We Asked Nick White About The Future of TIA

Transcript

Celestia is is trying to be there to to catch all that demand and like that's what we're most worried about is like are we going to scale fast enough? We need to stop talking about chains and stop talking about things in like the old way. If a roll back happens in a forest and no one's around to see it. Did he really roll back roll back? I don't know. Has that question ever been asked before? Welcome back to the rollup. Your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future. Nothing on today's show is to be construed as financial advice. You can see our full disclosures list at the rollup.co/ventures. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome partners. Innovating finance, global, institutional, and onchain. Deep

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All right, ETH Denver. Nick, welcome. Just got in today. Literally just got in a few hours ago. Uh, feeling fresh. Slept on the flight. I know you guys are at the end of your uh sort of like life today. Yeah, the end of the podcast journey. Rob, how are you doing? It's good. Welcome to America. I'm doing good. Um rolling. It's uh day two, but it feels like we're we're coming to a close on our podcast stint. Y but uh we're going to close close with a bang. So, andy's voice is still fresh. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Um tomorrow's modular day. I put my mammoth as the uh profile picture. You made it mammoth your profile picture instead of the penguin. Not on Twitter yet. No.

Come on, dude. Come on. Come on, dude. Don't bait me like that. That that that the penguin floor is dropping, but not that hard. All right, we're doing all right. But I got a very important question to start this pod for you. Is it sloth or is it mammoth? Yeah. You know, I can't I can't choose. Obviously, I'm sticking with the sloth cuz I'm just attached to it at this point. Um I I did tweet in, you know, I I have two mammoths. um one I'm one I'm going to give away. I have two sloths. I don't know what I'm going to do with my extra sloth. Um but I think in the like the long term the game is like to have a modular mammal menagerie where and so I think there's other people who are thinking about like what are some other like cool modular mam mammal collections

they can create. I don't want to like you know leak any alpha but I think there's going to be more more NFT collections. And the nice thing is I feel like, you know, as the community grows, it makes sense to have new collections that new people can get into and not feel like, you know, everything is like so limited. You know what I mean? Um, and that's nice thing that mammoths are. There's 10 10k of them. Sloths are only two 2.5K, right? But overall, I like my sloth. I uh I just like the way that it looks. I think the mammoths are like a little bit harder to make a PFP. They have a, by the way, people listening, if you have a mammoth, there's a cropped version that you can put that's like a little more recognizable. I What's unique here is that there's they're symbolic of like

some of the core values of Celestia, right? So like Lazy Ledger with the SLOs, but also just about the design philosophy of Celestia itself, just being very minimalistic. And then now we're we're really going bigger, right? We're we're trying to have bigger blocks, more block space, abundance. And so you kind of have like this like dichotomy of of symbolism there. The other thing so yes you you nailed it. So sloth sloths are lazy ses a lazy chain doesn't do anything except for da and that's actually a superpower. Then mammoths are all about scale. They're one of the biggest mammals ever to have exist walked the earth, right? So they're about how do we just massively scale up throughput um and about going bigger not only just for throughput but

for like if I'm an application developer, I'm building something on chain. I can dream bigger. I can go bigger because I have Celestia underneath. That's that's the message. But also m the cool thing about mammoths is they also symbolize to me this like you if you think about elephants and and mammoths are very similar to elephants. At least in my mind, I've never met a mammoth in person. But elephants are very patient creatures. They also they also, you know, voyage together slowly but over a long distance, you know, towards sort of a destination, a goal, right? And I think that's something that mammoths also represent patience, which is Celestia's whole strategy is the long term, playing the long-term game, playing to win in the future, and not sacrifices and shortcuts in in the near

term. And so we asked that also of the community of like, you know, don't be an airdrop farmer. Don't be a, hey, where's my revenue right now? Where's the, you know, why isn't the token pumping, whatever, all all that crap. Like, it's just like, no. Like, let us cook. We're we're building for the long term. And if you're aligned with that, like, come and chill. You know what I mean? We're we're we're on this journey together. It's going to be a long one. But the long journey is the one that you want to be on, I think. Okay. So, let's let's address some of the FUD then, Rob. Um because I think that I mean well like sentiment around TIA the asset in Celestia has has improved the last I think in the last month noticeably on Twitter um and just like amongst the the

community but I think that there's quite a few points that we should address. Um so we can start with the CIPs. There's one for uh locking the staking rewards on the table now as well as lowering the inflation rate. Uh honestly, I just want to understand your perspective when you address the the community basically around the investors and teams selling tokens and um the inflation rate being too high and just early investors basically getting rich off of Celestia and then that kind of causing the token to really underperform. I mean, I'll let you just kind of take the floor. Um you know, wherever you want to take this, but for sure. Yeah. I well um I think that you know over the last year or

maybe 6 months um I think it was the tail end of 2024 there started to be this narrative coming back up over and over again about like oh my god Celestia is a scam because there's uh unlocked staking rewards and all the VCs are dumping on retail and like exiting before their unlocks even even come up right and Um, you know, you can see onchain. I think some some other people some people like track down like they could you actually see that that's happening.

