Bankless - What is Celestia ($TIA)? Unpacking Modular Blockchains

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Celestia’s token ($TIA) just dropped. Highlighted by its modular data availability network the crypto community has showed a lot of excitement around this launch. Why? What is so valuable about Celestia? What is its vision for crypto? How, if successful, will Celestia change the crypto landscape?  Today, on Bankless We’re talking to two Celestia CoFounders Mustafa and Ismail to explore the thesis behind Celesia. So, strap yourselves in, put on your learning cap, because we’re going to learn about Celestia in today’s episode.  ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask   ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   ⁠ 👾GMX | V2 IS NOW LIVE  https://bankless.cc/GMX  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo   🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:10 What is Celestia?  6:12 The Modular Thesis 9:00 Celestia & Ethereum Relationship  18:27 Economics of Celestia  21:21 Celestia’s SDK 26:31 Celestia’s Capital Power  28:15 $TIA  32:18 Blob Stream 34:30 Celestia Endgame 36:18 Current & Future Projects on Celestia  41:15 Celestia’s Vision  43:55 Closing & Disclaimers   ------ RESOURCES Mustafa https://twitter.com/musalbas  Ismail https://twitter.com/KreuzUQuer  Celestia https://celestia.org/learn/  Vitalik’s Endgame  https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠   

Bankless Nation, we are going to learn about Celestia. Celestia's token just dropped and it's been up only ever since inception. Up over 200% since launch, Slesia is now a $7 billion network. Why? What about Celestia is so valuable? What is Celestia's vision for crypto? How, if successful, will Celestia change the crypto landscape? Today on Bankless, we're talking to the two Celestia co-founders Mustafa and Ismail to explore the thesis around Celestia. So strap yourself in, put on your learning hat because we're going to learn all about Celestia today. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023 and beyond. If you do not have an account with Cracken, consider clicking the link in the show notes to get started with Cracken today.

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and benefit from 10% lower fees. Try it out now at app.gmx.io. Sello is the mobile first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world. And now something big is happening. Introducing the Sello Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sello's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the SELO layer 2 on the SLOF forum. So has Ben Jones from optimism.

But why? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability and one block finality. What does all that mean? Rock solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on SELO have grown over 500% in the last six months.

With the SELO layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens. But SELO is a community-governed protocol. This means that SELO needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the SELO Forum. Follow at Celloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Bankless Nation, I am super excited to introduce you to Mustafa al-Basam. Mustafa is a co-founder of Celestia and CEO at Celestia Labs.

Authored the lazy ledger white paper back in 2019, we'll get into what that is and what that means, which kicked off the Celestia project. Previously, Mustafa was the co-founder of chain space acquired by Facebook. Mustafa, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having me. joined by musafah we got ismail coffee ismael is the co-founder and cTO of celestia previously ismail was a senior engineer at tendermint and the interchained foundation

that's the cosmos ecosystem ismail also welcome the bankless thanks for having me guys there has been a bunch of energy around the celestial ecosystem as of recently due to the token launch putting the the celestial token on the map so in this episode i want to explore just the contours of what celestia is what its thesis is for the future of crypto and what its role is for the crypto ecosystem. So let's just start at the very high level.

And Mustafa, I'll throw this one to you. What's Celestia? Celestia is a modular data availability network that scales for the number of users on the network. And what that does is that it makes it very easy for anyone to launch their own blockchains and roll-ups while having not to pay high data fees. Okay, so this is in the,

modular thesis of the crypto space. And there's been a ton of just like arguing and debating on crypto Twitter as to like what the future of crypto looks like, especially when it comes to scale. So does Celestia have like an opinion about what the future of crypto looks like and how does it fit inside of that own internal thesis? Yeah. So Celestia was started in 2019 around the thesis that

blockchains should not be responsible or layer one, lock chains should not be responsible for computation and execution. Basically, the original roll-up centric Ethereum thesis, the idea that not every single application has to share the same chain and not every single application has to be executed by everyone on the same chain. And instead, you can separate consensus and execution, and instead you do execution of chain in roll-ups. and that's the opinion that's the kind of original thesis that Selesia had and this was an entire year

before Ethereum kind of switched to a roll-up centric thesis and I started as a lazy ledger to kind of like figure out how we can rework blockchain from the ground up and create a system that where the base layer is only responsible for consensus

and data availability. Ismail, maybe you can take this and run with it. What does it mean for a blockchain to only be up to forward? for consensus and data availability. When we talk about the modular thesis, what are we pulling apart here? So basically we're pulling apart.

