Episode 311 - The Launch of Celestia and Beyond

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week gyo and I chat with Yas ismaile from Celestia we discuss how the team prepared for the Celestia launch we revisit da or data availability and then talk about how projects are using Celestia today we cover blob stream and map out how a developer could tap into

the Celestia da layer and then we chat about community building the modular narrative and more now before we kick off I just want to remind you that the ZK Summit 11 is happening in Athens on April 10th this is an invite only event and space is limited there's an application process to it attend and you need to apply to be eligible for a ticket I've added the link in the show notes so I hope to see you there now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor Alo is a new layer one blockchain that achieves the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a rollup driven by a mission for a truly secure internet Alo has interwoven zero knowledge proofs into every facet of their stack resulting in a vertically

integrated layer one blockchain that's unparalleled in its approach Alo is ZK by Design dive into their programming language Leo and see what permissionless development looks like offering boundless opportunities for developers and innovators to build ZK apps as Alo is gearing up for their main net launch in q1 this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK Journey dive deeper and discover more about Alo at al.org and now here's our [Music] episode today we're here with Ismael and Yas from Celestia welcome to the show thank you for having us hey thanks for having us and we have GMO as the co-host for this one hey GMO what's up so we're

very excited to have you on we're going to be doing an episode revisiting Celestia I want to do a quick throwback to a few previous episodes um a long time ago we had John Adler on the show talking about I think Fuel and lazy Ledger at the time which developed into Celestia Ismael this is your second time on the show we did an episode kind of introducing Celestia a little bit more and then last year I had an episode with Mustafa all about Sovereign chains and and sort of The Sovereign rollup idea today we're going to be doing a catchup on the project what's really exciting is the project has since launched and obviously this is something I really

want to cover with the two of you quick disclosure before we kick off though so the ZK validator is an investor and we're a validator also that's a bit of a shout out we're a validator yeah yeah I guess I also should mention that bank Capital Crypt is also an investor in in Celestia so investor War what is it called investment warning investment this is not investment advice there we go thank you that's what it is this is not inv one advice we're so good at that on this show um and actually oh I want to do one other shout out to another video that we did this past summer for the Sovereign radio I actually got a chance there to you as well I'll add the links to all of these in the show notes but I want to welcome you back and I think for those

listeners who are not familiar with those previous episodes or videos why don't you quickly introduce yourself hey I'm is coffee and um co-founder and CTO of celestial ABS yeah that's me easy I guess if anyone wants to hear more of your backstory they can check out the previous episode yes this is the first time you come on the show we've actually worked together on a few different projects behind the scenes but yeah I'm I'm excited to have you on the show for the first time do tell us a little bit about your background so I'm Yas scy I'm the head of Deo at Celestial Labs previously before Celestia I were the protocol Deo at solo for two years yeah and before that I've been um at

ethereum Classic believe it or not oh director of eum class for a couple of years um and I've done a few things here and there like with flash Bots with the EA random stint here and there but yeah very happy to be here very cool I met so I met you yes when we worked on the plumo setup ceremony for C uh in 2020 2021 oh let's go yeah yeah that was really fun because um yeah it came to you with the idea about what if we live stream across the setup cermony and what I remember was you know there were a debate about doing it on a server running the computation on a server versus locally yeah and I decided to do

it locally while doing a live stream and what I didn't realize at the time wasas when you do these computation it kind of destroys your Wi-Fi so while I'm live streaming my internet was cutting off no yeah it's still a good experiment um I feel like since then we've also I mean so last summer ZK validator curated part of the modular Summit like you and I have kind of talked a lot about events and so it's it's been fun working with you so you've just kind of given us a bit of a background on what led you to Celestia but what do you exactly do today at Celestia you're saying devel but I feel like your role is kind of broader somehow so I'm cursed with the

um experience of things outside of Deo CU not a lot of people can do them and stuff so while I'm still like doing Deo stuff I do a lot of things like outside of that that covers validators that cover cover core developers but like Yeah from a high level there's um the way I structure that bro at Celestia like there multiple different teams on De we have the solution engineering team that I manage currently now we're at four engineer no actually five right now on that team um and they tap into all kind of crazy stuff right like inegration like the op stack or the arbitrum integration with Celestia um now we're looking at ZK related kind of

work streams so I manage that team there's also the developer advocacy kind of uh um and experience work stream um where we focus a lot on documentation tutorials and demo then we have programs and that would be like the modular Summit like now we're we're scoping out soon to be you know announced later um a hackathon um and all the events ins side conferences that we support and finally validator relations so all validator that want to you know support the network and stuff we're you know we work with them for coordination Network upgrades and hardore coordination and obviously like main net launch and yeah

I mean we also do a lot of community related operations and the main program there with core developers is what we call the Celestia Improvement proposal process or the CIP process it's kind of like the EIP but it's on like the ietf you know standards for how do you create working groups when you're building technical uh specification and implementations so what I'm trying to say is uh I barely sleep yes as the the lead cat herder uh open source cat herder I believe is a possible alternative title um yeah I I believeing is an art yeah yeah yeah it's an art and a job apparently as we found

out it is I want to just add to this that we extremely lucky to have y i yeah it's mind-blowing to me how productive he is I love it let's define Celestia for folks who aren't familiar with the project I know that like most of this episode is almost going to be like teasing out the nuances and talking about updates but I think it's good to yeah just set the scene obviously celesa is really well known the term like da or data availability in celesa are very much intertwined so how would you Define the project today yeah Celestia is a a data availability layer and uh it's a live P2P Network so what is a data availability layer so data availability is often confused with uh long-term

storage or data retrievability but what it actually means is that in a blockchain if you publish transactions how is it guaranteed to the network to the P2P Network that these transactions have been made available to the public like have been published to the network essentially and um a data availability Network that's the main purpose of it like ensuring that um everyone can verify that the transactions have been published and they for a period of time can be downloaded from the network and can be executed such that you can verify the state of your decentralized application there's two ways on how these decentralized applications can

look like um like very generally speaking one is through validity proofs you can like via ZK proofs or or cryptographic techniques ensure that the state transitions that were made are actually valid and the other approaches optimistic rollups or optimistically via fraud proofs um so you just assume that the state is valid and in case there has been any malicious State transition you can prove that via so-called State fraud proofs and and the data availability layer makes that possible this is sort of setting the stage with a definition on da but how do you define Celestia as a project today so Celestia as a project today is the life Network and the

