Author: Bowen@Web3CN.Pro

 

On May 26, Celestia (formerly LazyLedger) tweeted to celebrate the 4th anniversary of the publication of its white paper. As the proposer and pioneer of modular blockchain, how has Celestia developed in the past four years? Learn more in this article.

 

1. Project Introduction

 

Celestia is the first “modular blockchain”, previously known as “LazyLedger”, and is an infrastructure specializing in “data availability (DA)”.

Modularity is the key to solving the blockchain trilemma and will bring about a secure, scalable and decentralized multi-chain future. Celestia adopts a modular architecture to deconstruct blockchain into data, consensus, and execution. It uses a streamlined and modular consensus layer to empower developers with limited budgets and allow 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 L1s, but can share security with each other. In contrast, Cosmos is an ecosystem of interoperable sovereign L1s called zones. Cosmos is cheaper and more flexible than Rollups, but they cannot share full security with each other.

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

 

3. Features and advantages

 

1. Features

  • Modularity

Blockchain has always been a distributed network that performs state machine replication, divided into three layers: data, consensus, and execution. In a single blockchain, all three layers of work are completed by one network, so the higher the complexity, the higher the cost and complexity of maintaining synchronization of the system.

Ethereum Rollup separates the execution layer and handles complex transactions, solving some of the problems, but Rollup must monitor L1 and execute call transactions for calculations, and then return to L1 in different ways. Data availability still depends on Ethereum's consensus layer and execution layer. Currently, the cost of using Ethereum's execution layer is still very high, and the scope of developer deployment is still very limited.

Celestia is a modular protocol that only handles data availability (DA). Other execution and settlement work can be locked to the DA layer. Developers can directly choose the execution environment to use to build DApps on Celestia.

  • Architecture

Ethereum Rollup Layer 2 is an execution layer, and the data availability, consensus, and settlement layers of these projects are all Ethereum. In theory, such Rollup will have security close to that of the Ethereum mainnet. However, Layer 2 networks that use off-chain solutions such as Validium increase the throughput of the Layer 2 network at the expense of data availability and security.

Image source: DeFi

Celestia provides different solutions for modular expansion. There are currently three types of architectures:

① Sovereign Rollup: The data availability layer and consensus layer are Celestia, and the settlement layer and execution layer are its own sovereign chain;

② Settlement Rollup (representative project Cevmos): the data availability layer and consensus layer are Celestia, the settlement layer is Cevmos, and the application chain is the execution layer;

③ Celestium: The data availability layer is Celestia, the consensus layer and settlement layer are Ethereum, and the application chain is the execution layer.

  • Decoupled Execution

Celestia receives transactions packaged by sovereign Rollup and sorts them through the consensus protocol Tendermint. Unlike other blockchains, Celestia does not question the validity of these transactions and is not responsible for executing them. Celestia treats all transactions "equally". As long as the transactions pay the necessary fees, it will accept these transactions, sort them and broadcast them on the chain. Sovereign Rollup nodes will execute transactions to calculate their status. If any transactions are considered invalid by the Rollup nodes, they will not be processed. As long as Celestia's history remains unchanged, Rollup nodes running the same validity rules can calculate the same state.

2. Advantages

  • Autonomy

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

The Rollup on Celestia operates in a completely different way, it has no perception of the data it stores, and leaves all the rights of interpretation and execution to the Rollup, which runs like most current L1 blockchains. Therefore, the Rollup on Celestia is essentially a blockchain with its own sovereignty.

  • Easy deployment

The Celestia team is implementing the ORU specification using Optimint’s Cosmos SDK. This tool supports deploying any chain without developers having to worry about consensus overhead or expensive deployment/operation fees. New chains can be deployed in seconds, and users can interact with them securely from day one.

  • Minimal governance

Blockchain governance is slow, and proposals for improvements often require years of community coordination to be implemented. While this is required for security, it significantly slows down the pace of development in the blockchain space.

Modular blockchains offer a better approach to blockchain governance, where the execution layer can act independently and quickly, while the consensus layer can remain stable.

  • 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 measured by Rollups in their own independent units. Because activity is subject to different fee markets, a peak in activity in one execution environment will not disrupt the user experience in another execution environment.