Spoiler alert, like if you're getting staking rewards, a lot of people have to sell them anyway to cover their taxes. So, it's not like they're exiting or dumping maliciously necessarily. Um, but also that's just the standard for proof ofstake uh chains. So every proof ofstake chain, Aptos, Suie, also Salana, you were able to as an investor or insider stake your tokens, get staking rewards and and have liquidity on the staking reward. So it's it's just a standard thing that's or a default. I don't think that people but people seem to have thought that like Celestia designed this in maliciously on purpose as a way for insiders to like get one in on on the retail community or something

which is obviously not true. Um that said, I think there's a lot of validity to to the fact that that's like probably not the right way to do things. And I don't think anyone has like necessarily the optimum solution yet cuz all these everyone's just kind of making this up as we go. But the the CIP that's uh currently in the pipeline is to lock staking rewards um going forward which a lot of other people are like oh yeah sure do it now that like the the half of it's already unlocked or whatever but there's still half of the tokens that are still locked up. So I think that's still the right thing to do and we want to kind of blaze a blaze a new trail that other people can can try to follow in the

future. Al along with that is the other CIP where we're reducing the staking rate probably by 33%. I think that's just a good thing to do. We're seeing that with Salana. You're seeing that in I think Near and other ecosystems where you know it just feels like the staking rewards are too high like unnecessarily. though, right? What matters for Celestia is having a high enough staking rate to have a high enough economic security because we're securing these L2s that uh ultimately the the security of the bridge from Ethereum to the L2 is secured by Celestia stake amount and there's a lot of total value secured right now in those bridges. So, we want to make sure that we have a healthy sort of like um staking value to to keep

those bridges secure. So we don't want to overly decrease it, but it still feels like it's a little bit too high. Yeah. On on Salana, I mean, you know, they have a high staking rate as well and and you kind of see that like you know, you have most of Solana staked in those validators and not in Solana DeFi because it's a higher staking rate and so the there's kind of a market rate here at which point like you kind of go back and forth. Maybe you kind of have seen this as well and how are you thinking about it? Yeah, I also another important part of this is like DeFi and um I think if the staking reward rate is too high, then people are just going to be like, well, why would I, you know, I'm not going to actually use my my TIA

tokens. I'm just going to like stake them and and forget about them, right? And we do want to actually create more of an onchain economy uh around TIA as a token and have it not just sit in your wallet staking but actually be something that people use as collateral or at you know to make to to buy NFTts or whatever people use Salana or Ethereum for. So I think that's another aspect of this is hopefully it will make that easier. Now we also have liquid staking protocols like Milky Way uh Stride uh uh Drop. So there's also other ways you can still h gain the staking reward and use it for collateral. So we'll see how it all plays out. I think another thing that people were concerned about is just that

the team was selling and the team was tapping out and just doesn't care about the future of the project anymore because leadership etc was is now completely well off doesn't there's no need to keep kind of building this out and that similar to Ethereum you saw some of the Ethereum early Ethereum people kind of tap out and that's led to very slow pace of shipping uh on the Ethereum side so I mean I don't know if you have anything to kind of add there yeah well as I tweeted did a couple weeks ago when I just kind of reached a a boiling point personally uh with with some of the trolls uh and cynics on Twitter. I haven't sold any TIA so far other than including your staking rewards including the staking rewards. Uh I the only things I've done are like trade like

swap on Flame or swap on Eclipse or all these different DeFi protocols I've minted. I don't know how many tea I've spent minting stuff on uh forma probably like five or I don't know. Um so like yeah I can I can say that at least for myself. I'm as motivated and as locked in as ever. I feel that within the team including the founding team everyone. Uh it's funny we just had a team on site and um one of our investors one of our investor like long-term investors were there. He's been at all of our onsites over over the years and he was just like uh I asked him like what do you think and he was like you know always

surprises me about the Celestia team is that you know a year ago we we had an on-site literally a year ago the when the price was $20 and I thought you know you guys would be like distracted by that and like you know kind of crazy and affected but you guys were just totally calm super focused like that didn't even like figure into the picture into the conversation and he said equally when he came um you know this past week he was like expecting people to feel depressed or not even just for not not even just because of you know prices but also just because the industry is all [ __ ] up and whatever else and a lot of I know a lot of people who are like having yeah super feeling super jaded and like he's like the Celestia team like everyone

from leadership all the way down just totally locked in not not phased uh and so I think we've built culture of like that's not what we really care about frankly. Like we have a value and a mission that we want to get to and we want to win but it's not about like money. It's not about you know that it's like building something of lasting value and like you know making history making a dent in the universe right when I think it embodies the patience which is a virtue like that that you talked about earlier and this is like one of the tenants of Celestia like that that you've been able to foster not only in the team but you know those those values do start to proliferate like amongst the

