How Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin Inspired Key Parts of Celestia - Ep. 672
Jul 12, 2024
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Mustafa Al-Bassam, former teenage hacktivist, discusses his journey from hacking FBI affiliates to founding Celestia, focusing on blockchain scalability. Topics include his hacking escapades, Celestia's roadmap, data availability sampling, and the future of blockchain technology.
Mustafa Al-Bassam's journey from hacktivist to blockchain developer and founder of Celestia.
Importance of data availability sampling in blockchain scalability solutions like Celestia.
Exciting prospects of increased block size enabling innovation for Celestia's future roadmap.
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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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