Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups - Ep. 610
Feb 20, 2024
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Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder and CEO of Celestia Labs, and COO Nick White join to unveil the vision behind Celestia, a revolutionary data availability layer for blockchains. They discuss the concept of '10,000 roll-ups' and how modular blockchains enhance scalability, especially for gaming and NFTs. Mustafa explains data availability sampling and its crucial role in ensuring reliable data for validators. The duo also explores the potential for Celestia to serve as a data layer for Bitcoin, comparing its architecture with Solana, highlighting a new era in decentralized applications.
Modular blockchains like Celestia separate consensus, data availability, and execution for scalability and innovation.
Celestia's data availability sampling optimizes resource usage and enables efficient data publishing for Ethereum roll-ups.
The possibility of Celestia becoming a data availability layer for Bitcoin rollups offers potential collaboration opportunities and increased scalability.
Deep dives
Customizing Execution Environment
One of the benefits of roll-ups is the ability to customize the execution environment. This allows developers to add functionality to the EVM or other execution environments without waiting for consensus from the main chain. In a monolithic chain, developers often face delays and political battles to introduce changes, but in the roll-up world, customization is faster and more efficient.
Modular Blockchains
Modular blockchains, such as Celestia, take a different approach to traditional monolithic chains. Instead of combining all functions into one protocol, modular blockchains separate consensus, data availability, and execution into different layers. Celestia focuses on consensus and data availability, while roll-ups and layer two technologies handle execution. This modular approach allows for scalability, flexibility, and innovation, as developers can choose their own execution environments and customize them based on their specific needs.
Data Availability Sampling
Celestia uses data availability sampling to ensure that data is published and available on the internet without requiring the download of the entire block. By applying erasure coding, Celestia enables nodes to download random pieces of data and reconstruct the complete block from only 50% of the data. This sampling technique provides high assurance of data availability while optimizing resources. Celestia's data availability layer has gained adoption, with many Ethereum roll-ups utilizing it for efficient and cost-effective data publishing.
Scaling Blockchains with Data Availability Sampling
Data availability sampling allows block size to scale with demand and usage, unlike fixed block size in standard blockchain systems. This enables scalability to millions and potentially billions of users while remaining trust-minimized. The current block size is relatively small at eight megabytes, but it can increase as the number of light nodes and data samplers grow. The community is working on metrics to analyze light node network size and stability, paving the way for larger block sizes in the future.
The Potential of Sovereign Rollups and Collaboration with Other Chains
Sovereign rollups offer the possibility of hard forking a rollup chain, providing greater independence and allowing community-driven changes. Celestia is exploring collaborations with other chains, including the possibility of becoming a data availability layer for Bitcoin rollups. By deploying Bobstream, Celestia could enable Bitcoin rollups to reference data on Celestia using proofs. Additionally, Celestia's focus on modular blockchains aligns with the vision of Solana, but both protocols take different approaches. The market will determine the long-term success of monolithic versus modular blockchains.
Celestia, a data availability layer for blockchains, was launched last October to much fanfare. The platform takes a modular approach to blockchains, allowing developers to post data onto it without the need for smart contracts or execution. This makes it extremely useful for scaling roll-ups and other layer two technologies.
Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam and COO Nick White join Unchained to discuss what Celestia is and how it works, how data availability sampling allows for more scalability, how Celestia compares with other data availability layers, whether Celestia could become a data availability layer for Bitcoin, and comparisons between Celestia and Solana.
Show highlights:
Mustafa’s background and how his project called Lazy Ledger ended up becoming Celestia
Nick’s vision for modular blockchains
Why Mustafa believes in the “10,000 roll-up” endgame
Why Mustafa thinks that gaming and NFT chains work better on a modular blockchain
What Celestia is and how it resembles the publication of an article in a newspaper
What data availability sampling (DAS) is and how it works to ensure that the data is available and accurate for validators
How DAS allows for more scalability
What types of applications can be built with this type of modular architecture
Mustafa’s explanation of the concept of Blob stream and blob space
How a roll-up can be an independent or sovereign layer, not just a layer 2 to a layer 1
How Celestia competes with other DA layers, like the future EigenDA
The role of the TIA token in the Celestia ecosystem
How Mufasa hacked the CIA when he was 16 years old and how he transitioned into crypto
Whether Celestia could become a DA layer for Bitcoin layer 2 roll-ups
Whether Solana could end up becoming an Ethereum layer 2 using Celestia for data availability
The proposal to extend the functionality of Celestia without smart contracts in the base layer
