A detailed explanation of Celestia, the pioneer of modular public chain

As the proposer and pioneer of modular blockchain, how has Celestia developed in four years?

Editor: Bowen@Web3CN.Pro

On May 26, Celestia (formerly LazyLedger) tweeted to celebrate the 4th anniversary of its White Paper. As the proposer and pioneer of modular blockchain, how has Celestia developed in the past four years? One article for quick understanding.

1. Project Introduction

Celestia is the first "modular blockchain". The previous project was called "LazyLedger", which is an infrastructure specializing in "Data Availability (DA)".

Modularity is the key to solving the blockchain trilemma, which will bring a safe, scalable and decentralized multi-chain future. Celestia adopts a modular architecture to deconstruct the blockchain into data, consensus, and execution to simplify , A modular consensus layer to empower developers with small budgets, allowing them to easily deploy their own blockchains.

2. Project Vision

Ethereum envisions a future centered around Rollups, which tend to be more expensive and less flexible than L1, but can share security with each other. Cosmos, by contrast, is an ecosystem of interoperable sovereign L1s called zones. Cosmos are cheaper and more flexible than Rollups, but they do not share full security with each other.

Celestia combines the best of both projects, with the vision of combining Cosmos' sovereign interoperability zone with Rollup-centric Ethereum with shared security to provide a more flexible, secure, and cheaper public chain.

3. Features and advantages

1. Features

(1) Modularization

For a long time, the blockchain is a distributed network that implements state machine replication, which is divided into three layers: data, consensus, and execution. In a single blockchain, the three layers of data, consensus, and execution will all be completed by a network. Therefore, the higher the complexity, the higher the cost and complexity of keeping the system synchronized.

Ethereum Rollup separates the execution layer, processes complex transactions, and solves some problems, but Rollup must monitor L1 and execute calling transactions for calculation, and then return L1 in different ways. Data availability still depends on the consensus layer and execution layer of Ethereum. At present, the cost of using the execution layer of Ethereum is still high, and the scope that developers can deploy is still very limited.

Celestia is a modular protocol that only deals with data availability (DA), other execution and settlement work can be locked into the DA layer, and developers can directly choose the execution environment to use to build DApps on Celestia.

(2) Architecture

The Ethereum Rollup layer-2 network is an execution layer, and the data availability, consensus, and settlement layers of these projects are all Ethereum. Such a Rollup will theoretically have security close to the Ethereum mainnet. However, the Layer 2 network using Off-chain solutions such as Validium expands the throughput of the Layer 2 network at the expense of data availability and security.

Celestia provides different solutions for modular expansion, and its architecture currently has three types:

• Sovereign Rollup: The data availability layer and consensus layer are Celestia, and the settlement layer and execution layer are their own sovereign chains;
• Settlement Rollup (representing the project Cevmos): the data availability layer and consensus layer are Celestia, the settlement layer is Cevmos, and the application chain is the execution layer;
• Celestium: The data availability layer is Celestia, the consensus layer and settlement layer are Ethereum, and the application chain is the execution layer.

(3) Decoupling execution

Celestia will receive the transactions packaged by the sovereign Rollup and sort the transactions through the consensus protocol Tendermint. Unlike other blockchains, Celestia does not challenge the validity of these transactions and is not responsible for enforcing them. Celestia treats all transactions "equally", accepting them, ordering them, and broadcasting them on-chain as long as they pay the necessary fees. Sovereign Rollup nodes execute transactions to calculate their state, and if any transactions are considered invalid by Rollup nodes, they will not be processed. As long as Celestia's history remains unchanged, Rollup nodes running the same validity rules can compute the same state.

2. Advantages

(1) Autonomy

Currently, Ethereum’s Rollup publishes block headers on Ethereum, and fraud/validity proofs are executed on the chain, so their status is determined by a series of smart contracts on Ethereum.

Rollups on Celestia operate in a completely different model, it has no awareness of the data it stores, and leaves all interpretation and enforcement to Rollups, which operate like most L1 blockchains today. Therefore, Rollup on Celestia is essentially a blockchain with its own sovereignty.

(2) Easy deployment

The Celestia team is implementing the ORU specification using Optimint's Cosmos SDK. The tool supports deploying any chain without developers needing to worry about consensus overhead or expensive deployment/operational expenses, new chains can be deployed in seconds, and users can safely interact with them from day one.

(3) Minimal Governance

Blockchain governance is slow, and improvement proposals often take years of social coordination to implement. While this is required for security, it significantly slows down the pace of development in the blockchain space.

Modular blockchains provide a better way for blockchain governance, where the executive layer can act independently and quickly, while the consensus layer can remain stable.

(4) Efficient execution environment

In Celestia, state growth and historical data are handled completely separately. Celestia's block space only stores historical Rollup data, which is settled in bytes, and all state executions are metered by Rollup in their own independent unit. Since activity is subject to different fee markets, a spike in activity in one execution environment will not disrupt the user experience in another execution environment.

(5) Scalability

While decoupled execution does not require everyone to execute all transactions, it sacrifices composability and has limited scalability.

