Unchained - Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups - Ep. 610

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. 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  Thank you to our sponsors! Popcorn Network Polkadot Guests: Nick White, COO at Celestia Labs Previous appearances on Unchained: Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate Mustafa Al-Bassam, cofounder and CEO at Celestia Labs Links Modular vs. monolithic Alchemy: Modular vs. Monolithic Blockchains Visa: Monolithic vs. modular blockchain Chris Burniske’s tweet on modular vs monolithic “The horrific inefficiencies of monolithic blockchains” by polynya Blockworks: A spicy salvo launched in the monolithic vs modular debate Unchained: What Is the Blockchain Trilemma? Celestia Celestia’s explanation of modular blockchains Data availability Data availability sampling An introduction to sovereign roll-ups Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the superpowers of roll-ups is that you can customize the execution environment. You know, whereas in a monolithic world, let's say I have some EIP that I've been trying to push for the Ethereum L1 to adopt for the longest time, and it's going to add some functionality to the EVM that's going to enable my application. In a monolithic chain, I have to wait and, like, kind of lobby, and it's like a political sort of like battle, and it's extremely slow. In the roll-up world, there is none of that. Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started coming crypto eight years ago, and as the senior editor of Forbes was the first mainstream reader-porter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the February 20th, 2024 episode of Unchained.

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Hey, Laura. Good to be here. So Celestia launched on Mainnet back in October to much fanfare. And it's known as a data availability layer, and it takes a modular approach to blockchains. We've covered this a little bit on the podcast before, not a ton. So Mustafa, Celestia started with you, with a project you were working on called LazyLedger. Tell us how you came up with this idea to create what is now finally morphed into. to Celestia.

Sure. So this was when I was doing a PhD in blockchain scaling in 2016-2019. And I was just trying to think about a lot of different ways to scale blockchains. Specifically, layer one scaling, how do we scale the base layer of a blockchain? And one of the earlier research proposals I worked on was sharding. And this was back in the, in about five years ago, the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap kind of revolved around sharding. And it was like, you have a thousand, 24 shards, and it was very complicated. And as part of that, I created with my co-authors, one of the first papers on how to do sharding called ChainSpace.

And that was later spent out into a project that was acquihired by Facebook. But I didn't join Facebook. And instead, I kind of focused more on my PhD. And I started thinking about, well, like, how can we fundamentally scale base layer? And I started thinking about, like, trying to unpick the components of the blockchain and trying to think from really from first principles and trying to unlearn everything I learned. And to, let's say, if we create a blockchain from scratch, fundamentally what is a blockchain and what is the simplest blockchain can create? And that's where lazy ledger kind of started out. It's the answer to the idea is like, what is the simplest blockchain you can make that is useful for developers, that is as minimal as

possible, and still make it useful to deploy applications on top of that. And that's kind of where a little bit just started, and it's basically just a blockchain that only does consensus and data availability. It does not have smart contracts. It does not have execution or anything fancy. It's just a very simple blockchain where developers can post data onto it. And it turns out that is fundamentally what blockchain does, and it's extremely useful primitive to people building things like roll-ups. And that makes it, it's extremely useful to scale roll-ups on layer two technologies. And when you were trying to do that, were there like particular problems you were seeing in the blockchains at that time in 2019 that you felt like

this vision could kind of solve for? Yeah. So this was back in the day before roll-ups even existed. And when I was focusing on sharding, the missing piece of the puzzle to sharding was this problem called the data availability problem. And it's the same problem that roll-ups have to date. But the idea is that how can, if you have like a thousand shards, which the Ethereum roadmap had before, how can each shard make sure that each other shard is being honest? And to do that, for each shard to make sure each other shot is being honest, it needs to make sure that all the data behind each shard was made available and published the internet. And so this was like a really hard problem at the time.

How can we make sure that all the data on a chain was actually published without actually having download all that data yourself? And that's where this idea of data availability proofs and data availability sampling came from. And that was kind of like the missing piece of the puzzle at the time to the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap. But once that puzzle was kind of figured out, I kind of realized, well, this is actually this final piece of the puzzle is actually the core component of what a blockchain really does. A blockchain is fundamentally just a data publication layer. It's a data availability engine. And Lazy Ledger was the idea to just do only that and scale that extremely well. And it turns out

that if you just do that and scale that actually well, you can build any kind of application on top of it using roll-ups or layer twos. Because roll-ups are basically just are basically blockchains in themselves that use another blockchain for data availability. Yeah. And so what this ends up doing is kind of, you know, take this original vision of a blockchain where all the different functions all happen on one layer and sort of separate it out into pieces.

So this is how we have this idea now of modular. blockchains. So Nick, can you just talk a little bit about that vision for modular blockchains, like what parts end up being modular and, you know, what are, you know, the different parts of a modular stack? Sure. So as Mustafa started to explain, the original vision for for blockchains starting from Bitcoin and Ethereum and even Salon, most of the layer one chains that people know of today followed a monolithic design, meaning that they do all of the core, functions of a blockchain within one protocol. But then as Mustafa started to think about things more fundamentally and from first principles, distilling down those functions, he realized that there's no

reason why they all need to be coupled together. And in fact, you get these superpowers when you start to decouple them and do them as separate protocols. And so the three main functions are consensus, which is the ordering of data. So, you know, if we're all on a, you know, sharing a blockchain, We need to know and agree on what is the order of events or the order of transactions. If the order is mixed up, then we're not seeing the same things. The second thing is data availability, which is a confusing term, but it's data publication, essentially. It's about being able to prove to someone else that the data behind those transactions

has been released and is public information that anyone can download and see. So data availability kind of provides this ability to audit the chain and see what's actually happening. And then the last one is the one that people are probably the most familiar with, which is execution. And execution is essentially where smart contracts and all the business logic and the applications for these blockchains lives. And that's where the transactions actually get interpreted and then verified into some output state. And so those are the three main layers. And Celestia focuses on consensus and data availability. And then you have roll-ups and layer two technologies that focus on the execution part.

And so those two things are kind of the perfect compliments of each other. So Celessia focuses on scaling the base layer of just consensus and data availability. And by focusing only on data availability and consensus, it can be way more scalable than a standard monolithic L1 that has to do everything all wrapped up into one package. And also likewise for these execution layers, these roll-ups and L2s, they just focus on that one thing and they can be really, really scalable and also be more customizable.