community around it it's a broad ecosystem of validators node operators and applications building on top these applications benefit from uh low costs for data availability there's a great variety of how these applications can look like most of them currently um are somehow evm focused right so they build on op stack for instance or optimism uh stack and they settle for instance on arbitrum or optimism or ethereum layer 2os but post their data instead of on ethereum they post it on Celestia W what we will see more and more um as I said

like there there's many approaches we we will see more and more is also alternatives to that which could be Sovereign rollups like think of them as their own chains that do not um settle on an existing settlement layer but instead are more like Cosmos zones that do not run their own consensus this is interesting to me so like where are the contracts actually deployed for these things do they not get deployed at all on ethereum L1 they do they do okay how does something like that work so the way it would work with like an OP stack implementation is um you deploy your op stack or um arbitrum based R up L2 you know the smart contracts are still on

ethereum right okay but you're submitting your blobs to Celestia right you're you know you're submitting them to Celestia and what the Celestia validator do um through blog stream is they attest to the data availability through a bridge back to ethereum a smart contract on ethereum like a like client implementation there and the rollup itself will be sampling via that smart Okay interesting you just mentioned blob stream we will have to come back to that because that's a whole I don't know if you'd call it product or what exactly it is but it's a it's a thing in its own right but yeah this is this is super interesting I will warn

that uh even even the word blob is already uh delving into um jargon territory so maybe we should also Define what that means that I I will be the the jargon warning person to be but be the jargon deoder I like that yeah um before we do that though before we talk blob blob stream jargon I actually want to bring us out a little bit so it sounds like I mean Celestia's live today we're already seing it being used for real last time we I talked about this on the show was with Mustafa and then it was very focused on Sovereign chains and sort of the vision that he had it looked a certain way I want to talk to you about the launch and then actually

what's happened since so let's first start with the launch how did it go um as the person like I coordinated launch and support with ismile with the Cavs with the community with the validators and stuff the best way I can describe laun it was like a beautiful Symphony and I would like be orchestr like like everyone was performing their musical instruments and I was like validators core developers release the docks and this all went it all went perfectly like it was actually a very boring launch and the thing that I missed on launch cuz we I I built like a little dashboard um to monitor the blocks from like there's like a timer

until launch and then after that it shows you block production happening so there was like between block one and block two was like a 20 second block production and I kind of Panic by looking at the dashboard but the reason for that like the technical reason for that is because um what the core defs told me is the network was building is topology so there was going to be latency at the validators you know connected and stuff and start you know peering with each other so that was kind of like expected but then it went really smoothly at one point I think like I was trying to take a photo block 420 but I missed it um but yeah I did go to is and I was like um I think it went really

well and is was just like smiling and just gave me a hug true I love it so it was a perfect it was a lovely Symphony I mean we did a launch party a few like online just a few hours after and I was surprised at how chill you guys were you guys were just like in a good mood I mean we' we had gone as a validator we had seen and gone through some other launches that were definitely more difficult where something breaks they have to Halt the chain like we you know we've seen some pretty chaotic ones did you miss the chaos I certainly did not miss the I was very happy that it went so smoothly and um what y called it was a boring launch

I think that um also means like it was a lot of coordination that happened up front and a lot of um hard work with like test Nets and um basically practicing a lot and uh making sure the software runs smoothly I was hoping for a boring launch and I went as uh or went even more smooth than I would have expected how did you guys test this stuff like I remember at some point uh someone recommended the idea of giving a bunch of like core team developers uh raspberry pies and then trying to like launch everything simultaneously as like a pre pre preest run uh and that being like a a uh kind of like a CD method

where like you would like distrib You' be like all right everyone pull like let's start the the chain on a bunch of Raspberry Pi sitting in someone's basement in like different places in the world but I don't know how do you even kind of do like continual testing on a large decentralized Network actually out of curiosity I this this is a very procedural question it's kind isn't it an upgrade of a test net though isn't there usually like a test net that they've decided is like the one we didn't do that um that's very often the case right like very often chain launches today are like that where you basically you launch in in almost like in private and it's like a it's a it's a test net essentially and then someone decides like okay this is stable enough and then it's public and then it's main

net but like what we did was slightly not slight was very different in the sense that um we assembled the Genesis file we published that and um the community agreed on it we like there's a there's a date set in the Genesis file like how technically works there's literally just an if statement in the code that says like oh if it's Genesis time if it's before Genesis time just go to sleep like there's like an actual line of code that says like sleep until Genesis basically and then with that moment kicking in the chain went life the piers like the the nodes look for other peers that's the 20 seconds that

Yas mentioned then the chain was life so there was no such period where where it was like coordinated in the background it was like more real decentralized launch and and as much as as possible almost is this like the OG this is a bit of like the OG way of doing it yeah yeah I mean uh for the cosmos Hub we did it very similarly okay why did you choose this way though why not do it from a test net upgrade kind of we did kind of like we did have F like four to five test net one of them being the block Space Race that the intention of the block Space Race were the incentiv by testnet program where we tested so many different things and there's a lot of it

mixed not only the validators but also da nodes like the light nodes Bridge nodes and uh the full nodes and we had a thousand participant and that allowed us to really really stress test um the first test net that were designed for Main and that allowed us to you know update everything after and then leading up to launch um I was coordinating um with some Decor abs and some people running validator like one test net a week and what we were doing was timing it right so we you know you have five people participating each one has a role like we had a member from the devops

team a member from the celestian or the da team um a member from uh the core acting that's writing that um consensus client and then you had me I don't know what I was doing there but yeah I was there um and and then you have ismile right and what we did was um basically there's several step that need to happen um starting with what you know is was saying you know you created the Genesis file but prior to that you can create a small Genesis file that had like it doesn't matter what's on it as long as you specify that it has to start at a specific time in the future and the future can be like in 30 minutes right uh like start in 30 minutes right and then everyone started running their

validator and then we monitor right and then block production happen it kicks off but then there's a few other things that need to happen right like the da nodes have to make a public release that is compatible with main because you know mayet uh launcher the consensus client but then the Da Side have to take that um like the first block hash into their software and then they make a public no um and then you can start your light noes and Stor full storage node and what's cool is you know when we're timing it like one week before main not launch the devop team had this whole kind of system in place to kind like you

