Mustafa Al-Bassam

Mustafa Al-Bassam is the co-founder of Celestia, the first modular blockchain network built around data availability sampling, which grew out of his 2019 LazyLedger whitepaper and launched its mainnet in October 2023. He earned a PhD in computer science from University College London, where his research focused on blockchain scaling, and earlier co-founded Chainspace, a smart contract platform whose team was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Before his academic and builder career, he was known as a teenage hacker, a past he has discussed openly in interviews about what drew him to cryptography and decentralized systems. He serves as CEO of the Celestia Foundation and remains one of the most prominent voices behind the modular blockchain thesis and the idea of sovereign rollups.

11 talks by Mustafa Al-Bassam