So one of the advantages of modular blockchains, aside from what I just mentioned is that you open up the stack for more innovation from the developer. So rather than being locked into the EVM or the SVM or any particular execution environment with a built-in execution layer in a monolithic chain, in a modular chain like Celestia, it's totally expressive and flexible because the developer can choose to run EVM or Solana VM or Cosmos SDK. or WASM, anything that they, any kind of execution environment that is best for their application. And they can even customize it and build something that no one's thought of before. So modular blockchain really are a step function change in the history of blockchain architecture. Something that's so interesting to me is so, you know, we're coming from this world where pretty much most things have been monolithic or at least started that way, even if some of them are morphing into something else. And yet here you guys are, you're kind of,

fully on board with this modular vision. And I've even heard you say, Nick, that you believe in a world of 10,000 or more roll-ups. So why is that? Like, why do you think that makes so much sense? Or why do you think that's the future when, you know, so far we, mostly what we've had is like something different? Yeah. So, I mean, I think the 10,000 roll-up endgame is very interesting because it's very controversial to many people. in some way it's kind of like the opposite of Solana's endgame

where you only have like one single chain but I think the way that I see it is kind of very similar to the evolution of Web 2 like if you look at the history of Web 2 and I'm not saying that analogy by reasoning is good but I think it's kind of like an interesting piece of history like when Web 2 when the web was first created the only way to create a website is if you had a physical server

somewhere like in your university or on a data center You need to earn a physical machine. And that was kind of like similar to the Bitcoin days where if to create a new blockchain or to create a new decentralized application, you own blockchain. But you had Bitcoin was just only for one application. And then you had name coin, you know, light coin, dutch coin. It was like a different blockchain for each application.

But then Ethereum came around. And then Ethereum kind of revolutionized it because Ethereum, the idea of Ethereum was instead of having a different blockchain for every single application, let's create a general purpose blockchain with a general purpose smart contract environment. And the Web2 analogy to that is kind of very similar to shared web hosting providers. Like back in the day before you had AWS or DigitalOcean,

you could go on like a service provider like GeoCities or Dreamhost or Bluehost and you could upload the code for your site to those services and your website would share the same server as many other websites. But the limitations of that is that you had to create your website in whatever programming language

that server supported, which was like at the time, PHP or Perl. And that's very similar to Ethereum. And also you have to share resources with this other websites. That's very similar to the idea of Ethereum or the world computer model.

You have to create your smart contract in the Ethereum virtual machine or Solidity and then upload your smart contract to this world computer and you're sharing the same smart contract as everyone else. but maybe not every single use case needs to share the same execution environment

or the same computer as every other decentralized application. And that's what we're seeing recently with a proliferation of people creating their own custom roll-up chains and blockchains. And this was the kind of like the original vision of cosmos. It's like scaling, anyone can create their own cosmos chain and every application has its own chain. But again, the problem with that is that there's a lot of overhead to creating your own blockchain. So the idea is that if you look at the Web 3, Web 2 analogy, you had the cloud, the creation of virtual machines and the cloud was a big moment that revolutionized Web 2 because for the first time in history, any developer within seconds could have access to their own virtual machine that had the same advantage that give you the same advantages as having your own physical hardware, but without disadvantages of having to maintain and own that physical hardware, because developers had access to the own execution. environment, they could install whatever software they wanted and they could customize it

how they wanted. And people were able to play around with new programming languages like Golang, Rost and so on and so forth that might not have been as easily possible before if people were limited to the same shared housing environments. And that's very similar to what we're seeing with roll-up technology. Because roll-ups, what they fundamentally allow you to do, they allow you to create your own blockchain, but without the overhead of having to maintain your own proof-of-stake work. So like right now today you can go this roll up as a service providers like you know, Conjure and Caldera and dimension, you could go on these providers today fill out a form and within seconds you can have your own roll up chain deployed immediately. And that's that's kind of

extremely powerful because that allows developers to have the it's like it's the it's the same importance as when the cloud came to web two. It allows developers to have the own fully customized chain, and they're no longer limited to the same limitations as they were limited before as EVM was. So, for example, you've got, like, gaming providers that have created, there's a, there's a project that has managed to embed, like, entire game engines in the EVM by modifying the EVM. So there's just, like, things that you fundamentally can't, economically do on-chain as easy as you can do with your own custom EVM execution environment. And a lot of the advantage is that it's inherently scaling because not every application needs to share the same gas resources as every other application.

If you're running your own roller, you have your own execution. You're not sharing execution resources with everyone else. So if one application gets very busy, that doesn't necessarily need to affect other applications. Oh, wow. Yeah. Just if I think back to, you know, like 2017, 2018, then it's very obvious that this has advantages because. or even like later on with the whole. So 2017-2018, I was thinking about the ICOs, how they just kind of pushed out every other use case during those periods.

And then I guess it would be same for, you know, like during the NFT periods where everyone was trying to mint at the same time. So are there specific applications that you feel work better on a modular blockchain or even that are possible with a modular blockchain? That wouldn't be when they're having to, you know, share those kinds of research. share the execution environment with other applications? Yeah, so I think, like, the obvious ones are, you know, like, you know, gaming and NFT chains.

Because, like, I mean, one of the, like, common criticisms of this 10,000 wall architecture is that composability becomes harder because you need to keep doing these cross-chain transactions. That is a problem, but it's not, it's a problem that's being solved and it's not a very problem. But there's many applications that don't need as much composability, especially like gaming chains or NFT chains, there's absolutely no reason why those applications need to be

on the same chain or execution environment as some high volume essentialized exchange. But that being said, we do also have, you know, DFI projects on SELAHA, notably projects like AVO. I think something like 70% of all DFI options trading volume is secured by Celestia as a data availability layer. And that's, and the reason for that is because it's just simply way cheaper than doing it on chain.

As the cross-chain, and for mobility issues and the UX becomes cleaner, I think people will kind of realize it's just better to do those things in roll-ups rather than doing it on-chain. I'll also add a few examples, too. I think one of the superpowers of roll-ups is that you can customize the execution environment.

Whereas in a monolithic world, let's say I have some EIP that I've been trying to push for the Ethereum L1 to adopt for the longest time, and it's going to add some functionality to the EVM that's going to enable my application. In a monolithic chain, I have to wait and kind of lobby, and it's like a political sort of battle, and it's extremely slow. In the roll-up world, there is none of that. You can take the EVM, fork it, add in custom op codes or functionality, and then just

launch it as a roll-up, and you have that functionality of the box. So a couple examples that are really powerful are Manta has built a EVM chain that has custom op codes for verifying ZK circuits. And that makes it really cheap for them to do things that have privacy or native randomness in the protocol. And that's really powerful for various games or applications like they have an application of ZK Holden, which is sort of like an on-chain poker game. Or other uses are things like adding native account abstraction kinds of things,

or new cryptographic curves that allow you to use the built-in, like enclave in your mobile phone as your wallet. And so these are the kind of things that like you can't do in a monolithic chain like Ethereum because you can't, you don't have control to that level of the stack. So there's a lot of applications like that where developers are exploring new, sort of the frontier of what's possible because modular enables that. All right.