know making that release for the daite and deploying bootstrappers explorers everything just for testing um so after the first block production a test net prior to release um they set things in motion and then they timed it and I think one of the team members had a stopwatch and we're like how long did it take to deploy everything and they're like 14 minutes like I'm like all right for main that launch maybe you can do it under 10 minutes we're like challenge accepted and it was really fun that separation though the fact that like first you have the consensus then you have this da step is is that unique to Celestia and like a DA system or do all

kind of regular blockchains have that happening under the hood no cuz Celestia you know there's um multiple layers right there like the consensus and da layer but DA has to like you know see you know what network is it data you know sampling from so it needs the client to first release on the consensus side before they make a public release um for the da Start Da Side to start running um da nodes wow that's so interesting I think technically speaking it could be the case that if the binaries basically that run the particular networks right uh if there were one binary I think um the Celestia node basically the the light Cline and

the Celestia node full node theoretically they could also do it without that delay initially I mean the light clients is different is a different story because they need some like subjective header to like initialize and so it needs some block or some header need to have happened first but like for a full note theoretically it could be that they run uh in parallel and it's not a necessary step but the way we've implemented is it's more separated um we are thinking of doing our own merge in the sense that to merge these both networks right that's something that is like considered I think I'm not sure if there's a CIP for that to yet to be honest but there's definitely a consideration to like make

it a bit like from the ux also a bit nicer for node operators to have only one binary right like and also one peer-to-peer Network um but like that's just an implementation detail it doesn't really matter and I actually kind of like the separation though I do think it would be nice if there was one peer-to-peer stack used only right like the separation itself is like it's nice that the things are so isolated in the sense that like if there's a bug in the da layer it doesn't trickle down to the consensus layer at all and vice versa but like if if the consensus layer breaks down no blocks are produced and the da layer is kind of pointless but like um it's it's it has its benefits but I think from the from the ux perspective for node

operators it would be neat if it was a bit more tightly coupled um just a tiny bit and I think there's there's teams working on that when you launched was there any Roll-Ups ready to go or was it sort of like launch wait get rollup deployment like I was kind of curious about that like if the system sort of like and the and the larger picture of it with these rollups kind of branched off it were there from the start or did you actually have to run it a while before they deployed just to be sure they could have deployed immediately um I think maybe out of caution people didn't uh in the first week or something but like it's a permissionless system

people could have like with block one started deploying rollups uh and it is something that could have happened because on uh these many test Nets that there were live I think there were like even as as as Manet beta was launched there were three test Nets uh running in parallel with various deployments um one of them was like Dimension with I don't know I think like 10,000 applications running on top oh uh like a bunch of smaller games and stuff so it could have been right like it could have been but like um most of these rollups were getting ready themselves most of these rollups had test Nets themselves and I think most of them waited for a few

weeks before they started posting blobs or or data onto Celestia the requirement for deploying from testet to mainnet requires a lot of leg work that's not necessarily Technical and stuff but it does require kind of management and organization from within that those rollup dams right so it's wasn't like yeah I mean like is said it was permissionless you can immediately deploy if you wish to but um there's a lot of coordination and a lot of you know things that you got to do prior to do an official launch right which is why a lot of them existed on testnet because they just wanted testing at the same time it's kind of a good thing nobody launched at the first week

for the first week we just want to see stable block production we just want to monitor the network we want to see that the da layer is you know sampling and you know all of that stuff I feel like this leads us a little bit to the question of blob stream and kind of introducing what that is because like on that launch day we talked about it but I still don't really know what to call it like I don't know if it's like an initiative or a product or rollup itself like I don't know exactly what it is so you launched a few weeks later or like yeah soon after after you had a few rollups happening at this you know joining that by the way is very much the picture that Mustafa had kind of described in our interview like that Sovereign chains and and that sort of

model but then yeah let's talk about blob stream because I feel like that kind of changes that picture a little bit at least for me and maybe maybe I don't understand it right but yeah what is blob stream let's start there and tell me if it is it a rollup is it a product is it an initiative it's not a roll up it's a kind of philosophical question if it's a product I would say yes okay um let's define the type of the object I think is what Anna is it a movement it's also it's also kind of an initiative in the sense that um someone needs to deploy a smart contract for it to work on ethereum and validators need to start running um what is called a

relayer or orchestrator that actually posts data attestations uh to ethereum to that smart contract to digest so it's not a rollup okay that that's clear so we what you could think of like from a very high level perspective what you could think of or a good analogy is like a oneway bridge from Celestia to ethereum and the only purpose of that bridge is to relay attestations basically signatures of the validators to ethereum that the um they test to this data this data route was published to the network that's a very simple primitive and for that you need like these smart

contracts um to digest these attestations and then the purpose of it is that if applications deployed on ethereum can then like like layer twos layer 3es on ethereum can then post their data onto Celestia and um get an attestation on back on ethereum that this data was published on Celestial and then they can like use ethereum or a layer above etherum for its like arbitrum directly or um optimism or any Layer Two on top of etherum can use that for settlement so they live they have that for bridging for State fraud proofs or for validity proofs they can use

their settlement layer as before either that's ethereum or Layer Two on top of ethereum but they can now post their data and instead of posting it on ethereum which is um expensive or on the like regular settlement layer which could still be more expensive they can now post that data on Celestia directly instead of like into call data in to the dedicated evm either the layer one or Layer Two right I want to break this down into these pieces if I can so in this case the ethereum L1 is the consensus it's the smart contract platform where the smart contract is deployed right it's just settlement I

thought the L2 was settlement I want I want to understand help help me with this where is the consensus where's the settlement where's the da happening that's like the kind of because I feel like they're being split right yeah the The Da and the consensus is on Celestia the settlement is on ethereum and the execution is on that layer oh wow okay so this goes back by the way to that original example you gave with the op stack cuz you had said L2 for settlement but you're saying like the execution of the settlement happens on the L2 but the L1 is the settlement layer

still okay I didn't realize that consensus and da go over to Celestia I have to add one more thing it's consensus and da only for the data of that application or chain right okay it is not for the state yeah so the consensus for the state remains on ethereum yeah on ethereum or on the settlement layer that application uses to be more General wow this see this is where it's it's so it's so fascinating like these these parts that we've understood so I've always thought of it as three parts but it sounds like it's actually Four it's consensus consensus it's like consensus for da consensus for state