rest of the community and so I I think you know you you see all of these new projects that launch they go live with mainet and tokens and all of them have to wash out the paper hands if you will like you know the the classical term but those who do sustain and keep building are the ones that last and I think you know to your point you know the ones that it's it's the old adage like you know you want to go fast you go alone you want to go far you go together and I think you guys have been able to build a lot of synchronicity between the team and the community and you see that in the sloths and you see that in the mammoths and I think that is what makes a a timeless value system and and ultimately a project with longevity. Um,

also I think you guys have done a great job just on a more technical path like look at what the ultimate goal is and then work backwards and I think we're even starting to kind of implement some of that those tactics into into our goals and our missions. Um, and and so you know just again you can kind of see like okay 100 gigabyte block you have this vision of a verifiable internet this new open system and you can work backwards on the path to get there. these intermediate steps and those kind of oscillations that happen in between just stay the course and and everything you know on that path to that ultimate goal is is in due time. Exactly. I mean just think about how many other teams are pivoting every six months when there's something cool. It's like data

availability is cool and all these L1s were like oh well we're doing data availability too and it's like we've been doing data availability since 2019. Come at me bro. And then AI come becomes hot and every like we're doing AI X crypto. look at us and then you know but for Celestia it's like we knew what we wanted to build literally six years ago when Mustafa published the lazy ledger white paper the vision has never changed certain aspects of which how we implement that vision like new technologies that have come out have you know changed the engineering roadmap but the the long-term goal has never changed whatsoever. We can touch on the revenue part a little bit later because I think that's like one other kind of point that

you guys have been faced with just constant battering about, but I'd like to kind of just go into more like positive territory because you like think like you guys are crushing, right? So, uh today L2B just dropped a uh DA throughput uh graph with all of the amount of data being posted onto Ethereum, Celestia and Avail basically now. Um, and also grow the pies has had really really great graphs on like the amount of data posted and then percentages right now I think it was like 95% of the total data posted yesterday was to Celestia 5% or so to Ethereum and a very very small bit to a veil but also but this was showing the actual throughput in terms of uh megabits per second right now on Celestia Ethereum and a veil and it's

very clear that you guys have the most like by a long shot compared to them I think it's over 10x um uh uh throughput per second. So maybe you could just kind of like simplify that for the community who is is trying to understand what this throughput uh means uh in in terms of megabits per second and then why that's so important for uh what you guys are doing now which is basically helping roll up scale. So where we are our current throughput is 1.33 megabytes per second. That is what the long-term target for Ethereum DAG sharding is. Um, and so we have that today and we have I think we're we're on track to increase that another 4x potentially before the

end of this Q2. Um, so we're just like heads down. That is like really the primary focus of the engineering team. And um I think it's really important because uh there's just a huge demand to launch all these L2s and roll-ups whether that's on on the Celestia native ecosystem or whether that's like Ethereum Ethereum L2s right look at Eclipse could not exist on Ethereum DA even even after Pra ships that there's not enough throughput base is going to is trying to scale is going to eat up all the future scaling that I think the entire whatever is on their current road map that's feasible. So, it's just like I think there's this incoming wave of of

demand and there's nowhere for that to go. And I think I mean there's also to to be fair a lot of um L3s that are using like basically data availability committees. Uh I think that's really a shame. Like I I I just feel like that's shouldn't be the the default. that shouldn't be how we scale Ethereum or scale any ecosystem is by like just AWS, right? So, I think that um Celestia is is trying to be there to to catch all that demand and like that's what we're most worried about is like are we going to scale fast enough, you know? Um but luckily you know avail I think is coming online. Um so

there's other there'll be other like areas of supply but I think Celestia is so far like the most reliable the most scalable robust solution on the market. Yeah. and and for the actual uh average data uh per per second right now while the the maximum capacity is 1.33 megabits per second I think LTB was showing about 0.55 uh megabits per second so you guys so there's still like there there could be a doubling in demand and there would still be room and then another double which is where we'd kind of get into we need to scale it up. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, there's been a spike in the last like couple days. Uh I'm unclear and who like it's not a labeled uh namespace like someone's but someone's consuming as much DA as Eclipse right now and it's un it's unknown who I I was I've been traveling so I haven't I maybe someone knows at this point but uh it's kind of unknown I I heard I heard it might it might be something similar it might be some kind of inscriptions thing I don't know that's my guess but anyway um yeah there's uh you know initias coming on online hopefully soon movement as Well, um there's going to be there there's rise. There's a huge amount of these really high throughput chains that are coming to market and like you know and