So now let's talk about Celestia and how it fits into a modular blockchain. Why don't you describe what Celestia is? So Celestia is. what we describe as a plug-able consensus and data availability layer, which means that it's basically like a very simple blockchain. All it does is it allows developers to post blobs of data to it. That's basically the only use case you can do it. You can just get arbitrary data and post it to Celestia.

And Celestia's job is to make sure that data is ordered in relation to other data. So you can say, okay, this data came before that data. And to make sure that data is actually verifiably published the entire internet. So there's no missing data. So that's basically all it does. And it tries to scale that extremely well using the technology called data availability sampling. And that basically idea is that the way that the blocks are constructed allows light nodes or nodes without a lot of resources to gain the very high assurance guarantee that that data was actually published without needing to download all that data. And the way that works is the nodes can download.

a small random pieces of that block. And if you download enough random pieces, they can have a very high confidence that the old data was published. So an analogy to explain this is to maybe think of Celestia like a newspaper publisher, sort of. So the blocks are sort of like a new, like daily publication of the newspaper. If you're a subscriber, you receive the newspaper and you can read the headlines and see that the data's in there.

You don't have to read the whole thing to know that it's all been published. So it's not about, you know, it's not about storing data. Storing data would be more like a library because a lot of people think that data availability is just data storage like Filecoin or RWeave. But it's actually like publication. So it's about, you know, roll up developer comes with a blob, which would be like an article. They would pay the newspaper and say, hey, publish my blob and the news today's date of the newspaper. And then that would be included and packaged all up and then distributed.

to everyone who's running a node in the network, and they'd all be able to really efficiently verify it. So they don't have to read everything themselves, but they can still know that it was published to everyone else. Yeah, and it's worth noting that publication is effectively, as I mentioned, like the core thing that blockchain does. Fundamentally, a blockchain is just a proof of publication mechanism to publish arbitrary data.

And once you have that, you can build anything on top of that as a layer two or as a roll-up. So, like, developers, as Nick said, you can define their own execution environments or computation environments, whether that's custom EVM or anything else, by using Sylvester as the underlying kind of consensus and data availability layer.

And so when you talk about how it's just publishing but not storing, essentially it makes the data available for some time period when it's necessary. And then after that, you know, then I guess it's stored elsewhere or something, or I guess, Is it that it's no longer available after finality on execution layer or something like that?

Like, you know, how long is it available? So currently we have a CIP that proposes that it's kind of like guaranteed to be available for 30 days, which is kind of similar to EIP 444 in Ethereum. In that proposal is 21 days. But it's not as if the data disappears after 30 days. It's more that it's pruned, but you'll still be able to. to download the data from kind of like archival nodes that store longer term data. So it's very likely, it's almost certain that you're still able to download that data,

that historical data. It's just that like there's no kind of like impromptical guarantee that it will be downloadable. Or like if you need higher assurance guarantees that you can download it in a certain amount of time, then you probably want to do some kind of like off-chain storage solution. So for example, you've got systems like file coin or Albi that solve this problem. or that kind of like incentivize storage. But we provide a different, Celestia provides a different goal in storage.

As Nick said, it provides publication, which is fundamentally a different thing. So, yeah, again, to like one way to think about this is like, you know, a newspaper publisher doesn't keep the newspaper around indefinitely. They publish it. They let people take it and read it and all that. But then they're not expected like, oh, if you ask the newspaper, hey, can you give me the newspaper that was 10 years that happened 10 years ago?

they're not going to have it on hand. However, there are other services like libraries that actually do store every single newspaper. And you can think of those libraries as more of the storage, like the data storage protocols, like R-Weave or FilePoint. And storage, like data availability is something that is critical to the safety of blockchain. It's critical to the security. Whereas the storage, and it has like much tougher trust assumptions that you have to tackle,

whereas data storage is just, you need one honest, party to store the data. And it's not as important for safety. It's more about the ability, like, liveness, the ability to regenerate the state of the chain. So they're very different things. But the problem is that data availability sounds a lot like data storage. Yeah, yeah. When I was first learning this concept, like didn't fully understand in the beginning. So we talked to, you guys referenced the term data availability sampling. So talk a little bit about how that works, you know, what it is exactly and how you. How you. you make that secure? Well, Mustafa, you know, co-invented it, so I'll let him take this one.

Yeah, the only idea is that the goal is how can I make sure that some block or some piece of data was published to the internet without me having to download that entire block or data? Because it almost sounds impossible, right? How can I, if I have this data, if I have the hash of the data, how can I know that this data was published? And data availability sampling seeks to solve that problem. The way it works, it uses this kind of like this mathematical primitive called

erasure coding. And erasure coding is a mathematical primitive used in a lot of older technologies like CD-ROMs and satellite communications. If you can think of a CD-ROM, if you scratch a CD-ROM, and maybe this is more for the older audience, if you remember this, but if you scratch a CD-ROM, your

computer can still read that data on that CD-ROM. So how is that possible? That's possible because the data on that CD-ROM is encoded using something called EREG coding. And the way that works is like, let's say you have one-megabyte updateer, for example. What you can do is you can apply a regic coding on the data to effectively blow that one-migabyte update up to two megabytes, such that if you take this two megabytes of data, and if any half of it is missing, you can reconstruct half of it from the other half. And that's including like any half of the data, like any chunk, as long as you have half the chunks of the data, you can reconstruct the other half. So it's kind of like a way to extrapolate

data or to recover data. It's kind of like a self-healing file. Like if you damage that file, it can kind of like repair itself from the remaining pieces of the file. Almost like if you kind of like have a wound, your body repairs itself. So what that means is that if you apply that for a blockchain, if you apply a regicoding onto a one megabyte block, for example, you now have a two megabyte block. But what that means is that means that you no longer need to make sure that 100% of the data is available to make sure that it's all available. You only need to make sure that 50% of the data is available to know that it's all available. Because if you know that 50% of the data is available, then you know that you can always reconstruct the other 50% from that

