How Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin Inspired Key Parts of Celestia - Ep. 672
Mustafa Al-Bassam was a teenage hacktivist who outsmarted a US government contractor, shamed the Westboro Baptist Church, hacked Sony a record number of times, and eventually got arrested—though his 80 transgressions got halved for a funny reason.
At the Modular Summit in Brussels, Laura had a fireside chat with Mustafa to discuss how he went from his teenage years as the head of LulzSec and member of Anonymous to founding Celestia, a project aiming to solve key issues in blockchain scalability by going with a modular approach.
He also discussed data availability sampling, why he believes Celestia has achieved significant product-market fit since its launch, and the three key components of Celestia’s road map.
Show highlights:
00:00 Intro
01:47 Mustafa’s origin story and how he became a developer who ended up hacking FBI affiliates and Fox News
05:32 How he hacked a military contractor to the US Department of Defense and Sony
09:16 Why Mustafa was arrested at the age of 16
11:14 What about Bitcoin attracted his attention and got him interested in the industry
15:22 Why he founded Celestia, after doing a PhD in scaling blockchains and understanding the problems of sharding
21:16 What data availability sampling is and why it is important
23:52 Why Mustafa believes that Celestia has had “extreme product market fit” since the launch
26:16 What’s next for Celestia and why Mustafa is so excited about the possibilities that increased block size can enable
29:36 How Celestia is working with zero knowledge accounts for defragmenting liquidity in rollups and access liquidity even within the Cosmos ecosystem
30:57 What the endgame for Celestia and the overall industry looks like, according to Mustafa
37:36 Q&A with the audience
44:44 Crypto News Recap
Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com
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Guest
Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia Labs.
Previous appearance on Unchained: Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups
Links
Previous coverage of Unchained on modular blockchains:
Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
What Are Modular Blockchains? A Beginner's Guide
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Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups - Ep. 610
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Celestia, a data availability layer for blockchains, was launched last October to much fanfare. The platform takes a modular approach to blockchains, allowing developers to post data onto it without the need for smart contracts or execution. This makes it extremely useful for scaling roll-ups and other layer two technologies.
Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam and COO Nick White join Unchained to discuss what Celestia is and how it works, how data availability sampling allows for more scalability, how Celestia compares with other data availability layers, whether Celestia could become a data availability layer for Bitcoin, and comparisons between Celestia and Solana.
Show highlights:
Mustafa’s background and how his project called Lazy Ledger ended up becoming Celestia
Nick’s vision for modular blockchains
Why Mustafa believes in the “10,000 roll-up” endgame
Why Mustafa thinks that gaming and NFT chains work better on a modular blockchain
What Celestia is and how it resembles the publication of an article in a newspaper
What data availability sampling (DAS) is and how it works to ensure that the data is available and accurate for validators
How DAS allows for more scalability
What types of applications can be built with this type of modular architecture
Mustafa’s explanation of the concept of Blob stream and blob space
How a roll-up can be an independent or sovereign layer, not just a layer 2 to a layer 1
How Celestia competes with other DA layers, like the future EigenDA
The role of the TIA token in the Celestia ecosystem
How Mufasa hacked the CIA when he was 16 years old and how he transitioned into crypto
Whether Celestia could become a DA layer for Bitcoin layer 2 roll-ups
Whether Solana could end up becoming an Ethereum layer 2 using Celestia for data availability
The proposal to extend the functionality of Celestia without smart contracts in the base layer
Thank you to our sponsors!
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Guests:
Nick White, COO at Celestia Labs
Previous appearances on Unchained: Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
Mustafa Al-Bassam, cofounder and CEO at Celestia Labs
Links
Modular vs. monolithic
Alchemy: Modular vs. Monolithic Blockchains
Visa: Monolithic vs. modular blockchain
Chris Burniske’s tweet on modular vs monolithic
“The horrific inefficiencies of monolithic blockchains” by polynya
Blockworks: A spicy salvo launched in the monolithic vs modular debate
Unchained: What Is the Blockchain Trilemma?