Mustafa already mentioned it kind of. We're pulling apart the execution from consensus and data availability. So if a chain does only consensus and data availability, it means applications post their data, their blocks, their transactions on Celestia. And they get ordered. and there's consensus on that order and then the execution happens in the roll-up

or off-chain like not on Celestia so that's basically what's been pulled apart Musafah you brought up the lazy ledger paper can you explain the significance of that and what does lazy ledger even mean? Yeah so it's called lazy ledger because it's a blockchain that is lazy in the sense that it doesn't do any computation or execution.

It's just a blockchain where you just dump arbitrary data into it. So it just kind of acts as a lazy or like dumb data-avitability layer. And the kind of original idea behind this is, well, like, I was kind of involved with the Ethereum research space in around 2018-2019. And back then, people were discussing the kind of Ethereum 2.0 sharding roadmap. And the kind of like missing piece of the puzzle was from that. was data availability sampling and the idea of how can we scale data availability. And so it was kind of around then that I kind of realized that the core primitive of a

blockchain, like what a blockchain fundamentally is, is just a proof of publication system where you can just dump arbitrary data into it and it orders it and makes it available. And once you have that and scale that very well, that that unlocks a lot of power and scale for developers to build their own computation environments and applications on top of it using roll-ups. Israel, what were you going to add to that? Yeah, I just want to add that lazy is a very common term in like CS, like in computer science or programming. And it is doesn't only mean that it's just lazy and like I think Mustafa used the word down. In the sense, it's also like it's actually optimized because it lazily does the execution.

only where it's needed, right? Like, it's not like this world computer model where everyone executes everything, like all the transactions, but it's optimized in the sense that the transactions only get executed exactly where it's necessary. So this thesis from Celestia about just being, A, a modular blockchain and B being focused on roll-ups,

aka, like supporting more blockchains, is very harmonious and synergistic with the Ethereum. thesis. So Ismail, maybe you can explain a little bit about like, what would you say is Celestia's relationship to Ethereum? I think it's very like, it could be very symbiotic in the sense that Celestia could also be used as a building block for Ethereum like Williams or layer two's in the sense that people or like developers who want to launch like a layer two currently have the choice to post call data directly on Ethereum, which is very expensive. I mean, it's great for censorship resistance, but it's like not really practical and

way too expensive. And the alternative to that is you have a data availability committee, which is rather centralized, right? So Celestia is that sweet spot between that because now you can have an Ethereum application or an Ethereum layer two. and you post your data additionally on, or not additionally, you post your data on Celestia and use that for data availability.

So I think that might enable new applications that are currently unfeasible or not practical on Ethereum through Celestia. We have this project called Blobstream that also posts attestations onto Ethereum, data attestations onto Ethereum. So that makes it very, like could make it very symbiotic in my opinion.

What's the property that Celestia has that Ethereum doesn't have that you're saying is unlocking potentially unlocking new use cases or new applications? Oh, that data, like data ordering and data availability is really cheap. Okay. That's the goal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So like the initial block size, it's not like it could be symbiotic.

It is very symbiotic because the initial blocks. size for Selesia is something like 20 times higher than the IP-8444 as well. I think this will add a lot of value to Ethereum as well, because in order for, in order to have, even with the IPA444, although to have a lot of applications that are practical, you need off-chain data availability, especially for these gaming chains that don't need as secure or as high security as on-chain Ethereum data has. And I should also mention, for example, EIP444 only supports three blobs per block. And whereas Celestia doesn't have a limit to how many data blobs per block.

And what does this mean practically? So we've discussed like the technical benefits of module blockchains. But one of the thesis that Celestia has for why modular blockchains are important is this idea of application-specific blockchains. So in a theorem right now, you have this, you have like a few big roll-ups, like you have Arbitrum run, you have, you know, optimism main chain and so on and so forth. But my original kind of thesis for Sestia was that, well, we should have many roll-ups. So it's very similar to the cosmos vision where you have many blockchains, except that those blockchains will all be sharing the security.

