Summary
Celestia was formerly known as LazyLedger but rebranded in 2021. Celestia means "heavenly" or "of the sky", almost divine. That sounds like a promising annoucement.Well, if you have the creator of optimistic rollups on board, then calling yourself Celestia might not even be blasphemy!
Celestia is unique, it is the first modular blockchain. Currently, most blockchains are monolithic, which means they try to handle consensus, execution and data availability alltogether (whereas modular blockchains outsource at least one of the 3 components). However, in most cases for monolithic Blockchains this results in the "blockchain trilemma". The blockchain trilemma is an issue that developers encounter where ultimately, while trying to achieve decentralization, security and scalability, one aspect has to be sacrificed in order to satisfy the other 2 in a trade off. Often, the result is lack of scalability.
The modular blockchain solves this trilemma by separating consensus, execution, and data availability. Celestia separates the consensus and application execution layers, meaning it only publishes transactions but does not actually execute them. Interesting article to read from the founder of Celestia Article
Where are transactions executed? Execution can happen for instance on sidechains, state, channels, plasma and rollups and more. Most popular recently have proven to be rollups as the dominant execution layer. Two main rollups exist, optimistic and zk rollups. The main difference is that optimistic rollups use fraud proofs or innocent until proven guilty model (transaction is genuine and it is allowed to happen on sidechain, however, to be executed on mainnet it needs to be validated e.g. Boba, Optimism, Arbitrum) whereas ZK rollups use validity proofs or guilty until proven innocent model (each transaction has to be validated, but it doesn't have to be validated on the mainnet, but can be validated on the sidechain e.g loopring, immutablex, zkSynk).
The advantage of Celestia:
Since Celestia doesn't validate/execute transactions, state execution does not create a bottleneck and Celestia is able to scale by increasing number of users
Anyone can use Celestia as an "on-demand" consensus network to run their own blockchain
Celestia provides a pluggable consensus layer, allowing developers to deploy their own execution layers to run on top
Rollups? no brainer, since the optimistic rollup creator is one of the founders. It will support both zk rollups and optimistic rollups
No compromise on security, since the more users that request data availability proof, the more security and throughput.
will leverage the infrastructure of Cosmos
"Celestia is the missing piece of the Cosmos architecture. It provides a shared security layer for blockchains communicating with each other using IBC, unlocking limitless potential" - Zaki Manian, co-creator of IBC and early Cosmos contributor
The interlink between Cosmos and Celestia doesn't come without reason. Ismail Khoffi the CTO of Celestia, was a senior advisor at Tendermint, a core contributor to the Cosmos Network. From Twitter user @Celestiascholar: "Celesia's vision is a marriage of Cosmos' sovereign interoperable zones and a rollup-centric Ethereum with shared security"
Some additional info from the FAQ:
Celestia will have a token that will be used to secure the network via Proof of Stake, and to pay for transaction fees on the network. We plan to implement a fee-burn mechanism similar to EIP-1559 in Ethereum so that burnt fees will offset new token issuance as Celestia gains adoption.
Celestia is able to scale as the number of users (light nodes) in the network increases. Celestia remains secure so long as there are enough nodes on the network to sample the entire block. This means that as more nodes join the network and sample, the block size can increase accordingly without sacrificing security or decentralization. Doing so on a traditional blockchain would sacrifice decentralization because a bigger block size would create a larger hardware requirement for nodes to download and verify data. Rollups also depend on data availability for their scalability, so better scaling potential for Celestia will also translate to better scaling potential for the rollups utilizing Celestia.
You can join the waitlist for the testnet waitlist
Team
Celestia undoubtedly has one of the best and most reputable teams I have come across so far. Website
Mustafa Al-Bassam, CEO: PhD in blockchain scaling at UCL, Co-founder of Chainspace (acquired by Facebook)
Ismail Khoffi, CTO: Former senior engineer at Tendermint and Interchain Foundation John Adler, CRO: Creator of Optimistic Rollups, previously scalability researcher at ConsenSys
Nick White: COO: Co-founder of Harmony, BS & MS from Stanford
Backers
last public news on fundraise is from March 2021, where Celestia raised 1.5m. In the meantime I assume several millions and tier 1 backers were added. Participants in the seed round include Interchain Foundation, Binance Labs, Maven 11, KR1, Signature Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Dokia Capital, P2P Capital, Tokonomy, Cryptium Labs, Michael Ng, Simon Johnson, Michael Youssefmir and Ramsey Khoury
Links
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