and settlement so wow yeah maybe let's disambiguate right like like blob stream is like I think that maybe here's another way of describing it that may also be useful is simply a way for ethereum or or I guess any smart contract change doesn't really matter to verify that a particular piece of state is available to everybody so the way we do like generally is like you have some like client and this is like also similarly a question so feel free to correct me about if I wrong at any point nominally you have a like client and you you're like I want to check if a piece of data has been posted to Celestia right and then you you can create you can certify that that is the case right and if not you could whatever

do some slashing that's you know big brain um but the point is like okay cool like that requires the problem is that requires you run a light client in your computer but you don't want like you know you want to use the you know the power of the magical internet computer that call ethereum to verify that a piece of data has been posted instead right so us to not require anybody else to have this like other secondary Network that is verifying whether something is posted and so this blob stream is like one way of being like great like there is a contract in ethereum and you can say I promise you I posted this data and then you simply say and if you don't believe me I will I will post this particularisation to ethereum and then it will indeed certify that I have posted the data more broadly

and if you trust ethereum security then you must trust that I have posted the data in the first place and so of course that has a bunch of applications Um this can be used to just like remove the data piece from the L2 and simply post it on Celestia right so now we have now we have like removed like one part that we often need to deal with which is posting data to either ethereum or some other you know like essentially making data available we have now like remove that task and given to Celestia in a verifiable way in a way that you can indeed certify that like here you go the data that I promised would be available is available and you don't have to trust anyone other than essentially like ethereum for that to be the case is that roughly correct no that's a very

accurate but to add to it why would anyone want to do that you know why would you want to start modularizing you know like moving components around and stuff it like it kind of like Lego pieces but the biggest benefit is this is how you scale ethereum right because now layer twos on ethereum have way cheaper transaction cost sub they have a really cheap da layer they can submit their blocks to and you know and they can verify um you know that it's been attested to on ethereum and that gives them a lot of superpowers where now you can deploy a rollup on ethereum and not worry about cost anymore because you have like a DA

Network that can makes it really cheap for you to um you know send your transaction to when you talk about sort of the effici like making it cheaper a lot of times I mean what my my mind goes to but like but weren't l2s invented to make things cheaper like aren't they themselves supposed to just make it cheaper like or are you making it cheaper for l2s to exist I mean I can answer that question because there are multiple layer based on what Celestia solved originally and based on what was the rollup CTIC road map that ethereum went through based on cela's vision but still had problem without an da layer so I'll break it down into like from the

rollup side from the rollup side um the idea that you can just deploy a rollup on ethereum with no cheap da um doesn't scale ethereum because what happens is let's say it's a really successful rollup right um it has some fun games there's some I don't know nfps whatever the cool character introduces right that will create a lot of adoption right there'll be a lot of adoption on it so what happened when you have a lot of production you have a lot of high transaction costs and that doesn't solve the problem with scaling because you still end up where you you know started we're like well things are really expensive what do I do now well maybe there's another rollup that I can go to you go to the other rollup same thing it's another chain that you know the

more users the more transaction there are the more expensive it ites do they just get filled up almost like they like when they're empty they're really cheap but the more action they kind of just cat to the L1 in terms of gas fees it's gas fees right like on like for the user they're noticing oh actually it's not cheaper on this L2 anymore because there's Demand right might still be cheaper as if they would deploy directly completely on ethereum like it might still be cheaper on that L2 but as Z said once that L2 or like once that roll up on ethereum gets really popular you compete again for data and state on that uh layer as well so I think the key

Point here is specialization because if you have one layer that only does data basically like only does one thing it like ensures the data was published and the the data is ordered so there's consensus on the data then there's no competition between State execution and that on that layer so um it's highly specialized and can optimize for exactly that use case and the applications on top can focus on speeding up the execution so so fundamentally right what what get what happens with l2s is they become more congested like at the end of the day like what happens on the L2 has to be posted somewhere right and if you are simply on ethereum like all you're doing is you're just passing the storage cost down to ethereum but that's still

going to cost you the same as if you were doing the thing on ethereum at least for storage maybe not for compute right you could be running much faster fancier bigger computers but for storage you're still storing the same data right that you were do storing previously like on ethereum and so that that cost is always going to get passed back to you um after enough usage this was the thing that's done by the L2 itself right like this is the L2 smart contracts like writing to the main chain there like check-in points that I mean we've covered I covered this years ago when we did a series on l2s so is it really is it that those pieces then like is it that writing to the main chain that gets moved over to Celestia not exactly because if celesa would drift another

settlement layer if in a different world right it doesn't solve that problem either but what Celesta solved from a high level problem um is what we call the big block problem which um basically solving the blockchain trilemma which if I remember correctly it's in like the TR tremma includes it's a triangle with security uh decentralization and I think Network up correct me if I'm wrong anyone I think that might be it there's so many tremas out there sometimes privacy's on a corner so I don't know yeah at this point it's like a 6D Simplex in some space with like you know 70 million faces and you can pick any triangle you want out of it or whatever there's a lot ofos but the the one you

mentioned we can go with that one yeah let's go with that one so basically it's the big block problem which is you know for a long time you know you can see um you know a lot of smart people can come into the space um you know criticizing crypto and be like well if your problem is high transaction costs why don't you just increase the block right I'm like Elon Musk talking about Dogecoin or whatever it's like you know and it's like well yeah I mean don't don't you think we never thought of that right like we can just increase the block and stuff um but the problem with the big block is if you increase the block site you centralize the network because the cost of running a Noe exponentially increases right and what Celestia solved there is allowed you to increase the

block size while keeping the network decentralized and that is through what we call data variability sampling where sampling from a high level I mean I can give an example of it later but like a really simple example but from a high level allows a light note to download less or sample less than 1% of a block you get 99.99% certainty about what is included in that block right so in a way the way that we could provide treat da for these rollups is because if the blocks increase and they start getting filled we can increase the block size as long as we're you know people are running and people are incentivised to run uh light