And so you have this idea of application-specific role-ups. And that's a very powerful idea that can lead to inherently better products because what that allows you to do is it allows you to create modifications to things like the EVM or create computation environments that can do things that inherently aren't possible without a custom execution environment. So to give you some examples, so for example, there's a roll-up on Ethereum right now called Manta, which has modified the EVM to add certain ZK, zero-knowledge opcodes, to make things like zero-knowledge holdem possible.

So there's an actual application running right now that wouldn't be economically feasible to run with an unmodified EVM. And then you've also got like a project called Curio, which modified the EVM to embed an actual game as an upcode to the EVM. So they've managed to create like a 0.5 second tick engine for their game where you can have like a real time strategy game where it's like if you move your character, it moves immediately. And that inherently requires modifications to the Ethereum virtual machine. And so our thesis with application specific blockchains that like we can imagine a world where there might be, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of roll-ups rather than. than five rollops. And we see this today,

there's a project on celestial called Dimension with 11,000 roll-ups deployed via Celestia via this project. And so you can imagine in the future, if you go to L2B, you can imagine in a year or two for now,

it's not going to be 30 roll-ups. It might be 10,000 roll-ups. And that's going to be inherently enabled by Ethereum L2's posting the data onto Celestia, because those application-specific roll-ups will inherently be enabled by much greater data throughput and greater quantity of data blobs.

Just to parse something out that you said, so we have a bunch of layer twos that are tinkering and playing around with new virtual machines, forking the EVM, or sometimes even just not even starting with the VPN, AVM and just having a brand new virtual machine to power that blockchain. But you can tinker, freely tinker with a virtual machine and settle on Ethereum.

Celestia isn't unlocking anything there. That's not new. you're saying is that the data availability is enabling these things to actually have the low fees to actually have the use cases that the tinkering of the EVM does enable, right? So it's not like you can tinker and change up a virtual machine blockchain on Celestia any more or less than you can on Ethereum. It's just that the cheaper fees due to the supply of data from Celessia just opens up the landscape of when you do tinker with a virtual machine, you can get more use cases out of it.

That's the way to interpret this. that but and also it's the fact that um with the IPA 44 for example you can only fit three data blobs per block and so you can like a roll-up can only buy like a hundred kilobytes of data at a time so with roll-up you can buy as little 500 bytes so with that kind of like um the minimum unit of data you can buy that inherently enables Ethereum to have a lot more to have this proliferation of smaller application specific roll-ups right so 404 for like three three blobs per um per block, I think. So, like, three roll-ups can post,

can post, like, their state route to Ethereum after 4844. But how does this compare to, and so 404-4 is proto-dank sharding? How does Celestia compare to full-dank sharding? Yeah. So it's not, I mean, it's not yet clear how many data blobs then full-long-shadding will support or, like, what the full roadmap is there. But generally speaking,

Celestia already supports eight-mecabyte blobs, so which I think is, as of today, is around half of the maximum throughput that Deng Sharding plans to support in a few years time. So I think the main benefit here really is through the blob stream bridge, Ethereum roll-ups, Ethereum can remain a lot more competitive with other layer ones by having access to this much higher data throughput

to allow roll-ups to scale and also to allow for application-specific roll-ups to proliferate. And I should also say that, like Seleleleian and Ethereum are actually very kind of similar in some sense because they share very similar values because as I said when I was kind of working on or looking at Ethereum research back when Ethereum 2.0 was still being planned. I was really interested in how to make sharding work and one of the key primitives of sharding was data availability sampling.

And so I could also this paper with Vitalik on how to on data availability sampling, and data availability sampling is basically answers the question of like, how can end users or light nodes verify that the chain, the data behind the chain was actually made available without them having to download all the data themselves because that's inherently required for schemes like fraud proofs or ZK proofs. For fraud proofs and ZK proofs to work, you need to know that data is available. And obviously you can just increase the block size,

but that will have the ability for end users to actually verify the chain. But with data availability sampling, end users can download small parts of the chain. If they download 1% of the chain, they can verify that 100% of the chain is available. And so this is very different to other off-chain data availability solutions on Ethereum, like data availability committees, because with data availability committees,

you have to trust that committee in order. to make sure that data is actually available. But with data availability sampling, the end user can actually verify that the data is available themselves. And that's basically also the goal, the end goal of dang sharding. And so from a value's perspective, it's very kind of aligned that end user verifiability is very important for decentralization.

