CIP process and working groups
Celestia has implemented a Celestia Improvement Proposal (CIP) process that allows for community participation in proposing and discussing changes to Celestia. Currently, there are four working groups, including core and consensus, interface, data availability, and ZK working groups. These working groups involve external teams and experts and aim to achieve rough consensus on technical specifications. The decision-making process is mostly off-chain, with on-chain materialization when new binaries or features are activated.
Blobstream deployment and its benefits for Ethereum scalability
Blobstream deployment is a key upcoming feature that will greatly benefit Ethereum scalability. By using data availability (DA) layers like Celestia, developers can remove the task of posting data to Ethereum, making it more efficient and cost-effective. With Blobstream, developers can certify and verify the availability of data in a verifiable way, ensuring that promised data is accessible and eliminating the need for trust in third-party entities. This not only simplifies the process but also leads to cheaper transaction costs for layer two solutions, as they can utilize the DA layer to submit and verify transactions, ultimately scaling Ethereum.
Addressing the big block problem and the role of Celestia
The big block problem, which involves increasing block sizes for better scalability, poses challenges in terms of centralization and costs for running nodes. Celestia addresses this problem through data availability sampling, offering a solution that increases block sizes while maintaining decentralization. By sampling and ensuring consensus on data within the block, Celestia allows lighter nodes to download less than 1% of a block and still have 99.99% certainty about its contents. This allows for practical scalability, aiming for one gigabyte blocks in the long term, while maintaining a decentralized network.
In this week’s episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with Yaz Khoury and Ismail Khoffi from Celestia. They share how the team prepared for the launch of the Celestia mainnet and what has been happening at Celestia since. They revisit the topic of DA (Data Availability) and explore how rollups and dApp developers can already use the Celestia DA layer. The group discusses Blobstream, which brings the benefits of Celestia to Ethereum and helps to scale the network, as well as community building, the modular thesis and much more.