nodes in order to en ensure that we can continuously sample the blocks while keeping the network decentralized cool and I think this also speaks very much to the modular thesis modular Vision that you that you guys have been pioneering where you're you're not just making the block bigger you're not just like it's it's not like this kind of unsophisticated ated slapping a Band-Aid on something you're like kind of dissecting out and then sampling like you know trying to reduce it so that it's still correct without just bloating it it's really interesting yeah okay I think we have a bit of a better sense for blob stream now although I I have

one last question about blob stream again we're kind of like my original concept and the original thing we talked about with Mustafa had Celestia as not the settlement layer but definitely like the Center of rollups here Celestia is interacting with another existing chain and so it's really providing da but it's not providing some of the other things it would do for Sovereign rollups for example it sounds like you sort of said it's it's sort of a product but is it like is it a set of smart contracts that you've developed is it like something that if a app developer living on an L2 could deploy themselves on ethereum and that's what that is is that sort of the

product is just like a collection of smart contracts on ethereum that interact with Celestia or is it more than that in terms of software is mostly the smart contracts but also um there need to be in one component in Celestia that uh posts these data attestations to ethereum okay um and like we developed that last year but there's also a team Su send um that developed a ZK version of that much better suited for this podcast um basically an optimization that uh it proves the soly the consensus that was achieved on celest right like then instead of the the smart contract posting all the signatures and like um being also somewhat expensive you can

have like uh post a proof and that can be verifi like that can be verified on on on ethereum essentially MH what's the name of that team succinct oh succinct yeah yeah yeah you've had them on that te oh yeah wait wait it's blob X right exactly yes okay I'm familiar with this yeah yeah so so these these like the name is blob stream X but it's essentially the same product like from from a product perspective it's exactly the same thing because for the user it doesn't matter if ZK proof or it's like an optimized version of blob stream basically I see I have a kind of random question that may be very quick to answer but do sequencers of l2s ever interact with Celestia or a DA layer the

way that I've UND like everything you described with like I I thought it was more like the app developer use like an app on an L2 that's actually like using this da or are you interacting with sequencers differently I mean one one way to look at it um like a model is um like the sequencer interacting with Celesta is kind of like in a way if you want to abstract the roll up interacting with Celestia so the developer in that case is a rollup developer that's deploying a rollup right and that's interacting with celester it's kind of like if you look at the cloud computing model like if I'm deploying an application on AWS or Google cloud or whatever in this case is Celesta we're

providing like infrastructure for that rollup right but from a user perspective they don't really need to interact with celester they're interacting with that rollup like that rollup could be application specific or something but they don't necessarily interact with celesa directly they can if they want to but I mean it depends on the kind of user I think what you're saying though in that case so and this does go back to another conversation Ismael you and I had which was this idea that the rollup is the app that's sort of like lots of rollups each one is an app but I had this I mean when I say dap or I I'm actually thinking of like a lending protocol or like something that like is not a rollup it's it's used to like

being deployed on as a smart contract in an evm environment so it could be doing that on an L2 it's not creating its own rollup in that case would that app deployment actually be interacting with Celestia maybe like we can think about it in some like layers right where it's like you have the L2 and then on top of it are a bunch of apps and the L2 itself interacts with Celestia okay right so the L so the apps on top of the L2 do not yeah like they do but through the L2 they're not they're not deploying the contracts themselves and I think this just so just to go back a little bit to rewind a little bit into this conversation I think there was a moment where I was thinking more on that

level and this is a good clarification that like when you talk about an application on ethereum those smart contracts those are always going to be rollups so sequencers they're not going to be like The Lending app or something unless they want their own rollup I guess exactly but there are there are also almost like layer threes on top of layer twos these days right like and and these are more like their own chain but they use dl2 to have like quick access to that ecosystem of of applications right and um and that they could also so to so maybe I'm confusing you more now but like they

could also interact directly with cel yeah so the hole goes deep the the answer unfortunately always is like it depends like how how people use the the stack right um I think for a smart contract living on let's say optimism or abrum directly of course the DAP developer does not need to interact or care about Celestia but if you want to like deploy more of a like layer three on top which like I think all these big um rollup ecosystems now offer in various ways then you could post your data directly on Celestia as well if

it's something you as adap developer need to care about I doubt it I think you take something off the shelf that um has like Celestia integrated like the solutions team that yaas mentioned is working on that and then they um would write their dab launch their rollup in a rollup or like layer three or whatever um it's called then their product like their app would need to care about but they have the like they would make a choice okay I want to post my data on this data availability layer or that data availability layer right what I want to do is also contextualize what iso's saying on the it depends part so that's kind of like the whole thesis around Celesta right it's so modular

that you can like and then when people ask us well what can you do with it and you're like you know build whatever you know like like it becomes because you have so much option like it's actually very liberating you have developer Choice first whether it's you know you want to deploy your own rollup for your whatever NFD kind of application or you want to deploy an NFD application on an existing rollup or any other you know kind of structure that you want you know that it depends it depends on what you want to do right and this is why we say build whatever so we're basically adding more to the tremma right like there's more choices you can you can do um in the sense like how much you care for

instance about upgradability and sovereignty of your application right that I think is something that is like a bit underrated right now like people might not care enough about it right now but like it is an actual like decision for instance if you deploy directly on ethereum you adhere to the like Fork Choice rules of ethereum and like everything right and um if you just completely own Cosmos Zone you're completely Sovereign right but then you have like this own consensus and like other trade-offs like Celestia basically enables you to not have your own consensus but at the same time it still enables you to choose between different uh layers of sovereignty or tapping into existing

ecosystems if you want and you can like tap into different settlement layers or yeah because I I do remember that that like the settlement layer is definitely separated like Celestia is not providing that but back then there was conversation about like a potential settlement layer for The Sovereign chains is that still on the road map is that still something that people want to do I think there's at least two teams or maybe even three teams that I'm aware of that um I want to build a settlement layer on top of Celestia okay so it's not ensh shrin so it's like not that we would add um a general purpose execution environment on Celestia and then people would deploy their smart

contracts there directly but instead it's like using Celestia for data availability layer for data availability but there's a settlement layer on top like that settlement layer just uses Celestia or the applications on top of that settlement layer use last year either directly or indirectly you have the choice um so I'm aware of two teams if not three I'm not I'm not sure if the third team decided yet um but there's certainly people working on that this going to be here here's maybe a fair summary is like Celestia is a it is a useful primitive to like build things on top of and of course that in that might involve