I know one thing about the economics of Celestia is that the supply of bandwidth, if you will, the supply of data increases, the more that people use it. This is a line that I've heard. Mustafa, could you explain how that works? Sure. So as I mentioned, with data availability sampling, you can have a system where you have light nodes.

And what light nodes are is that if you go on a metabask right now, how does your metamask interact with the Ethereum network? Right now, it just uses a centralized RPC endpoint, like inferior, for example. But one of the original goals of Web3 is that users should be able to verify the chain themselves without having to go through trusted third parties. And the idea of light nodes and like clients are important to achieve that because the idea with the line node is that you can run a node locally on your phone or your computer that connects to the network directly and can verify the chain with very little resources

using technologies like fraud proofs or ZK proofs and data availability something. And with data availability sampling, what happens is every light node downloads a very small piece of the chain. And so the more light nodes you have, the more pieces of the chain are downloading. And so the more pieces of the chain are downloading, the bigger block sizes you can have while allowing the light nodes to verify the chain. Because the property is that as long as you have enough light nodes, downloading enough of the chain, to collectively, that such that they can collectively reconstruct the, block themselves, then you can increase the block size. Sure.

So, yeah, the idea is that the more people, the more people that are verifying smaller pieces of the whole entire celestial system, the larger the whole entire celestial system can be while having assurances that the whole system is being checked by the collective set of light knows out there. Is that how to... Yeah, exactly. And this is kind of like a very differentiating point between Ethereum and Celana. because people complain about, you know, Salana claims to do very high throughput,

but it's got very high validator requirements. You need like 256 gigabytes of RAM to run a validator. And there's no way as an end user to easily or cheaply verify that the validators are doing the job correctly. And that's why like the Ethereum community kind of like pushes back against that rhetoric. Well, you can increase the block size, for example, but that would just mean having to increase the resources required to run a full node. But with line nodes, the idea is that you can increase the resources for full nodes without harming the ability for end users to actually

verify that chain because they can use technologies like fraudproofs and data data sampling. And this was also described, this was also described in Vitalik's end game post. Yes, yeah, I remember that. I remember that. We'll link that post in the show notes. Ismail, I think I'll turn this one Back to you. In the Ethereum roll-up landscape, we have all of these different, like, roll-up chain development kits or stacks. Like the OP stack is a big one, of course. Polygon when they're subnet or supernets.

And basically, they call them the CDK. Does Celestia have something like this? So we're working internally on something called Roll Kit, which is also a development kit. It's like a drop-in replacement for tendermin. or commit BFTIR it's called today. And that enables any ABCI compatible application, which is basically any cosmos flavorish chain to be deployed on top of Celestia.

But it's not even limited to Celestia as like general purpose development kit or infrastructure as you want. And you could also use it for avail or other data availability layers. But we're developing it. that's the only one we're developing in-house, but there's a big community that are working on SDKs, for instance, like sovereign SDK, dimension basically that Mustafa mentioned earlier is also, can also be understood as an SDK.

And we also working with the, like, we have a fork of the OP stack and we would like that to be like merged up stream such that you could also use OP stack off the shelf to deploy on Celestea as well. So when we talk about using like a chain development kit like roll kit and to deploy rollups on Celestia, that sounds exactly what like a lot of the layer twos are doing on Ethereum. Is it really that simple of a comparison or are there differences that we should understand? I mean, roll kit specifically is a bit different in the sense that it is like it requires the application on top to adhere to a specific interface, right? But I think all these SDKs, like the beauty of Celestia is like you could potentially use like

all these execution environments in one flavor or the other on top of Celeste as well. There's like there's no limit on what you can build on top for like EVMs or or any execution environments. So I think the main difference is that. Like in Celestia, we welcome basically all the, the whole zoo of SDKs and, and, uh, uh, uh, developer tooling into our ecosystem as well. Metamask portfolio is your one-stop shop to navigate the world of Defi. And now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore.

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cap of ETH, like you get to have USDC and dye transfer in, you get any of the tokens. So what's the same? Like, where does Celestia get some of the just economic power from? So on Celeste directly, there's no, it is no, like, Like, there's no direct, I mean, it's connected through IBC with the cosmos ecosystem. And I think ideally the community should decide on a bridge to Ethereum as well directly. So, but into like from Celestia directly, there, there won't be many like assets in and outgoing because it just doesn't make sense. Because like the applications are who need these assets and they live on top of Celestia.