they're launching on Celestia and so we got to scale. We left off one of our previous podcasts talking about uh induced demand. Um, and so right now, like the the level of supply that you guys have is at the point where I I think you may have posted something where it kind of showed like, okay, this is the the uh threshold that we have available. Um, could you kind of talk through like how you think induced demand could work? Like how do you think how do you think that would look like in terms of practice? Yeah, I mean you can see it I feel like with with Eclipse right now, right, where when you make something cheaper like a like a the cost of a of a good cheaper, then it becomes possible to consume it and use it for other things that wouldn't have made

financial sense or economic sense before, right? So like doing a tapping game, as much as people love, they [ __ ] on this thing, they hate this game. I know they hate this game because it's fake to them. I mean, yeah, it's it's a it's a low value activity, but the that's the kind of the point is that that we can actually have this lowv value uh uh uh utilization and have it actually be on chain and not have to dump it on AWS, right? And that's the future of where I think block space needs to go is needs to be cheap enough where you can do kind of be free to do whatever you want and not have to worry about that. And uh cuz there's no way you would be playing a tapping game on on ETH1 or even probably in ETHL 2. It'

just be too expensive. Um so I actually think it's bullish and I think it's bullish that it's testing out not only Eclipse's infrastructure and throughput, but it's also testing out Celestia's. So like sure whatever it could be spam, but it's still an impressive metric that Eclipse's I think TPS actually exceeds currently uh uh Salana L1's TPS at at times. So, like that's cool. It shows what I've been saying the whole time, which is I I think L2s are going to scale way harder than any L1 ever could as far as exe execution goes. On the induced demand thing, I I I I tend to agree and I do think the scale is is is coming. And one like example of how like this this could play out, we uh we've

had a couple conversations about ZKTLS and you know this is like exposing new data sources to to become available on chain and and in more expressive applications. And so like my my thinking is that once those data sources are available, we have like this breadth of data that you know was no longer even even considered to be part of an onchain application. And so once we start taking into account online like banking, fiat systems, social media systems, all these things that you know are privately uh uh accessible to a certain person. Now we can bring those the way it was described as almost like a private oracle or social oracle if it's coming from social media. And so then that breadth of data

all of a sudden means that we have to make sure that all that data is now accessible and and data availability is is the tool for that. And so the idea of more information being being available on chain I think converges with the ability to consume all of that data and and you know maybe we aren't able to vividly see that that picture of more expressive applications if we just look at like okay we can you know we can use all we can use a lot more data but once we look into like what kind of data is possible to bring on chain then I think it starts to make a lot more sense um and you start to see how this DA uh supply ends up filling and you start to see how it could be used onchain for some way more expressive applications

just different use cases. Yeah. The that like I mean basically what what we're trying to enable is we can bring any idea onchain and make it just as cheap or uh nearly as cheap as doing it on a a AWS or on a committee or or on a a centralized server, right? M and I mean that's been kind of the premise of just build whatever idea this kind of like come and build. Coming back to the induced demand just kind of like close that loop. Um there was an interesting post recently about like how that was applied to Salana and how a lot of people kind of thought that because Salana's block space was cheap that it would never kind of be used. Like do you think that people aren't grasping the idea that Celestia's isn't supposed to

be like charging users fees still? like it's not supposed to be expensive. Like you're not trying to capture value from people right now. Like like is this something that people are struggling to understand? Redstone modular oracles are available on 50 plus chains trusted by over 100 clients and over 6 billion in total value secured. Visit redstone.inance to find out more. Good question. I it's so funny because I do see I remember back in I don't know if it's 2021 or whenever when when Solano was having its come up kind of thing all the Ethereum people were hating on it because it's like oh well whatever but it doesn't capture any fees or like the fees are too low meanwhile look at

Ethereum users have to spend $10 if they want to send a transaction or whatever right and they were like all you know pumped up about that is like it's scarce block space it's valuable um I think that's just like you're just driving users away to other chains which is totally what happened in Ethereum. We can see that now few years later and Salana actually won out by doing by with abundance right um now where I where I disagree with Salana's like value capture is that it's we kind of dependent on me and priority fees long-term I think that goes to the application layer uh or even back to the users like that's we're seeing that all over the place with like uni chain a lot of these these like defi apps that generate me are going to their own

chains for that reason um now where Celestia is and on this like de induced demand uh and scaling point is right now the the the fees are set to almost zero basically and that's on purpose. Um it's just a spam resistance mechanism that's otherwise it would literally be zero because we want to just let people come and build stuff and we want to keep scaling and keep scaling and amass all the these users and all these rollups and build and grow this ecosystem. Now, I will say that long term, I don't think that's sustainable economically and I think that at some point there will have to be some kind of like more reasonable minimum fee for the block space. But the