like many many things some that we haven't even thought about quite yet right which allows you to essentially choose somewhere along the spectrum of you could build on ethereum right and that means that you are bound by the laws you know set by godam me metallic sorry I mean ethereum um as you know the ones you know true that are true there is the other end of a spectrum which like all right just get good and build your own chain right and just do all of the like things that you have to do you know do all of the chain things quote unquote um and now there's kind of an interesting middle right which says okay great like you can have kind of a a weird mix of the two where you could you have this this like in between state that is kind of given to you by celes it

says great you can build part of the chain you know for example example in this case like logic rules for State transition so like you know when is a block valid or something like that uh and then we we'll take care of one of the parts of building a blockchain for you which is data availability like it's like you can think about it as like a weird like okay now like somewhere in the middle of a spectrum and you know Spectrum might have many dimensions like you you now lie here right yeah and that middle is also a a spectrum like that's right in itself as well correct course and a TR and a six dimensional you know Simplex of triangle we get a graphic designer in on this one man yeah I want

to see this uh I I just wanted to add that while it sounds complicated it's actually quite simple right like it's not while you have the choices it's only you have to make them when you care uh about them and then you have the freedom to choose but you don't always have to choose right I think it's also part of the dev's team or Solutions engineering team and to to like um work towards like good devx I mean it's not only their responsibility it's also like teams external teams are building like infrastructure such that you don't have to make these choices so there's defaults and you can like just click like deploy and done but if you want to

you can like choose all the layers and use it as if it was like Legos or you can use something off the shelf and use only like only add the tiny bit that you care about you as a developer you as a community or you as a as a Dap developer like that that part that you care about like as much sovereignty how much sovereignty do I want do I care about ethereum as a settlement layer do like all these choices you can only you only have to do them if you want to right like that's the goal is like there's only like very good defaults very good devx and you can also just deploy whatever you want I just realized like I don't actually understand I don't think we've talked about what are the fees for using

this for Celestia as a DA layer like I'm guessing there is still some fee and how does that actually get paid like who receives it if you're not you know if you're sending if you're kind of living partly on ethereum but you're using Celestia's da how does that payment happen it depends oh my God you're killing me sorry um what a simp yeah but like whoever posts the data on Celestia pays the fee right like and that can be the sequencer okay could be the user right like if the user directly um submits the transaction which is like possible Right like it's a

based rollups in based rollups they uh uh you always submit like blocks or transactions directly onto the data availability layer so like it act like it honestly depends who who that party is but the party that like posts the data on Celestia pays the fee okay when you Sample When you do the sampling is there any sort of payment there as well it's just the posting yeah it's just the posting okay so this also has like an interesting set of mechanics uh which is that storage is priced separately from like whatever compute for example right like the person who storing has to pay a value to Celestia

which is totally independent of the value that someone pays for the compute that needs to be done on the data for example so I I don't know I mean this is this is kind of interesting it's like dis also similarly like you know how you've disambiguated resources they've also disambiguated their pricing which uh leads to kind of interesting Downstream consequences I assume I actually don't know how l2s are going to deal with this for like for the end user I I don't actually know what this looks like maybe they're just shown some aggregated price or something I think it's just a the the actual like sequencers that pay the fees currently right like like their users do not interact with the um currently with the data availability layer I don't know if

there's like a based rollup deployed currently like maybe yes you know I'm not sure we me and the dev Wells uh we had done something but like it's not really it's just like for fun like a simple based rollup in um but it's not ready um like it's just like a hackathon kind of project um but like yeah base rollup would be like an example of a like a rollup that interacts directly like from a user point of view with Celestia yeah so what I mean is that the sequencer itself needs to charge the user enough for like whatever data they whatever state they are touching or

whatever data they're touching but like in some sense for the sequencer right the the data cost is disambiguated from the computation cost has to absolutely correct yeah put on ethereum yeah that's correct and and and I think like um how the applications that are currently deployed uh handle this is most of these protocols either have a token or some business model and they don't uh give the like they don't ask the user to pay the fees directly instead they pay the fees and they their like their protocol revenue is generated ated in their native token or however and that's how the paying of the fees is subsidized so to say right mhm uh the

sequencer as it earns like money essentially like part of that is like set aside to deal with separate fees from celestian similarly separate fees from whatever and let's say it's an L2 so whatever the fees that you need that the L1 would charge for whatever Services providing so yeah it's it's kind of interesting I mean it it also like foreshadows all of this crazy stuff that's happening with like EIP 4844 and all of this like any any number of um ethereum initiatives in this vein so it's it's kind of it's an interesting like set of consequences that are Downstream of having two separate services for each of these I kind of want to expand on like so the modular

stack in a way I think I think you you guys pioneered that idea and that narrative but are there additional pieces of the process like we've already talked about consensus NDA and settlement execution State rather so like are there other things that you think could be pulled apart in the future piore and I and Mustafa we actually kind of brainstormed um a modular P2P network over dinner in London if you remember that was a really fun conversation but I thought it would really CU um P to peer like as a network itself is like you know different notes peering with different notes it's just like it's not really structured in a way it doesn't have to relate to celesa

necessarily but like just in general how NOS communicate with each other could be really improveed and stuff um and interesting seeing more modularization or improvements on the peer-to-peer stack would be really cool um I want to talk about the CIP process yeah because this is so you kind of compared it to the EIP process this is the way that Celestia changes I guess the reason I wanted to bring it up is it I think depending on how far along you are with that process it sort of gives us a sense for how far along you are in kind of like decentralizing the power and giving it to the community to make those decisions

um the network launched what is it like Halloween three months ago yeah so it's still pretty fresh oh yeah Halloween we didn't dress up it was very silly but um we thought about it yeah launch was not that boring um but uh are people already using the CIP process is this something that actually is it CIP process or am I saying process process no it's Celestia Improvement proposal process okay fine good yeah good chill but can one already do that or are you sort of just in the process of process process are you just

in the like in the moment where you're actually building that system the CIP process as it exists today actually get going better than I expected and stuff I'm actually surprised in the sense that if the question is about do we have external core developer teams participating in the process yes absolutely So currently there are four working groups right there's the main one for core and consensus we and that's where you know we have the core developer call and people can watch Live on YouTube when we have those meeting they're very transparent and stuff um and this is what goes around all the specifications and that goes into Celestia at least from a consensus point

