What is Celestia ($TIA)? Unpacking Modular Blockchains

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. Celestia 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. Bankless Nation, I am super excited to introduce you to Mustafa Al Bassam. 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 Chainspace, acquired by Facebook. Mustafa, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks for having me.

Joined by Musafa, we got Ismail Coffee. Ismail is the co-founder and CTO of Celestia previously. Ismail was a senior engineer at Tendermint and the Interchain Foundation. That's the Cosmos ecosystem. Ismail, also, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks for having me.

Guys, there has been a bunch of energy around the Celestia ecosystem as of recently due to the token launch, putting the Celestia 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 it what's 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 with 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

with 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 uh arguing and debating on crypto tweeter 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 blockchains should not be responsible for

computation and execution.

Basically, the original rollup-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 that's the opinion, that's the kind of original thesis that Celestia had. And this was an entire year.

Before Ethereum kind of switched to a roll-up centric thesis,

I started lazy ledger

to kind of like try figure about how we can rework blockchains 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 and run with it. What does it mean for a blockchain to only be um up for consensus and data availability? When we talk about the modular thesis, what are we what are we pulling apart here?

So basically we're pulling apart, well Mustafa already mentioned it kinda. We're pulling apart the

um 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. There's consensus on that order.

And then the execution happens in the in the um roll-up or off-chain, like not on Celestia.

Um

so it that's basically what what's been um pulled apart.

Mustafa, you uh brought up the lazy ledger paper. Can you explain the significance of that? And what what 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 availability layer. And

The kind of and the kind of original idea behind this is well, like

um 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 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 public 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 unlocks a lot of power and scale for developers

to build their own computation environments and applications on top of it

using rollups.

Ishmael, what were you gonna add to that?

Yeah, I just wanted to add that uh lazy is uh is a very common term in like uh CS, like in computer science or programming. And

it is doesn't only mean that it's just lazy and and uh like uh I think Mustafa used the word dumb. 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 um like uh this world computer model where everyone executes everything, like all the transactions, but it's optimized in the sense that

um the transactions only get executed exactly where it's necessary.

So this um 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 uh and and synergistic with the Ethereum thesis. So, Ismail, maybe you can um explain a little bit about like what what would you say is Celestia's relationship to Ethereum?

I think it's very like it could it could be very symbiotic in the sense that um Celestia could also be used as a building block for Ethereum uh like Williams or layer twos in the sense that.

Um

people or like developers who want to launch like a layer two currently have the choice to

uh post call data um directly on Ethereum, which is very like expensive. I mean it's great for censorship resistance, but it's like

um

not really practical and way too expensive.