  • Scalability

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

Celestia solves the scalability problem through Data Availability Sampling (DAS). Celestia does not care about the validity of transactions, but whether the block producer has fully released the data behind the block headers. Celestia only provides data availability without state execution, so the block output can be higher, and each block has more space, the blocks become larger, more data can be sampled, and higher TPS is achieved.

 

IV. Development History

 

2019.05 LazyLedger white paper released

2021.03.04 LazyLedger Labs Completes $1.5 Million Seed Round and Plans to Launch Testnet by the End of the Year

2021.06.15 LazyLedger changes its name to Celestia

2022.05.25 Celestia launches its first testnet Mamaki

2022.10.20 Celestia completes $55 million financing, led by Polychain Capital and others

2023.03.15 Celestia testnet Blockspace Race is online, and the block browser has been launched

2023.05.12 Celestia: The initial version of Quantum Gravity Bridge has been launched on the Blockspace Race test network

 

5. Team Background

 

The Celestia team’s mission 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 the hacker group Lulzsec and Chainspace. Chainspace is a company that implements a smart contract platform and was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Mustafa has also previously written several groundbreaking papers on the security of sharded blockchain systems. In 2016, he was listed as one of the 30 technology entrepreneurs under 30 by Forbes.

  • Ismail Khofi

Celestia Labs CTO, a well-known research engineer in the industry, graduated from the University of Bonn with a PhD in Computer Science. In addition to building academic research models, Khoffi has also made significant contributions to various non-blockchain and blockchain projects such as Google UK and Tendermint.

  • John Adler

Chief Risk Officer of Celestia Labs. He previously worked at ConsenSys as an L2 scalability researcher, working on the second phase of Ethereum 2.0. Adler found new applications for data availability from Mustafa and created the first pioneer for the Optimistic Rollup solution. At the same time, Adler is also the co-founder of Fuel Labs.

  • Nike White

Chief Operating Officer of Celestia Labs, with bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford University. Prior to joining Celestia, White co-founded Harmony, a blockchain protocol for scalable blockchain infrastructure, to provide new momentum for the decentralized revolution. White is also a senior artificial intelligence expert at Zeroth.ai, an accelerator program for Asian artificial intelligence startups.

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

 

VI. 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 seed round investors are quite impressive, mainly focusing on two institutions, Interchain Foundation, the creator of COSMOS, and Binance Labs. These two institutions can provide a lot of help in terms of project resources and trading venues.

On October 19, 2022, Celestia Labs announced that it had completed a $55 million financing round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital. Other investors included 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 institutional lineup is even more luxurious, including Bain Capital Crypto, a fund under Bain Group, which is a traditional top web2 institution and one of the top 100 institutions in the world. The second is the leading institutions in the web3 field, such as Polychain Capital and FTX Ventures.

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

 

VII. Development Achievements

 

Project Progress

Although it has been in development for four years, Celestia is still a young project. It has raised a total of $56.5 million in two rounds of financing. 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 start participating. Celestia's official Twitter currently has 120,000 followers, and the Discord and Telegram communities are also very active.

Ecological Development

Official data shows that there are 25 projects in the Celestia ecosystem, covering categories such as Gaming, DeFi, Wallet, RaaS, cross-chain and infrastructure.

 

8. Economic Model

 

Celestia has not yet issued tokens

 

IX. Risks and Opportunities

 

risk

As the first modular blockchain, Celestia has a long way to go. Whether the technology it envisions can be realized, whether the roadmap can be completed, and whether the ecological construction can attract more projects to settle in are all the difficulties and potential risks that Celestia is currently facing. The project is still in its early stages, and whether it will be successful requires further verification by the market.

Chance

Celestia has built a public chain that separates the data layer, allowing developers to focus on the design above the data layer without having to pay attention to the underlying data records. Many people believe that in the future, this modularly designed data availability layer will not only provide a faster implementation solution for expansion, but will also greatly reduce the difficulty for developers to enter Web3.

Currently, Celestia has not issued tokens yet. You can join the official community to follow the development and participate in the ecological construction. Among the many new public chains, Meta's Aptos, Sui and others are more dazzling. This time it is Aleo in the privacy track. Celestia is also good in financing. It can be ranked at the top of the new public chain list. Its strength should not be underestimated.