50% that you know that you have. Now, so then that's a very kind of powerful piece of information that you can use to create a game where as a user, if I know that I only need to make sure that to make sure that the person who created that block or the miner that created that block is being honest, if the, if the binary is trying to hide a piece of data, they need to hide at least half that data. So all I need to do is make sure that half data is available. what I can do is I can download random pieces of that block. If I download one random piece of that block

and the miner is being malicious and I landed in the part of the block that's not available and I don't get a response, then I know that block is not available. So then if I do one sample, there's a 50% chance that I know that block is available. Then you do two samples, 75%, three samples, 87.5%,

until you get to 16 samples, you have like a 99% guarantee. And after 70 samples, you have an extremely high guarantee that's lower than the probability of a hardware failure. And that's effectively how it works. Add a little more onto that. It's sort of one way to mental model

to think about it that I find useful is like flipping a coin where each time you sample the block, you download just a small, tiny part of it, and it lands heads, meaning the data is available. you get an increased confidence that the whole block is available. So if you flip heads 16 times in a row, it's like, okay, well, the statistical odds of me flipping heads every time is really low.

So therefore, it actually, all the data must be available. And what's powerful about this is that it enables the underlying chain, an underlying chain that employs data availability sampling can scale with the number of people who are sampling. So the number of users running light nodes allows the block size to, increase. And so unlike no standard blockchain where there's a fixed block size, data availability sampling makes the block size elastic and able to grow with demand and usage. So it's like it's sort of like the broadband moment of web three where all of a sudden we have

a step change in the scaling properties of a blockchain that will actually, you know, makes it feasible for us to scale to millions and hopefully in the future, even billions of users. and still remain trust-minimized because end users can run these sampling nodes on hardware like a smartphone that everyone has. So it makes the blockchain really scalable while still being verifiable. Wow. And so right now,

what would the size of the block be given the number of data samplers that you have? I don't know if I phrased that correctly, but you understand what I'm asking. Yeah. So right now, because we only launched main net fee kind of three months ago, we've started with the relatively small block size, which is 8 megabytes, which is still 20 times more than EIP.444. But this is to allow an early network of light nodes to kind of bootrap itself.

So in our incentivized test net, there was 1,000 light nodes. And there's lots of people, there's many people running light nodes on a main net. But it's still early stages because we need more metrics. We need like, kind of like systematic metrics for the community to know, okay, this is how many light nodes there are on the network. therefore it's safe to increase the block size. Because the problem with light nodes is that they're not suitable resistant. It's like anyone can run a light node. So you kind of need to have kind of good off-chain metrics

to kind of like analyze how many light nodes, how many real or how many total light nodes there are. And that's something that kind of the community is kind of building out. So I'm sorry, when you said a thousand that was in TestNet, how many light nodes do you have now on Mainnet? There isn't like a clear metrics on that because there needs to be a crawler to kind of map out the the light node network to kind of how many light nodes there are.

Okay. And you're building that or that's being built? Yeah, that's being built by a team called AGO, which is kind of building a Ross node for Celestia. Okay. Okay. So I guess it's a mystery for now. So in a moment, we'll talk a little bit more about the vision for Celestia, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Pocod is the largest layer zero blockchain with over 2,000 developers. And the anticipated PogoD2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem. Upgrading the infrastructure with 8 times higher transaction throughput and twice as fast block times. Perfectly tailored core time for the needs of every protocol.

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put it in the creamy garlic sauce on your McMuffin. The McDonald's Frank's Red Hot menu. They put that shit on everything. Breakfast available until 11 a.m. at participating Canadian restaurants for a limited time. Franks Red Hot is a registered trademark of the Frenchist food company LLC. Back to my conversation with Nick and Wistifa. So we talked about modular blockchains. We talked about, you know, how this will allow many kind of more application-specific chains and roll-ups. We talked about how Celeste is providing this data availability layer.

So now that this is launched, how do you think this will change the crypto space? Like, you know, what new kinds of applications will be enabled or what kinds of things will they be able to do now with Celestia? We talked about a few of them. I think the first sort of category are applications that need a lot of block space and have a lot of really high throughput requirements. So some of the ones that Mustafa have mentioned earlier are things like on-chain, D5. applications like some of these options exchanges, they have a lot of demand for block space, right? And only Celestia can provide that because we have data ability sampling. We have the ability to increase our block space with the amount of demand and users. Other things that fall into that

category to me are things like on-chain gaming, where there's going to be a huge high volume of transactions, and they're going to need a very, you know, cheap place to post that data. And kind of related to that and building off of it are a lot of the, there's a huge demand in the Ethereum ecosystem to launch Ethereum L2s. And the issue is that Ethereum block space is quite limited because it is monolithic. And so there's a limited amount of sort of like data that you can post to Ethereum. And so it's quite expensive. So only the sort of like most well-funded or most like highly used,

ethel-2s can afford to use Ethereum as their data availability layers, those things like optimism or arbitram, for example. But all these other teams that want to deploy L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem are kind of priced out. And so Celestia has come in and provided a place for them to post data that is dramatically cheaper and makes their application actually feasible. And so rather than having to pay literally millions of dollars in DA fees, they can cut that by 99%. And all of a sudden, the gas costs for users is now on par with chains like Solisphi's. So we're making the Ethereum ecosystem competitive with a lot of these Alt-L-1s by providing this really cheap DA.

And so we're seeing a lot of demand for roll-ups to deploy on Celesteia while still settling to Ethereum. So we're helping this sort of scale the Ethereum L2 ecosystem with this cheap modular DA. And then part of this is something called blobstream and also something called blob space. could not really figure out what this was in my research before. And I mean, I have like a definition written down. But if you could just explain how all that fits in, that would be helpful, not just for me, but for the listener. Yeah, so I can take this one.

So kind of block stream is effectively the way that Ethereum rollups can use Sestia for the availability. Effectively, it's like a one-way bridge between Sleastia to Ethereum, but it's not a bridge for relaying assets or transferring assets. it's a bridge for basically like transferring data commitments. So the way it works is that the Celestial data commitment is relayed to Ethereum every hour or so into a smart contract. And then that basically allows Ethereum roll-ups to reference data on Celestia using a proof that that data was included in that celestial data commitment. And so that basically allows people to build L2s and L3s on Ethereum that use Celestia

for data availability. Okay. And so something else that was interesting to me is, I guess in the event of a fork, Celeste would actually make it easier for the two chains to fork. Can you explain how that works? I think are you referring to the concept of sovereign roll-ups? I don't know.