So there will be bridges. There are like different bridging providers already. for these, but ideally this would also be in, um, be happening in a more trust minimized way. Yeah. So I think like a good way to put it would be that, um, like on Ethereum, the roll-ups scale the base layer, whereas on Sylvester, the base layer scale the roll-ups. But that being said, um, you know, obviously, you know, for roll-ups, bridging is still important. And we do have a very early kind of bridging ecosystem. So there's a, for example, There's IBC, as is Mel mentioned, you can have IBC bridges between Selesia and rollops.

And then you also have projects like hyperlearning. They have a bridge called DeXS, which you can use on using access to OIG right now, where they've actually got bridges right now between like you can reach Celestia to other chain, other rollups and including arbitraim, for example. So how does the native token of Celestia, the TIA, TIA, TIA token? What does, what's its role? How does it make the whole system like work? So its main purpose is that, like, first of all, it's like a staking token, right?

It secures the network the same way as EIF is used to secure the proof of stake network, like, we are staking. But the other big utility there is that it is used to pay for the data, right? Like if it's roll-up or application-specific roll-up posts data on Celestia, the fee is paid in TIA. Kind of like how when I roll up on Ethereum pays to post date on Ethereum, it pays it in ether. Same thing in Estelestia. Is there like an economic model unlike like EIP-159 where the TIA token is burnt or like what is the, what's like the supply characteristics like? But currently there is no fee burning, like no, not not an exact equivalent of that. So currently the fees are distributed to stakers.

like they don't end up with one proposer like block producer but they distributed according to like the weight of the stake it's also delegated proof of stake it's a bit different than any theorem staking model but yeah it gets distributed to the stakers or delegators and but we are thinking about fee burning as a viable way for forward for fees. I think fee burning specifically makes sense if there's like a lot of transactions, right? And there's like a like a fee market and you like balance it out.

And I think that's something that's also on our roadmap. Yeah. I should mention we have a very similar kind of protocol proposal process like Ethereum. We have a version of IPs called CIPs, Celestia improvement proposals. And I think the community plans to make some kind of like, feedback-bending proposals there. Certainly. Yeah, okay. And just to take an easy question off the table, the Celestia is, it's a blockchain. And so there are blocks with certain sizes, and there's certain levels of demand

for that block space, and then that demand is purchased in the TIA token, correct? Yes, exactly. Okay, cool. Is the economic model for Celestia somewhat similar to, like, a lot of the Solana people will say that the Solana case for the economics behind Seoul is that they make it up on volume. And so like with Celestia wants to have not just like a few roll-ups, it wants to have many, many, many roll-ups. And so like in terms of like long-term economic sustainability for Celestia, is it like, well, it's never really going to make economic sense if Celestia is only supporting a few blockchains, even if they are really, really big, beefy blockchains. The idea is that there's just so many blockchains and they're all paying a small amount that Celestia,

like the really the long-term economics comes from like making it up on volume. Is that is that right the right model to understand this? Yeah. So I have a post on the forum called the core values of the celestial social layer. And one of those values is that we should try to achieve economic sustainability through economy of scale instead of trying to achieve economic sustainability through artificial scarcity of resources or trying or like highly contested state. because ultimately we're all here to try to,

we're all in Web 3 to try to provide products to billions of users. So I think like the healthiest way to be economically sustainable is not through artificial scarcity, but to try to provide sustainable high quality block space to serve billions of people. And I think if you do that, then I don't see any reason why you can't achieve economic sustainability while having affordable transaction fees.

It's something that was mentioned earlier that I want, want to make sure that we dive headfirst into is this thing called blob stream ismail i think you i think you brought it up could you just explain what blob stream is so basically it um streams the data attestations onto ethereum such that ethereum uh layer two so to say um can read the data attestations directly on ethereum instead of like having to read the um like the um the attestations from Celestia additionally. So it's basically a more, like it enables a more decentralized way to handle data for a layer two on Ethereum.

So instead of a data availability committee, you have like a more decentralized solution there while still being very inexpensive instead of like posting on Ethereum. That's the main, I think that's without going too deep, that's the main. explanation, I would say. It's a way to understand this. It's basically like a bridge, not for assets, but for data. It's a data bridge between Ethereum, Rolovs and Celestia. Exactly.