Celestia solves the de-scalability problem through Data Availability Sampling (DAS). Celestia doesn't care about the validity of transactions, what it really cares about is whether the block producers have fully published the data behind the block headers. Celestia only provides data availability and does not perform state execution, so the block output can be higher, and each block has more space, the block becomes larger, more data can be sampled, and higher TPS .

4. Development History

• 2019.05 LazyLedger white paper released
• 2021.03.04 LazyLedger Labs completed a $1.5 million seed round of financing and plans to launch a test network by the end of the year
• 2021.06.15 LazyLedger changed its name to Celestia
• 2022.05.25 Celestia launches its first testnet Mamaki
• 2022.10.20 Celestia completes US$55 million in financing, led by Polychain Capital and others
• 2023.03.15 Celestia test network Blockspace Race is launched, and the block explorer has been launched
• 2023.05.12 Celestia: The initial version of Quantum Gravity Bridge has been launched on the Blockspace Race testnet

Five, team background

The mission of the Celestia team is to change the way blockchains and decentralized applications are built, making them more secure, scalable and autonomous.

Team members have extensive experience building and scaling blockchains in projects such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Harmony.

Mustafa Al-Bassam

CEO of Celestia Labs, graduated from University College London with a PhD in Computer Science. Co-founder of hacker organization Lulzsec, co-founder of Chainspace. Chainspace, a company implementing a smart contract platform, was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Mustafa has also previously authored several seminal papers on the security of sharded blockchain systems. In 2016, he was listed by Forbes as one of the 30 technology entrepreneurs under the age of 30.

Ismail Khofi

Chief Technology Officer of Celestia Labs, a well-known research engineer in the industry, graduated from the University of Bonn with a doctorate in computer science. In addition to building academic research models, Khoffi has also contributed heavily to various non-blockchain and blockchain projects such as Google UK and Tendermint.

John Adler

Celestia Labs Chief Risk Officer. He previously worked at ConsenSys as an L2 scalability researcher working on the second phase of Ethereum 2.0. And Adler found a new application of data availability in Mustafa, creating the first precursor to the Optimistic Rollup scheme. At the same time, Adler is also the co-founder of Fuel Labs.

Nike White

COO of Celestia Labs, BS and MS from Stanford University. Prior to joining Celestia, White co-founded Harmony, a blockchain protocol that scales blockchain infrastructure, powering the decentralized revolution. White is also a Senior AI Specialist at Zeroth.ai, an accelerator program for Asian AI startups.

In addition, Celestia Labs also has dozens of members, including engineers, management and consultants.

6. Financing information

In March 2021, Celestia completed a $1.5 million seed round of financing led by Binance Labs. Other investors include: Interchain Foundation, Maven 11, KR1, Signature Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Dokia Capital, P2P Capital, Tokonomy, Cryptium Labs , Michael Ng, Simon Johnson, Michael Youssefmir and Ramsey Khoury.

The lineup of seed round investors is relatively luxurious, mainly based on two institutions, one is the Interchain Foundation, the creator of COSMOS, and the second is Binance Labs. These two institutions can give a lot of help in terms of project resources and trading venues.

On October 19, 2022, Celestia Labs announced the completion of a $55 million financing round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with other participating investors including Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, FTX Ventures, Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital , NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group and several angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Eric Wall and Jutta Steiner.

This round of institutions has a more luxurious lineup, including Bain Capital Crypto, a fund under the Bain Group, which is a traditional web2 top institution and one of the top 100 institutions in the world. The second is Polychain Capital, FTX Ventures, etc., the leading institutions in the web3 field.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the $55 million is the total of Celestia's A and B rounds of financing, and the latest round of financing makes Celestia a unicorn with a valuation of $1 billion.

VII. Development Achievements

(1) Project progress

Although it has been polished for four years, Celestia is still a young project, and it has raised a total of $56.5 million in two rounds. The second phase of the testnet Blockspace Race was launched at the end of March this year, and cross-chain bridge nodes, full storage nodes, and light nodes can begin to participate. Celestia's official Twitter currently has 120,000 fans, and the Discord and Telegram communities are also very active.

(2) Ecological development

Officially, there are 25 projects on the Celestia ecosystem, covering categories such as Gaming, DeFi, Wallet, RaaS, cross-chain and infrastructure.

8. Economic Model

Celestia has not yet issued tokens

9. Risks and opportunities

(1) Risk

As the first modular blockchain, Celestia has a long way to go. Whether the technology it conceives can be realized, whether the roadmap can be completed, and whether the ecological construction can attract more projects are the difficulties and potential risks that Celestia currently encounters. The project is still at an early stage, and whether it will be successful needs to be further verified by the market.

(2) Chance

Celestia has built a public chain that separates the data layer and allows developers to focus on the design above the data layer without paying attention to the underlying data records. Many people believe that the data availability layer of this modular design in the future will not only It can provide a faster implementation solution for capacity expansion, and will greatly reduce the difficulty for developers to enter Web3.

At present, Celestia has not yet issued tokens, and you can enter the official community to follow development trends and participate in ecological construction. Among the many new public chains, Aptos and Sui of the Meta series are more dazzling. This time it is Aleo in the privacy track, and Celestia is also good in terms of financing. It can be ranked at the forefront of the list of new public chains, and its strength should not be underestimated. watch for.