I was either listening to a podcast or I read something where it talked about how if this had been available at the time of like the Dow or, you know, when Bitcoin did its big fork, that it would have made these contentious hard forks less contentious. Yeah, so that goes into the topic of sovereign roll-ups. So it's worth explaining what is a sovereign roll-up. So if you look at like traditional wall-ups, when roll-ups were kind of first popularized,

roll-ups were originally kind of opposed as a way to scale an L-1. It's like roll-ups being an L-2 to an L-1. But what I kind of realize is that it's possible to just have a roll-up as an independent chain in its own right. A roll-up does not have to be an L-2. A roll-up can be like an independent blockchain, like a layer-one chain is, but it's not a layer-2 to any other chain. It's just like an independent chain on its own right that happens to post or use another chain for the availability and consensus. But that does not make an L-2 because it does not mean that that kind of like roll-up needs to have an enshrined. bridge to that data ability there. And the reason why this is interesting is because this is

kind of like the original vision of cosmos, but the idea is like you can create your own cosmos chain and that cosmos chain has sovereignty because it's like an independent chain and it's run right. It has the ability to hard fork, right? But if you create a smart contract or a Dow on Ethereum, it's not really easy to hard fork that smart contract without hard forking the Ethereum chain itself. Whereas if you create your own sovereign chain, whether it's a sovereign roll-up or sovereign L1,

the community of the roll-up can kind of like hard fork and it's a chain if you wanted to. And I think the ability to hard fork is very important. Because to me, the whole point of blockchain is that they implement

kind of like the rules that social consensus has decided. It's basically like an implementation of a social contract. So it's like if you're deploying a smart contract, in Ethereum, you're inheriting the social consensus of Ethereum. But what if you want to have

your own social consensus or social layer? Because Ethereum, as you mentioned, the Dow hack, around 2017, there was this massive hack on this big contract in Ethereum called the Dada, 2016, and something like 5% of the Ethereum supply was compromised. And the Ethereum developers decided to hard fork the Ethereum chain to undo that hack. And then, if I remember, correctly, there was like another hack, similar hack of something like $100 million. I think it was parity if I'm correctly. But they didn't have half forked in that case because it didn't constitute as big percent of the of the FAM supply.

So then the question is like, why should only like big contracts be able to hard fork? And this is why the idea of like having your own sovereign chain can be important. because if a Dow is on a smart coin track on Ethereum, then it's not sovereign because it does not have the ability to hard fork, whereas if a Dow on its own chain has the ability to hard fork if you wanted to. And that's to me as an extremely important kind of like part of a blockchain, like a part of, extremely part of a part of cryptocurrency is this ability for the community to do upgrades via hard forks.

Oh, now I get it. So it's not necessarily that the existence of Celestia would have prevented it. It's more this vision of these modular blockchains allow these app chains. And then the app chains can do their own forks that don't affect the rest of the execution environment. Is that? Yeah, exactly. Oh. It's not so much the idea of celestial itself.

It's the idea of this idea of sovereign roll-ups, which we kind of like, which Celestial introduced. And sovereign roll-up is the same as like the notion of an app chain. Yeah. It's basically, I mean, it doesn't have to be an app chain. It can be like a general pepper chain, but it's similar to layer one. Like the same way that layer one can hard fork, a sovereign roll-up can also hard fork. Because like the difference between a sovereign roll-up and like, let's say a traditional Ethereum roll-up is that its traditional Ethereum roll-up has what I call like an enshrined bridge to Ethereum.

Like, you can say that roll-up is defined by the bridge on Ethereum. It's like, it's defined by the smart contract on Ethereum. theorem. The canonical chain for that roll-up is what the bridge says it is. But for a sovereign roll-up, the idea is like, okay, well, what if we don't enshrine a bridge? What if we just say this is actually an independent chain on its own right? And the bridges are secondary in the same way that a layer one bridge is secondary to the layer one itself. It's sort of like the difference between being like a state within the United States or under some like larger like Federation or like a country versus being your own country. So like a sovereign roll-up is a lot more like

its own country that can do its own rules and make changes whatever however the community decides, whereas if you're a standard sort of settled Ethereum roll-up, you have, you're still kind of bound by Ethereum, the country that you are sort of like incorporated under. Okay. And then to continue that analogy, so since they're all sharing security, then if you are this separate country, it's like you're part of NATO along with other countries. Is that another way to extend the analogy?

Yeah, yeah, because Celestia, yeah, I guess in like typically, if you're your own independent country, then you have to have your own military, you have to do all these, like provide your own infrastructure essentially. But in, and that would be sort of more like the Cosmos model

is you have to bootstrap your own chain, have your own proof of state token, all that stuff. But in the Celestia model, you're still sovereign, you have full control, but then you're part of like an alliance, essentially, where you can inherit the infrastructure and security of this bigger sort of network, which would be Celestia. All right. So then which types of crypto projects do you think should, you know, go that route versus like trying to do the more traditional, like we're going to have our own security?

You know, now that there's all these options, like what types of projects you think should, you know, go more like, yeah, Cosmos Ethereum route themselves? versus, you know, being more, or really anywhere along the spectrum. I don't know how many different options you think there are, but I'd be interested to hear, like, how developers should think about those choices. Well, to me, I think so that there's sort of a spectrum between launching your application as a smart contract on a shared execution layer like Ethereum or Solana. And then there's being a fully, you know, custom application of a chain with its own

consensus and his own blockchain completely. And then you have like the spectrum of like rollups, uh, whether they're settled or sovereign. Um, and I think, you know, if I were a developer, there's nothing inherently wrong with running your application to a smart contract. And in fact, there's some advantages, especially in today's world where, you know, you get to be part of a preexisting community with liquidity in users by launching an Ethereum or Solana out of the box.