of view if we want to activate a hard work to activate those features and introducing the concept of rough consensus um which exists in you know the EIP process it exists in the P process for python it existed it's like a passing or a torch for like these kind of specifications working groups right then we have other one there's an interface one um working group and that one has um external team like Astria participating in it it has um Iger which is building a rust light client uh for Celestia's da Network and then there's the da working group which is just um two different uh Team there's the celestial Labs team with Celestial node

and there is Iger and then finally and that you know we've announced like a couple weeks ago you guys might like it because it's related to the podcast um there the Z working group by zachie and uh skip oh yeah we know about that I don't know about this yeah they uh they announced they wanted to do a working group I believe two weeks ago and they had their first meeting last week um and there were like 60 no 50 people attended that meeting from all over the ZK world and the cosmos World it were really really cool to see bunch of zkv people were in there actually yeah that's awesome this is our kind of thing yeah damn I'm sad I missed this well it's

just the kickoff I don't think it was like the finale like I think there's a lot of stuff to do yeah it was like the kickoff call yeah um but uh G can add your it's fine but um yeah um so now you have a ZK working group right and now there's you know four working groups and there even talks about about maybe more depending on what rups are looking for and stuff so we're already seeing a lot of interest a lot of people want to interact with the process because they find it to be a really good process and it's not like we're Reinventing the wheel it takes the best kind of practices from other processes that exist that are what Define what we call

off Shain governance which is a superior way of governance around technical specifications because you have all the experts all the core developers all the research folks um you know reading those specifications and you know going through a rough consensus process to decide what to add to Celestia for Activation in the CP process so is that only for the outcome of these working groups so like first you do this offchain and then like is it onchain I guess this is kind of the question like how onchain is it it materializes on chain eventually but in the sense that these decisions if they're made and accepted by the community are well

materialized onchain but it's completely offchain like sorry interrup decision making the onchain part of this decision would be mostly like if the celesa lab core developer team releases a new binary and then you know activates their future in the future that would like make it onchain if that's the question I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about or onchain yeah really the question is is there like do you plan on having onchain governance and having like the validators voting on some upgrades or do you actually picture most of this happening offchain in working groups and then it's like the core team basically makes the call I'm very opinionated on

it um I don't know if I'll get in trouble for saying it but I don't care I've been saying it for a long time um I I really hate onchain governance I like me my personal taste is I you know I noce there's more more like a cosmos Community kind of thing but I think like and vitalic also talked about it a bunch of other people like coin weighted voting for Activation of um technical features in a blockchain is a flawed mechanism because you're relyant on people voting with their coin who might not have the context on these changes compared to core developers who've been studying this like the network the code the specification the research in

and they have a better decision Mak process around would this screw the network or not if we activate it right yeah I mean I've I've definitely heard the the arguments for and against it I think having like existing in the cosmos Hub and actually voting on a lot of these things I've gotten to see it firsthand and wanted to add one more thing so y dislikes the onchain governance so much that he did not mention that there is a tiny component as like a subset of parameters that can be voted on chain um so and these parameters are mostly governance related parameters and a few like very few minor parameters of the chain that can that

makes like the memo field in a transaction how large should be like what's the max or or um how like what is the Min deposit for actually voting on on any of this you can vote on that but like that's that's um that's uh what's the word for this it's very like it's very internal it's like you you can change in the clubhouse you can change the color of the wall of the clubhouse but it's there's one thing was one thing so we have a we have a hardcoded like in the software currently hardcoded Max of like uh block size uh or Square size the current block size you can change it via governance up to I think 8 megabytes Max

and then if if if that's reached you like if the community decided we need bigger blocks because there's so much demand for it then there would be an offchain process the CIP process uh to to go beyond that right like because we know like the current software can handle easily 8 megabytes and um we started with the like most optimal like block size and parameter but like that's an that's an relatively important uh parameter that can be V voted on Via onchain governance but only up to a certain limit and these limits are set currently such that like there's a range where it makes sense right there isn't for instance like in other Cosmos chains

there's like also you can change inflation there was like this huge debate on the cosmos Hub like inflation should be hard tipped it it was kind of exciting zkv tipped it oh nice yeah um that was like that that like things like this I I think I completely agree with Y right like I'm not advocating for unchain governance like things important decisions like that should not be voted on Via coin weighted voting basically I'm like I wish I hadn't been like we did that cut it out no no no no no I mean in in the cosmos Hub there's no other way

right like there is definitely the right way to do it oh my god um it's not that you have a choice um I mean the community has a choice they could hard Fork right like they could say like I don't know we we disagree with the hub's currently like current inflation and the community does not come to agreement on chain so we will hard Fork the cosmos subub and there were there were I think even initiated by one of the like Founders I think in Cosmos right there was a discussion of like atom 2 or or I I I don't I don't I don't even remember the name but there was a discussion around forking the sub so there is a way interes but that's only in case of like

an extreme situation an extreme emergency so to say so yeah I think if this can be avoided and like offchain governance um can be used as like much more prefer preferable and so far the experience with the CIP process that like shephered or like stewarded by by us is like insanely good right like there's a lot of very constructive debate um people are like Community is super eager to participate and and improve um like literally improve Celestia right so it's very nice to see cool I feel like we should chat a little bit about what's coming up technically product wise and maybe events what's in

the pipeline mhm I mean on the technical Ro map what is the biggest thing is like blob stream deployment right like blob stream currently is not deployed and it um that's a feature that the community needs to activate but like that's will be the biggest next in my opinion the biggest next feature that is going to be live when roughly is that happening very soon I honesty like TM indeed yeah like but like not years it's like rather weeks or something I it's up to the community to decide that but like I think there's audits happening in the background I I don't want to set a date because I can't decide it but um uh it's

it's literally like probably weeks away yeah then there's a lot of like there's a lot of optimizations ongoing like both on the consensus layer which means like uh working on comets or tenament uh P2P system the mempool is being optimized there's also CS about some of that like there's uh proposals I think there's already like 15 proposals if I'm not mistaken another big feature that's being shipped is is pruning as as boring as it might sound it's like actually very important for note operators um there's again there's a CIP for that and also a lot of optimizations on the da layer mostly it's mostly about like

