Celestia Overview — Modular Blockchain
In the crypto world, there are many projects trying to address technical issues and/or limitations of their targeted ecosystems.
Celestia is the first modular blockchain network and it seeks to bring solutions in data availability and scaling. The Layer 1 modularity and architecture allow building your own blockchain ecosystem on top of the network by having the consensus and data availability separated from the execution layer.
Monolithic blockchains contrast
Most blockchains nowadays are monolithic, the opposite of modular. In short, these do availability, ordering, and execution of transactions for excluding invalid transactions.
Whereas the modular ones only take care of the first two: availability and ordering. Keeping execution on a different layer. This allows for a number of advantages and possibilities, allowing the ‘user’ to build his own execution layer according to a number of particularities.
We’ll be exploring a bit more on this further on.
Data availability
Having the transaction data published and agreed upon is a requirement for security reasons. Without publishing, the validity guarantee is missing and transaction execution/interpretation becomes impossible.
Celestia approaches scaling from a different perspective by choosing increased block size as a solution. This would normally lead to higher operational costs for validators, however, this is where data availability proof comes into play. Nodes sample 1% or less of the block’s data, proving that the data is available on-chain.
Regardless of block sizes increasing in time, the sampling size remains the same, requiring more validators to participate and allowing the network to become truly scalable. In fact, larger block sizes encourage better decentralization and ushers scalability in the right direction. One fun fact is that light nodes will be the main actors in this situation, being able to secure the network by using the same rules of data sampling explained earlier.
For a more in-depth breakdown of this particular aspect, Mustafa Al-Bassam, one of the co-founders of Celestia, worked alongside Alberto Sonnino and Vitalik Buterin on this brilliant paper called “Fraud and Data Availability Proofs: Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities” which you can read about here.
Rollups
Celestia does not have an enforced settlement layer, which means that it can change its social consensus rules without restriction, avoiding the necessity of hard forks or soft forks like we’ve seen on Ethereum, where the smart contract encoding could not be changed. Since Celestia’s rollups contain no smart contracts, they’ve been named sovereign rollups.
Typically, deploying a rollup on Ethereum grants you the chain’s security but limits your sovereignty, which is a problem solved in the aforementioned formula. Imagine being able to have Ethereum’s security but with full sovereignty, eliminating the need for compromising a key aspect of decentralization.
This, however, comes with a few disadvantages of its own.
We could definitely argue that the main one comes down to bridging, a popular area in rollups discussions. The classic governance rollups have the ability to use L1 for bridging to other rollups, which is not possible in Celestia’s sovereign rollups. The latter uses direct bridges (P2P). This adds complexity, too many bridges between chains, state updates on both sides, and, no unified liquidity layer.
Community involvement ease of access and security
Being able to plug your own blockchain in and become part of the IBC-connected chains with access to Interchain Accounts grants accessibility to any one community in bringing their chains online with high security throughout all connected chains, similar to Cosmos’s current Interchain Security initiative.
This means that all the chains hosted on Celestia will benefit from shared security.
Decentralization
One aspect of some major chains nowadays is their security — guaranteed by full nodes deployed by major parties such as well-known centralized exchanges. Celestia’s game plan encourages users to run their own nodes, due to the ease of access to technology and the importance attributed to the light nodes participating in the security of every chain onboarded. The more light nodes are online on a network stack, the more we can talk about trust minimization, basically offering actual power to the community instead of relying on a top 5 or 10 parties.
This does not replace the need for full nodes running professional hardware, such as ourselves (BlockHunters), nor does it mean that you can simply download and switch on a light node without any technical knowledge whatsoever.
But it’s important to know that users can opt for running a Celestia light node and not be forced to run multiple nodes or a full node, since these are not necessary for confirming data.
Celestiums
We’ve been talking about them this whole time, they combine ETH L2 chain with Celestia’s data availability. In this process, it uses Ethereum for settlement and dispute resolution, as explained by Celestia’s team here.
Celestiums provide powerful crypto economic guarantees since the whole system is also tied towards slashing bad actors. Validators that lie, compromise bridges, and so on, will face heavy consequences on the forks that turn negative actions into unprofitable plans. Plainly put, it’s simply too costly to act toxic on-chain.
Throughput
We can expect to see a high throughput capacity, possibly higher than on any other monolithic chain, which is the perfect scenario for rollups since they are extremely data-hungry.
Due to its DAS model and decentralization components through light nodes, among other things, Celestia’s data availability sampling has a direct impact on how the throughput can grow in accordance with a node’s bandwidth capacity. Even a cellphone can be used in data sampling on Celestia, so that definitely adds some spectacular growth opportunities for the whole chain.
Quantum Gravity Bridge
In a Twitter thread back in March this year (2022) we have John Adler (Celestia Co-Founder) being quoted by the Celestia team with a very succinct tl;dr on the Bridge being built.
The positioning of the QGB on Ethereum grants ETH L2 operators the ability to post transaction data on Celestia where it ends up being placed into blocks by Celestia’s validators.
As explained in the same article talking about Celestiums:
The Quantum Gravity Bridge contract verifies the signatures on the DA attestation from Celestia. So when the L2 contract on Ethereum updates its state, rather than relying on the transaction data being posted as calldata to Ethereum, it just checks to make sure the correct data was made available on Celestia by querying into the DA bridge contract.
EVM Compatible
Through EVMOS, it allows ETH smart contracts and L2s to be compatible with the ecosystem, providing a great environment for developers to deploy rollups or apps.
Cevmos
Back in December 2021, Cevmos was announced, a settlement layer for EVM rollups. It’s a modular stack for EVM-based applications that are using Celestia sovereign rollups, with an optimization focusing strictly on rollups for lower fees and efficient scaling.
Fuel Network
One of the networks taking advantage of the opportunities Celestia offers. Fuel’s main goal is to offer the fastest execution layer for a modular blockchain stack, leveraging data availability and scalable bandwidth features in order to bring parallel transaction execution, the Fuel Virtual Machine (FuelVM), and developer experience through Sway and Forc.
This is just another very important brick added to the scalability process currently being built in crypto.
But we wouldn’t expect any less from it, since its Co-Founder, John Adler, is also the Co-Founder of Celestia.
For more on Fuel Labs, don’t forget to check out their blog here.
Celestia right now (2022 December)
Celestia has plenty of funding to continue developing the features and technology we expect to see in the upcoming year. It has raised $55 million in a combined Series A and B round through Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
BlockHunters is involved in the Celestia testnet, and, we have also applied for the upcoming Incentivized Testnet, marked for 2023 on the roadmap, a little bit behind the Mainnet Launch in the same year.
The estimations are Q1 for Incentivized Testnet and shortly after, Mainnet in Q2 of 2023.
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Celestia & more
⚪️ https://celestia.org/
⚪️ https://twitter.com/CelestiaOrg
⚪️ https://t.me/CelestiaCommunity
⚪️ https://github.com/celestiaorg
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