But then what could happen is that you launch your application there. you start to get traction, you get users, you get liquidity, and you build up a brand for yourself. And all of a sudden you realize, like, I'm hitting the constraints of, you know, the EVM or the SWANVM or just the underlying scaling properties of these monolithic blockchains. You might think, okay, maybe there's actually a real reason for me to launch my own chain. And then I'll get more scalability. And I can customize certain things to make the user experience of my application more powerful. And so then you would look at the different options. And if for some reason, the customization required you to,

to have your own chain, like its own consensus, then, you know, obviously you should go that route. But for the most part, for most, I would say like 90% or 9% of applications, I think that they get the bulk of the advantages by just being a roll-up because a lot of the customizations that they're going to want will be in the execution layer aspect, which they have full control over in the modular stack. And if they want to customize things like having a crypticemen pool or some of these more fancy things, there will also actually be modular components like that that have been, that are being built by other projects in the modular stack, like sort of this new emerging layer called the shared sequencing layer. That's kind of the way I think about it. As you can prototype

as a smart contract. And then as you mature, you're probably going to want to migrate to become your own chain at some point. It's just sort of like the arc, I think, of development kind of naturally. Yeah, a whole important kind of aspect. I want to say, mention is that if you create your own day on one chain or cosmos chain, you usually have to pay a massive security budget in terms of new token issuance, you know, like 10 to 20%, and that's a very huge security cost to you maintaining a proof of stake value set. But if you deploy it as a roll-up with its own token, you don't have to pay this huge inflation or kind of token issuance security budget to incentivize validators because you don't need a whole proof of stake

valetetet set. You can just have a few sequences will do because the roll-up already inherits the sensitive resistance ideally of the base layer. And also, I mean, on that point, launching, you know, coordinating a launch of a blockchain is actually pretty difficult because you have to, there are a lot of validators out there and a lot of them are very sophisticated, But you still have to, you know, gather them all together and coordinate everything and run test nets and all these things, whereas like a roll up you can just do out of the box. So one of the things I kind of joked about when Celestia launched is like Celestia went through the effort of launching a blockchain and, you know, issuing a proof of stake token and all these

things so that you don't have to. It's sort of like, we're going through the effort so that you in the future when you want to launch your blockchain don't have to go through all of that work, which is very time-consum consuming and expensive. All right. So at this point, Celestia has partnered with Starknet to offer data availability for layer threes. You've also partnered with Polygon to integrate Celestia into their chain development kit.

There's other data availability solutions that are also coming to market like Avail, near DA, eigenDA, et cetera. So it sort of feels like we're coming to this moment where there's going to be a number of solutions available. Potentially, they would also partner with, you know, some of the same partners that you already have. And so is it just going to be this future where each application or roll up or whatever will choose their own data availability layer the same way that we see, you know, in Web 2, there's like different companies offering software as a service for anything from, you know, like payments to, you know, your website or whatever. So like, is,

Is that kind of the future we're heading toward? Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, it's interesting because celestial is the kind of like first specialized data ability to launch before any other competitor. So there's this kind of like huge first mover advantage. But I don't think it will boil down to costs because, you know, the costs are extremely early low. You know, it's like a hundredths of a cent to do a roll up transaction on the legislature.

I don't think making it a thousandths of a fence or 10,000th of a cent. is significantly moving the needle and for a world developer. So I think it will fundamentally boil down to things like, you know, what are the security properties kind of all developers want? And also, more importantly, what is the developer usability going to be like? Celestial Labs and other kind of development teams have put a lot of effort into creating integrations with kind of popular all-up frameworks like, you know, optimism and arbitram. and I think the more kind of like integration Celestia has with other frameworks, the more of a kind of good developer user experience kind of evolved around it.

And the more of a big community kind of evolves around it. And so it kind of becomes this network effects in a sense that the more integrations you have, the more easy is to kind of use it as opposed it as a day layer. I think that's one element of it. And the other element of it is kind of like what are the security properties? of that the area that you want. Like different dea liars have like different security properties or different tradeoffs. Because Celestia is, you know, has obviously data availability sampling. So it has crypto economic security.

But other areas kind of structures might be structured differently. Whereas like Igan, the A for example, resembles more of like a data availability committee because there is no like there's no data availability sampling or data availability proofs. It's just you have to sort of like trust the, um, the, um, the argument. the ADA kind of validate owners to say that this data is available, if that makes sense, because you can't slash on-chain data availability. Okay, so Celestia also has the TIA token, as you mentioned. Describe how that's used.

Yeah, so the Tia token has several uses. I think the first and most important use case is for the payment of transaction fees on Celestia, including the payment for blobs on Celestia. The other use is for on-chain governance. There's these on-chain governance parameters on-Slecia that people can vote on, including the community pool. So it's like this kind of like pool of funds that the community can vote to be spent in certain ways, pretty much like every other cosmos chain.

And then you also have, obviously it's a proof of stake token that secures the network. You have to stake it into order to kind of like elect validators on the network. And finally, and it's also. kind of emerging as this kind of token that you can use to bootstrap roll-ups. Like if you're bootchraping a roll-up, you might not necessarily want to bootstrap a token with that roll-up immediately. So kind of just like how if it is used as a gas token for Ethereum roll-ups, Celestia can also be used as a kind of like token to bootstrap all roll-ups,

whether that's as a gas token or whether that's to require some tokens to be bonded to become a sequencer in that roll-up. then Celestia, the Thier token kind of becomes a natural choice for that. And I'm sure you probably saw this on Twitter because I asked what I should ask you and someone, you know, linked to this tweet, but Omed Malikin called out Celestia's token tweeting, congrats to Celestia for achieving what seemingly every new L1 strives for. No, not sustainable adoption or credible neutrality, but combining a low float with a lot of hype to achieve an absurd FDV, meaning fully diluted.

valuation. So right now your FTV is about $20 billion. What do you say to his criticism? Well, I think it's pretty hard to say that Celestia has no adoption when like almost all new Ethereum ballops are using Celestia for DA and something like 70% of all new arbitram orbit chains are using celestial for DA and 70% of the Defy option volume is using celestial for DA. So I think that's pretty clear adoption. But in terms of FDV or price, that's, you know, I can't really, I can't really comment on that. That's not what we're kind of here for. We're here for the long term to build a kind of like sustainable and scalable data of a bit later. Okay. And Mustafa, I have to ask you about your history before you got into crypto because you are rather famous for having hacked

the CIA when you were 16. That's a really just interesting tidbit. So can you tell us more about that and, you know, the path that led you from that to where you are now? Yeah, sure. So I kind of got into computer programming from very early age when I was like eight or nine. And from there, I kind of like realized that programmers can make mistakes in the way that they kind of create their software. And from there, I kind of like started poking holes in like various different websites I was visiting. And that's kind of how I got into hacking. But I kind of got first got into it from a kind of activist perspective when I was going to 40, 15 when I was kind of they joined various hacker chat rooms. And this was back when the kind of hacker group Anonymous was active. And I sort of kind of got involved with various operations. Back then they were kind of like mostly doing these now of service attacks against, you know, companies like MasterCard and Visa as a response to, for example,

them blocking donations to big leaks. But then I thought I wanted to kind of like take it a bit further to see, okay, like now of service attacks, they're kind of interesting, but they don't do much. So I kind of decided to see, well, when I put together the most technically capable people in this group to see if you can actually do something more substantial in terms of like uncovering wrongdoing by like hacking into kind of corporations or companies to kind of expose emails or expose data that might kind of reveal wrongdoing. And that's kind of like what we ended up doing. For example, we hacked into a company called HBGRI Federal, which was. like a US military contractor and it was revealed

they were doing all kinds of things like astroturfing or creating like fake social media profiles or developing malware to kind of like spy on journalists and that kind of thing but then eventually we ended up kind of creating this group called LLSEC which kind of went

on this 50-day hacking spree that went to do all kind of things as you mentioned do a denial of service attack against CIA that was kind of like the most kind of hype thing even though it definitely wasn't a hack it was like a denial of service attack against the CIA. But because it's the CIA, it was kind of like very embarrassing for the CIA.