performance and stability currently right and like longterm is if there's more and more demand for Block space how do we guarantee that celesia can still like uh serve that Demand right we have this like internal Mantra is like 1 gab blocks and yeah it sounds a bit insane uh but data availability sampling would make it practical at least if there's like many many light clients like billions not maybe not billions but like many many many many light clients right and um so while it's not planned to achieve that this year it's definitely something we work towards right I think that's like from the technical side

optimiz ation stability blob stream pruning and then longterm make it possible to have one GB blocks cool all right what about on the products and events adoption or adoption yeah yeah so I mean yeah we can summarize all of that into like an adoption kind of um so just to carry a little bit more of the technical stuff from the adoption point of view um more Integrations are coming like we we're actively working on polygon ctk integration and I think was it this week or last week I don't remember um like starware announced like um integration with Celesta s active work on that that's being scoped um from

the rollup deployment side I mean there's like liare Finance there's man Pacific already deployed um there's um up node which is like a gaming kind of roll up and you already can see um like Manta Pacific I believe there a tweet by man specific about like within one month after like migrating through using celesa for DA they saved like a million dollars um a lot of people using op stack uh deployment roll up as a service providers um like conduit and Caldera are seeing a lot of adoption because now with oneclick deployment using celesa for da you're seeing a lot of interest in people trying to you know migrate PGN which stands for public goods network is actually shutting down it's like a

project within gitcoin um but even though they're planning to shut down within 6 months or something um they migrated to using Celestia just to save money while they shut down you know so you already seeing really like really interesting kind of like cool things happening on the adoption side and Lyra um after they went modular they started generating sequencer profit right um someone shared about Lyra like the profit kind of goes down and then they you know switch to celesa FIA kind of climbing up against so to wrap it up on the adoption and product side there's um a lot of different integration that are being scoped out a lot of different rollups that are waiting like you know

they're going to deploy on Celestia and there will be more interesting use cases for gaming rollups in the future because now playing a game is really really cheap when you have a gaming rollup that um uses cheap da as a resource right and yeah I mean that's um like what currently scoped out for the rest of the year from like the product integration and adoption side do you have any events planned you sort of mentioned this hackathon is that live it's not live um so um we haven't announced a hackathon but we are coming up with our own concept for hackathon so one of the problems that I see with modularity at

least from a community point of view is you know it's like this big Infinite Canvas and you would you know you want to get started painting and when we like you know modularis not maximalism so like okay great you know like we're modular you know we're we're all about building and stuff but there's no a sense of belonging right or like single line to like there's no one like path that people are supposed to do yeah exactly it's like where that thing that kind of hooks you for a sense of belonging while you're hacking and when you say build whatever it's great because it give you a lot of freedom but it's kind of like watching Netflix where you have so many options and I spend

more time deciding what to watch than what I end up watching you know um so what we want to do with the hackathon it's going to be an online hackathon we're going to announce it hopefully early in March um around that timeline at the first version of that hackathon but I want to introduce a little healthy tribalism into the hackathon just to make it more competitive between hackers I can't say anymore it's going to be really fun really exciting and and yeah I mean like there'll be like a ZK track that you know we can collaborate on good the other things that are happening on the community side so I'll go like you know from the smaller grassroot one to the bigger one on the grassroot events we have the modular Meetup program and

now that's spreading like w Wildfire where um last year we had about 12 meetups around the world the past week we had two meetups and we have like four planned only for January and February one was in Nigeria in wari Nigeria the other one was in zagre Croatia for this year we have one planned for buenus Iris for Barcelona for Logos I think there's one for Istanbul like a lot of like there's so like the idea behind the modular meetups is my experience with other l1s is when it comes to like community building is a lot of times you'll find like organizers come up to you and they'll be like well if you pay me a Grant I'll set up a meeting for like a meet up for you in my random part

of town and you know that's fine but like what do I what do you get out of it it's not really community building right it's just like pay to playay kind of like you know Community s offs if you will and what I was interested in is I wanted people who actually committed to div vision of modularity people who actually are passionate about being Community leaders in their own like local region and you know start building something before I can even consider sponsoring them right and like the advice I would give them is like well you don't have to find a venue that you got to pay for you don't have to do anything fancy first try to see how many people are interested in modular see the side of

your community and the easiest way to do that go meet up at a bar and just invite people to it's not going to cost you anything right and that's what happened with the modular Meetup in Paris what the organ brought people to a bar and they had like a quick presentation on modularity then they had modular trivia games right and the people had fun and stuff and then you see a lot of people in attendance and the guy is energized to create more more modular meetups so we're seeing a lot of interest there and it's my target for 2024 is 22 modular meetups so double last year um I think we're going to hit that number um after that we're doing we call the modular day

series which is one- day conferences that could happen at different conference circuits so we had one in Istanbul last year we're scoping one out I think for Denver and there might be another proposal for somewhere in Europe um so that one can be like a like a one- day kind of conference around modularity and stuff organized by um Community uh organizers and finally modular Summit 2024 this is what I wanted to know this is my real question I'm building it up for modular Summit like when can I interrupt him to say modular Summit I wanted to build it up I want to build up the excitement um so the modular Summit 2424 like when you when we're talking

about the muts and the modular day Ser you can think of the summit as a pilgrimage for everyone around the world to go about one time per year for that Flagship event where they can talk about you know like all the brightest SM talking about not just mod it from like the infra point of view but like all the different subcomponent all the different topics so last year we had a really successful one and as you know you were cating the uh ZK track for it yeah I mean this year if you're open for i' would love to get you to create it again um this stuff um we're thinking about a three-day event we know where we're going to do it but we can't announce it yet until we you know finalize some of

the details but it's going to be Summer and the summer it's going to be bigger we're going to go way bigger this year um it's going to be a lot more fun and we're still going to go with the same kind of concept around allowing different people with their own subcommunities and topics to create it uh and stuff um for like the main State and I think that's what made it special last year sure amazing well thank you for that little kind of hint at what is coming yes really appreciate it um I want to say thank you to both of you for coming on the show thank you Ismael for coming back on the show yes you got to be on the show I'm so happy thank you thank you for having I'm very happy it was pretty fun yeah nice yeah likewise

all right well I want to say a big thank you to the podcast team Henrik Rachel and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for [Music] listening