point is it's not meant it's not meant to be extractive. Like I think when you're constraining supply then you're you're kind of like squeezing your your users and your applications like kind of like milking them. That's never going to be the case, right? uh the it's it's meant to be fairly priced so that the and and so that like you're only paying for the amount of value that you're getting, right? Like if if it's not if the block space is not valuable enough to pay for that, then you shouldn't be using it and you should go elsewhere, right? But the point is that like build a product that is valuable, make your block space valuable and that that can also mean adding in services around your

block space whether that like lazy bridging and things like that that make it more uh more attractive to use that that specific block space. So that's like the long-term vision. Okay. So even with the recent uptick in demand, the revenue numbers are still small compared to something they are meaningless. Revenue numbers are literally meaningless. Okay. So so the the vision for for what you should look at and actually um Mikey Paluto from Blockworks, shout out to him. He he did a great tweet which is like in and I' I've tweeted this before too. It's like study Amazon, study these high growth, study Uber, study these like high growth startups who reinvest

everything into just more growth that are not actually trying to maximize profit because when you're playing like a network effects, I wouldn't you know potentially win takes takes all kind of like game which you know data availability in L1 block space might be you that's not you don't want to overly optimize prematurely for like making profit, right? You want to uh you want to grow, you want to build the best product, you want to amass market share and um and that can come down the line in the future. There was also a great uh interview on the Unchained podcast with um who's the guy who wrote Chris Dixon and he was just saying like he because she she Laura Shin asked him like what do you think of this ETH verse soul

value capture debate. He's like it's so myopic these guys should just like stop even thinking about that and talking about it and just thinking about how do we onboard as cliche as it is like how do we get to a product that a billion people use every day. You know what I mean? And that that that really is like our northstar. Just to finalize for the revenue haters, the goal for Celestia is to be operating at an economy of scale which is a gigabyte blocks which is thousands, tens of thousands of chains, millions and millions of users to have some sort of uh increase in fees at a at some sort of time that is arbitrary based on the value of the block space and the value of the service provided.

and to operate to potentially earn billions of dollars in revenue per year at a massive economy of scale. But in order to get there, there's no sense in trying to earn thousands or or hundreds of thousands in the immediate term to kind of bottleneck the scaling. And so for those who are worried about revenue, it kind of comes back to the patients and it comes back to understanding the entire vision here. Understand the strategy. Yeah. Understand the vision and like don't judge by PE. I don't think anyone should be judging by PE right now. is way too way too early. Judge by growth, judge by do you think that this is the right like architectural approach or strategy long term. So then we we have this kind of go bigger idea that you guys push mammoth

this idea of bigger blocks. It's it's it's something that that that the community rallies behind. And then with that in mind, I think it's very important for you guys as the founding team and as the leadership and as a team to kind of coales around like one or two core ideas or metrics that really are valuable to you. Like you know it some some teams value different things. But without this I feel I feel you could be prioritizing five or six different metrics and it's kind of leads you to go in different directions. for Celestia, what is the what are the one or two core metrics that you guys would like to optimize the [ __ ] out of and like prioritize and that if you guys just get that right, then everything else kind of falls into place. Great question. I mean, we've we've talked, you know, a

few times on on the podcast about our road map. I think that lays out a really good foundation. Gigabyte blocks, you know, billion light nodes and a million roll-ups. I mean uh you can't take those all like necessarily at face value but they those are metrics that do encompass some of the key you know priorities for the protocol. Gigabyte blocks obvious I would say that is above and beyond that is the northstar like so keep going bigger bigger bigger just keep scaling the blocks at all costs almost I mean without cutting corners um and just real quick before you get into the other one is there a practical limit to the amount that you guys can keep increasing the block size there is yes because there there are engine well well do you mean in in the long term in terms of like

engineering or in terms of like social consensus or how like how that actually like yeah is there kind of like a law that will evolve like Metaf's law where it's like the the compute like the potential to compute doubles every year or maybe that's Moore's law. Yeah. But but like you know the the same kind of principle that uh there's kind of like this equilibrium where you know with the technological improvements you can kind of expect this level of you know size increase per year per you know. Yeah. You know, it's I uh I really it's too early to know like what what could but I think there will probably be like a Moore's law of DA potentially. I mean at the at the at the at the baseline DA is is constrained by bandwidth and bandwidth follows Neielson's law. So

this is like the equivalent of Salana's whole like M they they say well M's law applies to Salana. So like we don't need to do any of these DAS scaling stuff because we'll just get that much faster computers every two years. Well, DA benefits from that same thing uh uh which is Neielson's law which is like bandwidth I think it's a little bit slower but it doubles every like 18 months or something like that right so uh we we have that as a baseline but then um the question is like are there there are there are practical engineering uh like blockers to like let's say if we wanted to 4x the blocks tomorrow we couldn't do that because maybe the storage and the the nodes nodes, the DA