So it's like, you can think of it as like a one-way bridge. You post the headers and these like data attestations of Celestia on Ethereum. That's basically it. So as far as I know, only Ethereum and now Celestia are going after like the roll-up roadmap. I don't think there's any other, like, chain out there. Maybe, I mean, Cosmos is similar to this, the App Chain thesis. But really, there's no, like, Celestia is the only thing like Ethereum in the sense that

there's, like, one single settlement layer. Ethereum is a settlement layer for assets. Celessia is a settlement layer for data. But these are the only two ecosystems really going after, like, the thesis of producing roll-ups and not just a few roll-ups, like, thousands of roll-ups. And so, like, is the kind of, unless without any new player entering this, arena is the kind of the long-term conclusion for Celestia some combination of Celestia native roll-ups and then also selling its data to Ethereum roll-ups.

And that's kind of just like the grand scheme of things. Yeah. I mean, I should also mention that like there are some other kind of roll-up-centric project since then. So I think like, for example, Tesos is trying to do have a roll-up centric roadmap. And I think there's some, you know, early experimentation of roll-ups on Cardano. I mean, I don't know how that's going. But like, so that's it. What I would say is, like,

Celestra is the only kind of base layer that has been created from scratch specifically with a roll-up centric ecosystem in mind. And as you said, like, we're not opinionated on how people use that base layer. Like, the core value here is when it create a credibly neutral base layer and you can,

for data availability and consensus, and that's completely neutral to any execution environment that builds on top of it. And as you said, like, people are kind of like free to use, use it however they want, whether it's as an Ethereum L2 or a Validium that uses Celestia as data available for Blobstream, or whether it's a sovereign roll-up directly on Celestia or using some other cellulmet layer, kind of that's up to the user, because that's kind of like the whole

point of modularism from our perspective, which is that users have the, developers have the flexibility to choose how they want to, what elements in the stack they want to use. And as any kind of technology stack matures, and we also saw this in Web 2, for example. In Web 2, you had this rapid modularization and software as a service architectures popping up where users kind of had like these microservice architectures and virtual machines where they can have different components they can plug and play around with. And so at any technology stack matures, you have a modularization of the stack where developers can pick and choose what makes sense for the application. And that's what we're trying to do.

That's how we see the blockchain space moving forward. So what are some projects that people can find on Celestea? What are some of the earliest projects that have committed to the Celestia ecosystem? What are they up to? What's just like the landscape of Celestial projects look like? Yeah. So it's kind of like a wide ranging landscape. So you have various roll-up frameworks that support celestial.

So, for example, you've got Dimension. And Dimension is a Cosmos bridge, like Cosmos, Rolars. up settlement layer that supports Celestial for this availability. So you can deploy a Cosmos roll-up on dimension that uses celestial for this availability. And right now, they've got an incentivized test net with around 10,000 roll-ups deployed. And I think that really kind of

illustrates the point where we're trying to make deploying a roll-up as easy as deploying a smart contract. And if you go to the portal, there's various kind of applications you can pay around with deployed on there, like, you know, gaming and NFT applications. And then there's There's also support for Arbitrim roll-ups and OP-stack roll-ups. So there's a few projects building OP-stack roll-ups that plan to use for data availability.

So there's one called Manta Network, which I mentioned earlier. It's kind of like a roll-up that has certain ZK upcodes to make certain privacy-preserving applications, like privacy-preserving hold them possible. They're already on Ethereum Mainnet, but they're planning to support, use our obststack integration to support Celestia as data availability for cheaper transaction. fees. Ismail, when you guys like daydream about potential future use cases or potential future ideas that somebody could build, is there anything that comes to mind to here? I mean, I dream of like basically anyone, like today, if you, if you deploy like an application,

you just like have an app store or whatever you hosted in some like cloud provider. I think ideally we'd have something where you can like deploy your roll-up, like your small roll-up quickly in a browser and like run it with your community, run it with your friends and like turn it to tear it down once you don't need it anymore. So that's basically like a use case. I think like if immemrial roll-ups, so to say like is something I would like. to see and maybe something like I think it's been it's been a dream since like I don't know early Ethereum days or even before like have a social network on on top of chain and I think maybe not like the

like not all the whole application all the data needs to live on on Celestia or or on chain but I think to some extent having an alternative, like a social network alternative, on-chained, or like a web-free native social network, I think that would be really cool. And I think, yeah, Celestea enables applications like these as well. And so I personally think the killer use case for crypto is still payments, kind of like going back to the roots of crypto, like Bitcoin was a peer-to-peach system. but why hasn't that happened yet? I think for consumer applications, like roll-ups,

as I said, to me, the most important thing about roll-ups is to create a better product. To me, roll-ups are not just about better scale or potentialization, but fundamentally to create a better product. So you know how the Salana people, they say the goal of Salana is to have like Web 2-scale blockchains. But I think like roll-ups are actually what will achieve that. And I had a thread of, I had a tweet about this.

