Since its launch, Celestia's specially built data availability layer has been increasingly selected and applied by public chains. This article will sort out the current ecological development status of Celestia. Regarding basic information about the Celestia project, we published "A Brief Analysis of Modularization" in November. Blockchain Celestia", this article will not elaborate on it.
1. Celestia’s data cost compared to Ethereum
The cost of payment for each layer 2 to publish data to Ethereum is expensive, and it will cost more than $30 million in December 2023.
The article "The impact of Celestia's modular DA layer on Ethereum L2s: a first look" published by Numia Data compared the costs of different L2s in the past 6 months to release callData to Ethereum with the amount they might have spent using Celestia as the DA layer. (The calculation sets the TIA price at $12). From the difference in magnitude between the two, we can see the huge economic benefits that a dedicated DA layer like Celestia can bring to L2 Gas costs.
2. Current status of Celestia ecological development
1. Celestia is supported by multiple RaaS platforms
With the development of Rollup-As-A-Service (RaaS), developers have a large number of tools to build Rollup blockchain and can quickly deploy Rollup while inheriting the security of the base layer. The following Rollups-as-a-Service protocols all provide Celestia as the underlying option. RaaS has also been able to support many Ethereum Rollup frameworks, including Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and Polygon CDK.
2. List of Celestia ecological projects
Forget
Manta Network is a modular blockchain for ZK applications, created by a team of founders from prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, MIT, and Algorand, and has received investments including Binance Labs and Polychain Capital.
Manta Pacific is built on OP Stack, providing a scalable and cheap gas fee environment for ZK applications, leveraging Manta Network's Universal Circuit, allowing developers to quickly build, test and deploy support using only Solidity and Universal Circuit SDK ZK application. At the same time, EVM equivalence has been achieved by using OP Stack Bedrock's code base, and zkEVM will be implemented based on Polygon CDK in the future.
Manta Pacific has adopted the Celestia modular data availability solution to greatly reduce user transaction fees. It is also the first Ethereum L2 to adopt Celestia for modular data availability. The solution will be officially launched on December 18, 2023. After migrating the Data Availability Layer from Ethereum to Celestia, the cost has been reduced by 99.81% compared to using the Ethereum mainnet.
Recently, Manta launched New Paradigm, a liquidity incentive activity similar to Blast liquidity staking. Users can obtain future token rewards by staking funds. Manta Pacific TVL rose rapidly with the launch of the campaign.
Dymension
The Cosmos ecological modular settlement layer Dymension is launched on Genesis Drop, and airdrops are issued to Celestia, Ethereum Layer 2, Cosmos, Solana and NFT holders. Users can receive 70 million DYM before 20:00 on January 21, 2024, Beijing time ( 7% of total supply), adding a golden shovel narrative to TIA.
Celestia: As of December 19 (block height 360,000), users who have staked at least 1 TIA and up to 5,000 TIA in Celestia are eligible to be allocated 20,000,000 DYM (2% of the total supply);
Ethereum Layer2: Dymension will provide 10,000,000 DYM (1% of the total supply) to Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Blast users. ;
Cosmos: Dymension will allocate 17,500,000 DYM (1.75% of the total supply) to Cosmos ecological users;
Solana: Dymension will allocate 10,000,000 DYM (1% of the total supply) to more than 500,000 addresses on Wormhole, Tensor, Drip.Haus and other protocols.
Dymension will also allocate 12,500,000 DYM (1.25% of the total supply) to Pudgy Penguins, Mad Lads, Tensorians, and Bad Kids holders.
In addition, Dymension will also launch a liquidity incentive plan one week after the launch of the mainnet, allocating 2.5 million DYM to users who cross-chain to Dymension.
Saga
Following Dymension, the Cosmos ecological scalability protocol Saga announced the genesis airdrop eligibility criteria and issued airdrops to the Celestia community. More than 27,000 wallets are eligible.
ZKFair
ZKFair is the first community-owned zkrollup, powered by Polygon ZK and Celestial DA architecture and powered by Lumoz. The Gas Fee Airdrop on December 24th aroused great popularity, and the token also created a large wealth effect after being launched online.
Orbit decision
On October 25, 2023, the Arbitrum Foundation and the Celestia Foundation announced the integration of the Celestia modular data availability network into the Arbitrum Orbit and Nitro stacks, providing developers with the option to publish data to Arbritrum One, Arbritrum Nova, and Celestia, 12 The Arbitrum Sepolia test network was officially launched on May 20th. Subsequently, the following protocols on Arbitrum announced that they would integrate Celestia.
Syndr: A decentralized derivatives exchange based on Arbitrum Layer3 "Arbitrum Orbit", providing options and perpetual contracts with low fees, low latency and high throughput.
Kinto: The first KYC’ed Layer 2 capable of supporting modern financial institutions and decentralized protocols.
Alpha Dune: L2 focused on "loyalty-driven" GameFi applications.
Deri: A decentralized cross-chain derivatives protocol built on orbit L3.
Eclipse
Eclipse Mainnet is a general-purpose L2 that combines the best parts of the modular stack, Ethereum as the settlement layer for the verification bridge, Celestia as the data availability layer, RISC Zero for generating zero-knowledge fraud proofs, and Solana's SVM as the execution environment. On December 14, the Eclipse testnet was launched, and Eclipse data began to be published on Celestia’s Mocha testnet.
Pocket Network is a decentralized API data service protocol that provides access to blockchain data by establishing an incentive mechanism among all blockchain participants (application developers and full node operators) and a decentralized node structure. Belongs to depin track. Pocket announced on November 21 that it would adjust its development roadmap to adopt the Rollkit open modular framework, which will utilize Celestia as the consensus and data availability layer of the POKT network. The related Shannon upgrade will be launched on the test network in Q1 and on the main network in Q2.
Movement
Modular blockchain network Movement Labs has launched Ethereum L2 "M2" based on Move, expanded using Celestia's modular data availability layer, aiming to accelerate the creation of high-performance consumer applications. Where Move VM is optimized for high throughput, with a native fee market and embedded support for formal verification, M2 also extends via Blobstream to transfer Celestia’s high-throughput modular DA to Ethereum for integration by L2 .
3. Summary
Rollup infrastructure is becoming more and more complete, modular blockchain has become the main trend in future development, and Celestia will also play an important role in it. At the beginning of its launch, Celestia's business model faced some doubts. For example, expansion projects that do not use Ethereum as the DA layer are not Ethereum Layer 2, and the independent DA layer cannot empower Ethereum but will increase systemic risks; the widespread application of Celestia will weaken Kan. The significance of the Kun upgrade; the conflict of interests between the independent DA layer represented by Celestia and Ethereum itself, etc. Today, Celestia has proven itself to a certain extent by being chosen by more and more RAAS and second-tier players. As the price of TIA continues to rise and the ecological development is booming, Celestia has been in the limelight for a while, gradually moving towards the positioning of the "best DA layer" of the modular blockchain, but it will also face the Ethereum from Cancun upgrade in the near future. We will wait and see what the future pattern of Rollup will be like with the competition from Fangfang, EigenDA, AVAIL, etc., and how DA will dominate the world.