Celestia
Celestia’s explanation of modular blockchains
Data availability
Data availability sampling
An introduction to sovereign roll-ups
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Deep Dive into Celestia (TIA) with CEO Mustafa Al-Bassam
Today we're joined by Mustafa Al-Bassam, CEO and Co-Founder of Celestia Labs. 15 years after Satoshi, we finally have what a blockchain actually is Celestia provides the ability to publish data and make sure that data is available. Celestia had what many are calling one of the best launches of 2023, and they are the first Data Availability Layer live today. In our conversation we get into how Mustafa built Celestia, other Data Availability Layers in the space, how Celestia can be thought of as a bulletin board for computers with some cryptographic and economic assurances - computers posting info so everyone can see it. It's so simple. It's an obvious fundamental building block. Yet they were the first to do it. Prior to Celestia, Mustafa was generally known for his expertise in ethical hacking. He had the US government at the age of 16 and was sentenced for it. We get into this and so much more, but first to ground the conversation, Mustafa shares what he is focused on at Celestia today.
0:00 Intro
1:10 Mustafa Al-Bassam
8:45 Hacking the US Government
10:47 Lazy Ledger
14:13 Colab with Vitalik
16:00 Challenges
18:00 DA and Celestia within Blockchain
19:27 Modular Blockchain
21:54 Monolithic Chains
24:55 Celestia within Cosmos
25:40 Celestia technicals
29:08 Requirements to run a node
35:05 The Graph vs Celestia
36:42 Developer experience
38:23 Starting fresh
40:21 Advice for teams
41:10 Celestia's culture
43:27 Payments
45:10 Decentralized Stablecoins
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What is Celestia ($TIA)? Unpacking Modular Blockchains
Celestia’s token ($TIA) just dropped. Highlighted by its modular data availability network the crypto community has showed a lot of excitement around this launch.
Why? What is so valuable about Celestia? What is its vision for crypto? How, if successful, will Celestia change the crypto landscape?
Today, on Bankless We’re talking to two Celestia CoFounders Mustafa and Ismail to explore the thesis behind Celesia. So, strap yourselves in, put on your learning cap, because we’re going to learn about Celestia in today’s episode.
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------ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro 4:10 What is Celestia? 6:12 The Modular Thesis 9:00 Celestia & Ethereum Relationship 18:27 Economics of Celestia 21:21 Celestia’s SDK 26:31 Celestia’s Capital Power 28:15 $TIA 32:18 Blob Stream 34:30 Celestia Endgame 36:18 Current & Future Projects on Celestia 41:15 Celestia’s Vision 43:55 Closing & Disclaimers
------ RESOURCES
Mustafa https://twitter.com/musalbas
Ismail https://twitter.com/KreuzUQuer
Celestia https://celestia.org/learn/
Vitalik’s Endgame https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html
------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
The Sovereign Rollup Thesis & Inevitability of Modular Tech Stacks | Mustafa Al-Bassam (Celestia), Preston Evans (Sovereign)
Today we are joined by Preston Evans and Mustafa Al-Bassam to discuss the sovereign rollup thesis. We discuss social vs technical sovereignty, the Sovereign SDK, why light clients are critical to scale, limitations of optimistic rollups, value accrual in a modular world and more!
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Rollup Designs
(05:40) Social Sovereignty vs Technical Sovereignty
(09:58) Why Does the Rollup Debate Matter?
(18:09) Limitations of the EVM
(20:39) A Blockchains 3 Core Tasks
(24:21) Thales
(25:18) Security Guarantees & the Benefit for Users
(32:21) Modular Inevitability & Breaking the Layer One Loop
(42:34) Why Preston is Bearish on Optimistic Rollups
(46:00) Value Accrual and Moats
(53:40) Sovereign’s Alpha Release & Celestia’s Mainnet Incoming
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Follow Preston: https://twitter.com/prestonevans__
Follow Mustafa: https://twitter.com/musalbas
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Resources
Celestia
https://celestia.org/
https://twitter.com/CelestiaOrg
Sovereign
https://www.sovereign.xyz/
https://twitter.com/sovereign_labs
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Disclaimer: Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Santiago, Jason, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