nodes would like get overwhelmed, right? So, we have to rearchitect that or like would just start like missing blocks and and like the consensus would would halt or all these there's like a lot of different failure modes, right? you have to control for and it's kind of like I wouldn't say not it's not whack-a-ole but it's like uh you know each I think at each time that we're going to go like okay let's do another 2x another 4x it's going to be like okay well what's the blocker where's the bottleneck go there solve that move forward I think is kind of the iterative approach I also say that there's there's some like highle architectural changes that we're making um one is called um we're changing sort of like the peer-to-peer networking, uh, how we gossip transactions and how we

build blocks to make the bandwidth consumption way way way more efficient. And eventually if you like once you get to a bandwidth utilization for the consensus nodes that or like nodes in general that's really really efficient then then it kind of becomes just like a maybe just making beefier and beefier nodes to some degree. And the good thing is that unlike a Salana or unlike you know other other protocols scaling the the nodes that are involved in block building and consensus is fine. It's okay if they have to have you know larger connections uh like like high bandwidth connections or bigger computers um because we have light nodes right. So then that's the second leg of

this three-legged stool which is like we need to make sure that people can actually verify the network and that there's enough of them to make the block space secure because you can if you have gigabyte blocks but then not enough light nodes are there to actually reconstruct it if you know the validators collude then like you kind of go back to almost an AWS you kind of become a DAC right and we don't want to be a DAC that's the whole point the beauty is actually just recently um the team um one of our core engineers who spun out to build something called Prism. They actually just shipped recently one of the first not just a light node in your browser but like a full rollup like a ZK rollup that runs in your browser. And um anyway, it's

really sick and it feels like we're getting to a very close point where you know deploying apps with with native light node capabilities is going to be like a real thing and not just like a oh it's in your wallet it's like going to be embedded. Um, so I'm pretty pumped. I think it's no longer a contrarian view that you know modularity modularity is continuing to proliferate and we are going to see every app become a ZK app and every rollup become a ZK rollup and to take modularity to its logical conclusion. Every user is its own rollup. Um, and I think with ZK and interop we're we're approaching that as a reality. Um, and that's been kind of like my mental model at least is like escaping the chain centric view, which

is like a settlement first view. It's really not about L1's, L2s, and applications on top. It's about these little like modules of state that just exist in the void, and then we're going to connect those with interop, right? And so this, you know, is a vision that I think you you guys at Celestia share and ZK accounts and lazy bridging is a very important part of that vision. like maybe you could kind of talk about like how again working backwards from this ultimate goal like how important is lazy bridging and ZK accounts and how does that help you achieve this you know open internet with 100 gigabyte blocks. So the question is like what is where where does ZK accounts fit into the like

long-term vision for like interoperability for the ei's ways that it fits in. Um so for people who don't know ZK counts it's this idea that we can add a way to verify ZK proofs on Celestia and have uh basically some representation of that state live on Celestia so that other rollups can read from that and and and they can kind of have a way to interoperate uh through the through the Celestia like base chain because they're all going to be running light nodes anyway. So kind of like kind of makes sense. Um the first thing that enables is just TIA being able to bridge up to these um uh roll-ups natively which we don't currently have. Um right now we

have IBC but then you kind of have to like a lot of a lot of these roll-ups can't support IBC. So they have to hop to stride and then over there hop to Astria and then up to the rollup which is not like a ideal situation. So that's the first thing it enables. The second thing it enables is kind of what I was talking about which is like you start to I don't like the word settlement but the Celestia base layer can become a uh almost like a yeah sort of similar to like perform similar types of uh services to to settlement. Um but but like a different flavor I'd say where it's more about like just like verification. It's a source of truth. A source of truth. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. I think I forget who it was, but we were having a conversation with someone earlier today on a podcast and we were talking about this idea of local consensus. Maybe you remember who that was, but you know the guys from Pod Network from Pod Network. Exactly. And it's a very similar vision where they they have their pods, right? And it's there's no consensus at all, right? And there's no no real concept of settlement. And so it's just about uh a single round trip from from pod to pod to achieve some sort of local cons local like agreement that the state is correct, right? Um and this I think is the epitome of modularity. And I think as like I think this is just a core principle of economics that we have the division of labor and everyone is able

to specialize and then we trade with one another and that creates a free efficient market. And so as we continue to expand into more and more chains, we'll continue to see that specialization happen. I think that is the direction that this space will go where all of these apps ex exist. All of these users have their own roll-ups and rollup is a very light term like you know I don't expect users to be running anything more than like something in their browser perhaps right and it could be embedded into a wallet wherever they're executing transactions. So in this in this world like we are kind of we are like exchanging this information and this value and it's all occurring very very light and and in synchronicity

with these other these other apps and roll-ups. Um you know that's a very different view than I think a lot of people in the space hold today. I think still settlement is kind of like the first iteration of what people think about when they think about using blockchain. they think about the chain. But I I think it's important that people start to unlearn some of these misconceptions because really like there's a vision here that all of this explodes outwards and we get a much more expressive robust ecosystem as a result.