I guess that's like the most high profile target. So that's the one that people talk about a lot. And then how did you make that transition over to crypto? Yeah, I mean, because this was back in 2011, 2010. So I was kind of like already following Bitcoin back then. Because I was out like before, because part of the reason I got involved into this hacking from activist perspective is because I was interested. in kind of like peer-to-peer file sharing.

There was like this website, there still is this website called the Pirate Bay, which kind of like was subjected to like a lot of like, like governments trying to shut it down. To me that was really interesting that you had this p. to p.t p.tep file sharing technology called BitTorrent, and people were kind of like sharing files legally, copyrighted files of legally.

And the US government and the entire movie industry and music industry was trying to shut it down. But they couldn't because BitTorrent was disdeme. And to me, that was really fascinating because it was evidence that, like, decentralized technology was extremely powerful. So I was one kind of big, and even before Bitcoin, I was kind of like trying to think about, like, what else can be decentralized? Like, you managed to be decentralized pay to pay file sharing. Like, what if we decentralized the domain name system? Because, like, they were trying to take down the pirate bay domain names, for example, or trying to create, like,

to essentialize social media, for example, or the essentialized chat rooms. And those were things that a lot of people, including myself, are thinking about before Bitcoin was even created. So when Bitcoin was kind of introduced to the world, that was kind of like naturally very interesting to me. And I kind of followed it very closely. And, you know, around 2013, when I was following it closely, I was kind of following this block size war.

This was when Bitcoin reached is one megabyte block size limit. And there was a huge internal debate. and then there was like this fork, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this is a very interesting problem to be. And I wanted, I started thinking about more about how can we do base layer scaling on on on for blockchains. How can we scale the base layer without compromising on security and essentialization, which is why the Bitcoin community did not want to increase the block size limit above one megabyte because they, they feared that it would become more expensive to run nodes that verify the chain. And so that's why I became interested in kind of like base layer of scalability and light nodes. And that's why I kind of pursued a PhD in it in 2016. Interesting. Wow. I love that story.

So let's talk about the future of Celestia. Obviously, we've mostly talked about it applied to EVM environments. You know, you guys are allowing these Ethereum L2s to, you know, be a lot cheaper, basically, and to scale. but I'm sure you're aware there's a lot of layer twos on Bitcoin actually coming out so I had somebody ask me on Twitter if you saw Celestia

becoming a data availability layer for Bitcoin roll-ups. Well, it's funny because that's something that we were just discussing the other day because we were seeing the same pattern of all these Bitcoin L2s popping up and then we thought, well, we've built

this data bridge for Ethereum called Bobstream, could we actually use it on Bitcoin? And Mustafa had this idea of actually creating, there's like this new, like, Bit VM on Bitcoin, and there's a way that we could actually verify the same data commitments on Bitcoin and potentially actually provide a DA, scalable DA for Bitcoin L2s. But I don't know, Mustafa should explain more of his vision,

because he's the more of the OG Bitcoiner. Yeah, so, I mean, there's a team called Chainway, I believe, that's deploying a EVM roll-up on Bitcoin. is like a ZK EVM roll-up on Bitcoin. And the idea is like, well, we can easily deploy a blob stream to that because the blob stream is basically is meant to be deployed on EVM chains because it's basically a solidity smart contract.

So you can deploy on any EVM chain. So if we just deploy block stream on this Bitcoin EVM roll-up, then you can deploy Bitcoin L3s on top of this roll-up that you suggest a data-evibular layer. And it makes a lot of sense because, you know, Bitcoin's data availability capacity is even way more limited than Ethereum. It's only got like 10 minute block times, you know, 4 megabytes every 10 minutes. It's very limited in terms of data availability.

So I think ultimately for roll-ups to succeed on Bitcoin, you do fundamentally need external availability layers. Yeah, I actually just interviewed them on my premium offering, and they talked about their new roll up Satrea and it was really interesting because actually another project that I had talked to was Botanics and I guess that's

more like a side chain but but you know I suddenly was like oh wow there's like a lot of activity and there's a third I think I'm going to be talking to soon and then of course this is like a perennial question but you know there's always these memes about Solestia like you know Solana

and Solana already has really cheap fees they're going them on Rathic route, but, you know, I don't know if you see a world where Salania would, Salana would also utilize Celestia. I think it's only for Solana to utilize Celestia because I think the Salana community has made it pretty clear that they didn't consider like layer two as part of the kind of like scaling vision of Atlanta. There isn't really that much of a reason.

Like if you're building a layer two, you probably want to build, you probably don't want to build it on a chain where that's not really, that's, that's not what it's about. that's not what the community kind of coerces around. But it is in theory possible we could deploy a blob stream, a version of blob stream on Solana, for example. And I believe, yeah, there's like the neon EVM, right, on Solana.

So we can deploy blob stream on neon technically as it is. And then Solana contracts could reference data on Celestia. But I think you were asking if Solana hosts its data to Celestia or Ethereum because I think that's also

like a common thing that I told you says well like Solana could become like an Ethereum L2 if you just post this data

