Celestia — The Foundation of a Modular Blockchain World
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve likely read about the evolution from monolithic to modular designs that a number of blockchains are working on. What you may not have heard about is Celestia (formerly known as LazyLedger), the first blockchain designed with a modular architecture in mind. Celestia is one of the most exciting projects in the entire crypto space, and its upcoming mainnet launch could be a landmark in reshaping the construction of blockchains as we know them today.
Celestia is a layer one proof of stake blockchain which provides a pluggable data availability and consensus layer. It orders data and makes it available, but it does not execute transactions. Celestia is optimized as a shared security layer for specialized execution environments such as rollups to live on top of. While Celestia will support all flavors of rollups, it is initially focused on the EVM and Cosmos SDK. Celestia itself is built on the Cosmos SDK and uses Tendermint as its consensus engine. The key team members behind it each have incredibly impressive track records in the space:
- Mustafa Al-Bassam — CEO and co-founder
- Ismail Khoffi — CTO and co-founder
- John Adler — CRO and co-founder
- Nick White — COO
Modular vs. Monolithic Blockchain Designs
This topic has been covered in depth by many others (specifically
has a number of great posts), so I’ll keep it brief here. Fundamentally when you break blockchains down to their core components, they do three things:
- Execution — This is the computation required to update the chain. Take the current state, add in a bunch of new transactions, and out comes the transition to the new state.
- Consensus — This provides security and agreement regarding the transactions and their ordering.
- Data Availability — You need to make sure that the transaction data behind the block headers has been published and made available so that anyone can readily compute the state and check state transitions.
Take your pick of major blockchains today, and you have a monolithic approach of doing those three core components all together. Split them up across specialized chains, and you have a modular approach. A modular design is the well-documented approach for Ethereum’s current scaling roadmap, but it’s also what the Celestia team has been working on for several years now. Celestia flips the current model on its heads by decoupling execution from data availability and consensus. Leave the execution to specialized environments like rollups. Those rollups can then turn around, post their arbitrary data to Celestia, and rely on it for data availability and consensus.