But interrupt has to talk about this a lot like this like switching from a a chain perspective to just think about apps. Yes. Exactly. you know, just like we need to stop talking about chains and stop talking about things in like the old way because the the new people are just simply not going to exist in the same paradigm that we have. It also I think is misleading too like cuz in the in the f well in the future when we do have chain abstraction and like interoperability works really well like uh rollups are going to be a lot more like just smart contracts, you know what I mean? Except they're going to be smart contracts with like superpowers. So uh even the fact that people have like tend to like whenever you say rollup or or you know its own chain application

specific chain people think like they have all this baggage that comes with it right but like the point is like in the long term that baggage won't be there and so I yeah I like to I like to like think in that mental model which is like you have applications you have security zones which to me are what was what Celestia is at the end of the day. a it's a security zone for these applications to plug into each other. Like you can think of whatever the you know the state route that they have as a ZK account in Celestia is sort of like the the contract state that you would have on a smart contract on Ethereum. Um it's just that they're they're living in their own sort of like state space, their own execution space with customizability and on all this scalability. Um but at the end of the

day it starts to everything starts to look very similar. These roll-ups are are as light as smart contracts. It's just chains and bridges, guys. Well, yeah. No, it's not chains. Well, the the the last thing I'll say is actually um it's really cool if you uh go back to the lazy ledger white paper. When Mustafa wrote it, no one had really solved roll-ups yet. They didn't quite exist. So he way he thought of people building applications on u just a pure DA layer was this concept called um clientside smart contract which is basically like you have the smart contract and if you want to know what the log like what the you know state transition function is like you can find it somewhere and then you can just reexecute the contract yourself. Um but

the thing is there was no way for those things to bridge like the superpower of roll-ups is that you have these secure like clients allow you to bridge between them. Um, so he posed that as an open question, but the the cool mental model about about that is that like we even get carried away with the fact that like these uh roll-ups need to be like their own chain cuz that also brings a bunch of baggage around like you know I don't know you need a sequencer, you need RPCs, you need all this like infrastructure around it and I think in the future we start to have these like very minimal basically like you write a smart contract and Then it gets ZK proven and it's very it's it's it's but it it operates as a rollup like

it's its own state but it's not like a full chain and in fact actually just to show Prism one more time that's something that they're building I think it's called the Prism SDK a way where you can just like write uh like a Rust based like chain and compile it. I actually don't understand how it works, but you can uh just ship a chain that is like not like a is ship a rollup that's not like a rollup in the way that people think. It's mostly we've been we've been toying with the idea of of again removing the chain centric view. It's just and Rob kind of touched on earlier.

we just have a certain like state in in kind of existing and just kind of passing back and forth zk proofs amongst each other without and like kind of removing this idea of needing to like come back to the L1 and just using or using some some sort of base layer but I I don't know what's the right way to think about that that's a good question which is like you know I know in the future like will will you need to have hubs for routing things and proving things or not and like I think the endgame to me is like some form a proof aggregation and which in which case like you don't really need like you just you know maybe the proof gets posted to each one of the roll-ups or and and then that one proof lets you like verify

everything else. The trippy thing is actually when so at some point we're going to zk prove the Celestia state machine. So it's an active area of research. Um, in which case basically Celestia L1 becomes its own ZK rollup in a sense amongst the trippy thing is then if everyone's posting their proofs of their state onto Celestia that gets executed and proven then Celestia is in a sense kind of like a proof aggregation. Yeah, it's a it's a shelling point for proofs and and all of these mod that is and it is kind of a proof aggregation because you're actually aggregating all into the proof and that's important because as you have like uh all these ZK proofs that are being sent between these different

modules to to verify state like what's to say that you know there isn't a a roll back on one one of these modules of state and then that gets rolled back and then how does the the module over here you know it just verified as EK proof but then it got rolled back. How does it know that there was a roll back? It needs a new ZK proof. It needs some sort of source of truth. And that is where this proof aggregation system comes in. Celestia could, you know, it it would Celestia would end up getting some sort of proof that there was a roll back cuz if a roll back happens in a forest and no one's around to see it, did he really roll back roll back? I don't know. It No, it has that question ever been asked before one.