Ethereum that's kind of like a more long-wind discussion I suppose but if that happened then would Celeste be involved I mean like

it could do like if Slala wanted to you I mean I wouldn't see a reason for Slana if Solana wanted to become an Ethereum L2 Yeah, I'll see a reason for it to post its data to the Thelstia

because then that's just using, because then that's an off-chain data availability from the perspective of Ethereum. And it might as well just use Salana for data availability if it's going to be off-chain anyway from the perspective of Ethereum. So like in that kind of, if it was to be Ethereum L2, I think it makes sense for, it would have to post the data to Ethereum itself. So then Nick, I feel like I asked you this before,

and I don't even remember what you said. So then why is there this meme about the solo? I still don't understand it. I think it stems from a few things. But at a high level, it's that so like, you know, this year and going to the future, there's been this like monolithic versus modular debate for a really long time since sort of the inception of Celestia. And it's now, now that Celestia has launched, we actually have, you know, two protocols

that are kind of embody monolithic and modular. So Solana is sort of like in the staunchly in the monolithic camp. and Celestea is not actually in the modular camp. And so there's sort of like this tension, I would say, of like these are the two protocols that represent those respective visions. And so there's sort of like this, you know, let's see how the market reacts and actually which sort of architecture wins out in the long run. I also think there's a, so that's part of it,

but there's also a part of it that is about the fact that Solana and Celestia do share some common ground in the sense of that we both believe in the abundance of block. block space, and we both believe in optimizing, you know, the underlying technology of blockchains to the maximum so that we can achieve, you know, the best scalability. It's just that we kind of have a philosophical difference in how we think the best way to achieve that is. And so I think there's, it's the fact that there's a common ground, but also these, these differences between the two protocols that gives, gives the significance of this Solestia meme.

Okay. So now let's just talk about what's kind of next up for Celestia. I, you know, I'm seeing these announcements with these kind of business partnerships. So I imagine that that's part of it. I also, you know, wanted to just ask about this dimension, which allows people to easily deploy role apps. And it recently launched. And it sort of seems like they, Celestea and Dimension could work together. But yeah, just you could talk about that or just whatever else is on the short-term roadmap for Celestia. Yeah, I mean, in the short-term, from my adoption perspective, there's been all these kind of like roll-ups that have deployed on Seleicester on test net, and then now there's this coming to mainnet, and that mention is one of them. So like the dimension is very cool because,

you know, they had like they had a test net with like 10,000 kind of roll-ups on top of it. Like, not all of them kind of like are meaningful roll-ups, maybe only a fashion of it, I only had the actual users of applications, but it kind of like really demonstrates the point that deploying a roll-up can be as easily as you're playing a smart contract. But you can imagine a future where L2B right now

has 30-year-roll-ups, but in the future, like in a few years for now we could have like 10,000 roll-ups. And it would definitely be a challenge tracking all those. It's kind of like also various, like in the past few months, a lot of the adoption of Soliscia

has been, has mainly been from Ethereum, L2s or Ethereum roll-ups, well, not roll-ups, but ball-diums and optimums. But in the next few months, we're going to expect to see a lot more like non-Ethurium or like Cosmos native kind of like roll-up projects emerging. Dimension is one of them, but there's also one called the Sovereign SDK, which is kind of really cool. It's like, they do sovereign ZK roll-ups where you can write your application in Rust and you can deploy a sovereign ZK roll up on top of it.

there's also like shared sequencer projects like astria you can deploy roll up on the shared sequence room so that's kind of like where we stand from an adoption perspective from a more kind of the core development from a core development perspective the solicitor community has basically launched this thing called celestial improvement proposals because now there's a border kind of like core development ecosystem outside of just celestial labs and there's many people like this you know As I mentioned, Iger is one of them. There's also teams like PK Labs and various cosmos development entities, including informal and Strange Love.

And they're kind of all participating in this. It's very similar to the Ethereum kind of like EIP process, but it's for celestialia. And there's kind of like various things emerging from that. One of the more exciting things emerging from that is this idea of, because right now, Celestia, as I mentioned, does not have smart contracts. So right now you cannot do a trust minimized bridge from Celestia to a roll-up.

Right now, you have to kind of go through an intermediary third party, like Hyperlane or, like, Axler. But unlike Ethereum, you can have a direct kind of like bridge between Ethereum and a roll-up because it has got smart contracts. We're doing, there's this proposal to have like these ZK-smark accounts on Sylvester. So you can create accounts on Celestia controlled by ZK program. And the reason why I think this is exciting is because it's very similar to Bitcoin

roll-ups because right now, the Bitcoin roll-up that you mentioned by a Cheneway team does not have a trust-momomized bridge with Bitcoin. It's like a sovereign roll-up on Bitcoin. But in the future, Bitcoin will need to have a hard fork or soft fork to add a new ZK upcode to Bitcoin to allow ZK roll-ups to have bridge to Bitcoin. And so, Celestia is kind of like a very similar mechanism. And to me, it's kind of like really cool because it allows you to achieve what's called, like, functional escape velocity without having to have spot contracts on the chain. Because it allows you to basically extend the functionality of the base layer without having small contracts. Because

historically it's been thought that the only way to extend the base layer is to have smart contract. But with surrounding a ZK op code and ZK rollops, I think is going to prove that smart contracts on the base layer aren't necessary. Interesting. But you're talking about on Bitcoin, smart contracts on the Bitcoin base layer? No, I'm talking about like ZK roll-ups on Bitcoin will need a soft fork on Bitcoin to add a ZK upcode to Bitcoin. So there's like various discussion in the Bitcoin community to add ZK upcodes. So you can like verify like a ZK program on Bitcoin and that will allow you to deploy

ZK roll-up in Bitcoin. And that's the reason why that's cool is because it allows you to have roll-ups. It allows you to have roll-ups and Bitcoin. fight the fight that Bitcoin does the housewark contracts. I see what you're saying. Okay. Oh, interesting. Oh, wow. Yeah, that will, I feel like really change the game for Ethereum. Or sorry, Bitcoin, because, yeah, I mean, I feel like I've heard different sources say for a long time that Bitcoin at some point will need to implement privacy. So that will, yeah, be a big game changer.

All right. Well, you guys, this has been a fascinating discussion. I've absolutely loved it. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work in Celestia? So the best place lot is Celestia, the ORG. There's a lot of like, kind of like introductory material there. We have like a section with like a pile of website called Learn Modular that we can learn about the basics of module blockchains. Nick? Yeah. And I think another great place is to follow Celestia on Twitter.

So we're at Celestia org. I think Mustafa and I are both on Twitter too. And I'm a perpetual modular bowl and trying to educate people about the benefits of modular blockchains. And so that's what you can expect for me. Great. Well, we'll put your handles in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thanks, Laura. Thanks.

Thanks so much for joining us today. It's to learn more about Nick, Mustafa, Celestia, and modular blockchains. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, well, out from Nelson Wong, Matt Pilchard, Wanda Manovich, Megan Gavis, Shishonk, and Marketa Curia. Thanks for listening. Unchained is now a part of the CoinDesk Podcast Network. For the latest in digital assets, check out markets daily, five days a week, with host

Noel Atreson. Follow the Coin Desk Podcast Network for some of the best shows in Crypto.