other day, but you can imagine, like, if you had a roll-up sequencer with a roll-up, you can, for example, like, let's say PayPal wanted to become a, like, a roll-up or compete with USDC or create some kind of stable coin, they could easily kind of like make PayPal on chain by making it a roll-up. And that sequencer would basically give, the roll-up would give people a Web 2-like experience without even knowing they're interacting with a blockchain. Because the sequencer, with the roll-up sequencer, you can get, faster finality times than the base layer or any kind of consensus algorithm. So it's like Solana has 400 milliseconds block times, but with a roll-up sequencer that inherits

base layer, citizenship resistance and security, you can have Web 2 level finality or latency, like 10 millisecond latency. And I think, and the fact that they can use their own execution environment means that they're not limited to kind of like having to work their system around how the EVM works. So to me, that's kind of like the real beauty of all ups that you can literally just, in the future, it's just to get like any WebT application, give it and give it Web 3 guarantees. And the experience will be completely indistinguishable from using Web 2. Well, guys, I've learned quite a lot going down this Celestial Rabbit Hole.

There's a motto, a line apparently that is in the Celessia ecosystem and that I'll ask you guys to explain as we close this one out. What does it mean to have one gigabyte blocks, a billion light nodes and a million roll-ups. Can you just explain this vision, please? To achieve, like, what Mustafa mentioned, for instance, vision, like, you have, like, Web 2 style applications and all this, you need, like, a very large block space, right?

Like, we want to move away from the scarcity mentality and have, like, abundant and very inexpensive block space. And to achieve that, we want to aim for, like, massive blocks. But we don't want to... So that's the one gigabyte blocks, right? But we don't want to sacrifice decentralization and the verifiability of the chain. That's why light nodes are essential part of our vision. And we want one billion light nodes, basically like light nodes running on your fridge.

And like on all machines everywhere on your phone, in your browser. So these light nodes are necessary such that the massive blocks actually can be, can be reconstructed in the case of a woof folding attack but also um yeah also we want to empower users to actually verify the chain that's the one billion light nodes and obviously the applications on top are what matters so that's the one million roll-ups we want we already seen this in in with i mentioned 11 000 roll-ups but um we want to make it as easy as possible such as like even today's Web 2 developers come and say like, oh, I can also just deploy this as a roll-ups. So why not 1 million roll-ups?

Beautiful. Love it. When you guys are done with this podcast, it's Monday. So they've got another long week of crypto ahead of us. Mustafa, what's the first thing that you're going to go back and get working on? Like what's the near-term focus for the Celestia team right now? So, yeah, I mean, in the short term, we're making various optimizations to the Celestian software just to implement things like pruning.

It's like very, these very short-term kind of optimizations that we have to do straight after main net pretty much. Like, no other thing. The kind of like short-term is very boring, like these kind of like technical depth. But that will allow, that will enable the groundwork to have things like one gigabyte blocks. And then what about the long term? What's kind of the big landmarks ahead for the Celestia project? One gigabyte blocks, one billion.

One billion. I know it's one million roll-ups. Awesome, guys. Well, if listeners are curious and they want to learn more, where should I send them? Yeah, Celestia.org. There's lots of material on there,

and also material on how modular of blockchains work as well, on Stoerith.org slash learn. Awesome. We'll get all those links in the show notes. Mustafa Ismail, thank you so much for guiding us down the Celessia rabbit hole, and good luck.

Congratulations on getting this project out there and seeing the light of day. And I, too, and very much aligned with the whole idea of a million roll-ups. So let's get it done. Thanks for coming on the show today. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Cheers, guys. Bankless Nation, you know the deal. Crypto is risky. Defi is risky. New chains are always risky. You can lose what you put it in. But we are headed west. This is Frontier.

It's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.