No, I think the answer is no. Right. It has to tell someone that it rolled back otherwise it's justing it own sort of more trusted but then that zk proof gets broadcasted to all the other modules and then everyone knows that it got rolled back and I think I think to Nick's point I think Celestia becomes the shelling point of proof a aggregation to gossip these these uh zk proofs to the rest of the modules. Yeah. And I mean one of the thesis thesis of lazy bridging, right? It's why what's called lazy bridging is that like when you deploy a new chain, uh chances are you don't want to have to deploy your own bridge to all these other chains you want to like connect to. You don't want to have to run relayers or do all that work. So it does kind of I that's where I do get bullish

on like the idea of hubs where it's like okay I just connect to this one place and it's connected to everything else. So it's just a very simple thing. Um now it might might be one extra hop versus like I just could go straight but then like you know you could have all these solvers right and all the intent stuff where it's like you know you can forward things and and the point of Celelesia having these um and so you can have like faster than like settlement like routing times and interoperability but but like solvers have their own limits which is like they can only really in my opinion like do market making and forward tokens. I don't know if they can I don't know if you should trust someone to just like uh if you just want to do a cross cross contract call or something like

that like crosschain I feel like then it becomes a little tricky but Celestia the last thing is that Celestia has single slot finality and the faster we can make those block times speeds up the the speed and the settlement time for routing those those coins and the the end user experience. If you look at the rollup centric road map for Ethereum and then you look at where Celestia is headed, there's clearly like several pain points right now that Ethereum is feeling. Yeah, I think native interrupt is one. I think single slot finality is another. Totally. Yeah. And so it's there's two reasons why I feel like the Ethereum as a settlement layer uh didn't work out uh in terms of like you know I don't think L2 it's not like I'm using

arbitrum I go back down to L2 and then I go up somewhere else. Uh but I think that like I go back to I go back to Ethereum and then I bridge up to base or something that I feel like that was the vision originally. It didn't work out. Um that was a hub model. That was the hub model. I think I mean obviously uh I guess like now um what's it called? What's the main across has kind of like solved that for certain ecosystems to to a large degree. But um Ethereum is doesn't have single soft finality and it's very expensive. So it's actually like routing through Ethereum is going to cost you a shitload of money from the user perspective. It's like okay I have to wait a long ass time and then I you know I'm going to have to pay a ton of

money. So it's not really worth it. Does lazy bridging enable sovereign roll up to sovereign rollup or is it sovereign roll up down to Celestia back up to sovereign roll up? Uh I think it can I think it enables the the latter more so. Yeah, that's the point. Yeah, but you can also still do sovereign roll to sovereign roll directly with an intent based type of solution or you can have your own bridge between those two chains if you want. Okay. Yeah. But the point is if you didn't want to have to deploy all of your own let's say there's like hundred you want to connect to the whole ecosystem. Mhm. It's like do you you don't want to have to deploy your bridge every single time, right? Yeah. So you just want to connect to one place, right? My understanding was that there was a there was a like a light client

that you could deploy on your sovereign rollup if you will that could verify like a ZK IBC and effectively enable lazy bridging between the two. You would know better than I would. So I'm not sure but I after reading like my understanding of Celestia is that or my understanding of lazy bridging is that that was that was the case. I don't I'm going to I'm going to double check is that you can you can have your chain be verified on the Sussial1 and then also likewise you can verify the state of other chains mean that like you can use that as the way to like basically route tokens if that makes sense. Well Nick thanks for rocking with us. It's been a journey today. Um just a less Celestia oriented question. What are you

what are you most excited about in crypto outside of Celestia? what is uh what has got you know so this kind of I think is maybe a good way to wrap up the conversation but um yeah everyone's like jaded everyone's bearish uh we just had like oh the only use of blockchains is like you know meme coins and scams and speculation or whatever and like I feel like that luckily we're I think exiting this like nhilism thing um and I am extremely bullish on on realw world use cases actually coming in this next wave Um and that is because for for a handful of reasons. One is actually just the the infrastructure obviously we finally have

like the the baseline tools that you could use to build some really interesting stuff for the first time. There's like embedded wallets that make like user experience of signing up insane. You have things like ZKTLS which allow us to like bridge into the the actual legacy web 2 world really like natively and that can like that's a whole like Pandora's box of of interesting uh opportunities. There's DA so much throughput like we have all these like tools that are coming together for the first time to make some really cool [ __ ] possible. Add to that we're in a new regulatory regime. That's so bullish for people who want to try [ __ ] that you couldn't try before. Like

I don't know, think about how many I don't know there probably like all these decentralized social things like friend tech or whatever. I mean I know I don't know how people feel about that but it's a good example of something where I feel like the having like tokens involved in the application which I think is a superpower of crypto has been very much dampened or just or even privacy or just all these aspects of potential applications you want to build as a builder you had to really worry about that. Um, and then also just as a baseline too, it's going to be so much easier for builders to raise money or get a bank account or just operate and not have to like feel like there's like, you know, the evil eye watching over them. And then last is actually AI where I think that it's going to be just going

so much like the speed of development for everything is going to accelerate and it's going to be so much more accessible for anyone to build smart contracts or build their own chains um build like a web 3 application. So, like if you combine all those things together, I just feel like this is this like we're in the most bullish time for builders that we've seen since the beginning of crypto in my opinion. Well, Nick, thanks for coming on, man. Hope you have a good rest of ETH Denver. Rob, it's been a journey. It has been certainly the last couple days, but I think we went out with a bang. Thanks.