How Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin Inspired Key Parts of Celestia - Ep. 672

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

Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com

Thank you to our sponsors!

• iTrustCapital
• Polkadot
• PlayFi Labs

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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