BUILD WHATEVER with Nick White of Celestia

Transcript

welcome to the interrupt today my guest is Nick white he's the COO at Celestia it's the first modular blockchain Network and it just launched a month ago today we're going to be diving into Celestia we'll talk about data availability sampling and the role of light nodes we'll also discuss the other nodes that secure the Celestia Network we'll discuss ethereum's role in Celestia's go to market and look at blob stream which is a new product that allows ethereum l2s to Leverage Celestia's data availability we'll also discuss the increasing competition in the data availability landscape and other projects coming into this space and we'll look at some of the few early projects that are already building on

Celestia I'm also dying to find out why he thinks the evm isn't the be all and all in crypto before we get started make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to get notified when new episodes come out every week and remember that none of what we discuss here on the interrupt is investment advice if you like this content please consider staking with us we are validating on fos Quicksilver osmosis and Juno just look for interrupt in the active set my guest Nick White is coming up next right here on the [Music] interop Nick thanks for joining me on

the podcast Seb uh really glad to be on with you and excited to talk about all the things modular yeah so Celestia launched uh just about a month well was a month ago yesterday so congrats on the launch it's been a long time coming and um I yeah you must be excited definitely uh it's it was a huge effort over multiple years you know the lazy Ledger white paper was originally published in 2019 and so um it took you know the better part of of four years to take it from white paper to actual protocol and um I think it's a big moment for the industry because we're really entering this

modular era where now we have the first you know modular data availability layer with data availability sampling and um I think it's going to unlock a lot of like new use cases and applications and and things for people to build so we're really um excited uh and just uh you know I think because it was worth all the work yeah like Celestia has really created this this narrative like the modular narrative I think was was was coined by Celestia and you like we had uh Mustafa and Ismael back on on the podcast on epicenter in 2019 talking about lazy Ledger and like I I remember doing that episode and thinking back

then like it really wasn't obvious what this was going to be used for right like there was this idea that you would have this kind of lazy blockchain chain that would just um uh that would just prove the the the existence of data and I they hadn't I don't think they had really yet explored this idea of like modular blockchains or at least that narrative or that sort of like you know uh stack construction you know wasn't uh wasn't really like for fully formed yet and um and then you know some sometime later it was like okay this is now Celestia and it's like modul stack and data availability and they really sort of like coined that whole new uh narrative in the ecosystem like since the launch

what has been the the reception from you know the broader crypto ecosystem and you know do you see this uh do you really see this kind of shift happening in people's minds that okay now there's like another way to build blockchains I definitely see it yeah I think you know it's interesting actually in the first blog post that um lazy Ledger published as a project uh it you know Mustafa says we envision a a world of modular uh s of data availability layers and execution layers um and so like that was kind of the birth I think that back in 2019 that was kind of the birth of this word modular right and then it it kind of

grew into the the core way to sort of explain the difference between Celestia's view of blockchain architectures and and the traditional monolithic archit cures that have existed since you know Bitcoin ethereum salana all the other popular l1s and you know I I think that steadily at first it was just kind of the seed of an idea you know and and it didn't really uh it took I think another major Leap Forward was also the idea of rollups right so John John Adler one of the other co-founders of Celestia uh came up with you know the construction of of a like optimistic rollup and I think that was kind of the perfect complement to this idea of a lazy Ledger that's just data availability and so

it's a combination of those two things that unlocked this completely new architecture that we now call Modular blockchains and I think over the past few years Celestia has been trying to you know evangelize and educate the the broader crypto Community about this new way to do things and I think slowly but surely um people have been uh sort of converted and and nerd sniped into this new architecture because it has all these advantages from scalability to um you know better to verify you have things like light nodes which I'm sure we'll talk about and then you have all this added flexibility for developers you know when you can spin up your own custom chain you can do things that you just couldn't do in a monolithic

framework where you're locked within the evm locked sharing you know the same sort of like execution resources as all the other applications and so um I think it just kind of was inevitable that eventually people kind of were one over into this into this new way of doing things and I think now that we're live it's no longer about the theory but it's about putting it into practice Yeah that that's interesting right when you when you talk about uh people being able to launch their own chain that was the cosmos Vision I mean still is so the cosmos vision and the app chain Vision but but Cosmos sort of took it a step like I mean it was very Visionary in terms of uh having that execution sovereignty uh for your own application but I think or at least like

I never really considered when when those Concepts started first started emerging back in like 2017 2018 just the cost of security the cost of securing your own chain uh when you have to run your own valider set and when you have to sort of manage every aspect of your chain and it it's sort of like we went from shared web hosting right if you sort of take the web 2 analogy what I like to do you went from shared web hosting to everyone runs their own data center to now somewhere in the middle where you know we have shared infrastructure you're still you're still leveraging some shared infrastructure in terms of data availability and perhaps security we'll talk about ethereum and how that fits in but um but essentially the the application is the application is sort of containerized and sort of

like lives on on top of this uh this shared security model and there's still a world in which some applications are going to want to like do the own data center thing right like osmosis and uh dydx and applications that have a lot of users uh that have a you know a complex execution environment that requires also um to be able to control your the consensus the governance you know me things of that nature but for most applications that's not going to be the case and so you know I wonder do you anticipate um a lot of the you the Cosmos app chains that you know launched in the last three to four years [Music]

to um to become rollups like to give up their valid a set or supplement their security with or the data availability with Celestia maybe supplement their security with ethereum or some other um kind of modular security construction like that I think well I'm really glad that you brought up this sort of analogy of comparing the different um architectures to sort of like traditional web 2 like web 3 architectures to web two architectures and I think um you know ethereum or these monolithic protocols uh are very similar to we shared web hosting providers where like everyone's kind of like using the same infrastructure but then you're kind of like stuck within

whatever like Frameworks that they support so like that's like evm or svm right and you're you're ultimately kind of like limited in in the flexibility and scalability of your system so then uh you know if the the the next one is is sort of like the cosmos uh vision of everyone should run their own chain right rather than launching on a shared chain run your own chain you can have C customization you have more scalability because you have dedicated infrastructure and uh I think that's a that's a step forward for certain things but then the the celestial vision is sort of like the the synthesis of that and it's a lot more like Cloud infrastructure where you know instead of having a data center where you launch a

virtual machine you have a Data Network like Celestia where you launch a virtual blockchain which is a rollup and you get you get the best of both worlds and that like you know when you launch your own chain it's like building your own data center it's a huge you know capital expenditure it's also a lot of like operational like ongoing Opex uh costs and um so it doesn't make sense for everyone to do that because it's just it's a lot it's a lot to to to to take on whereas with Celestia you can or like if you launch on a data center like AWS it's like oh it's out of the box it's on demand uh you get the same amount of flexibility you uh a benefit of these economies of scale right that that AWS can provide to all these uh developers and so celesia is the same thing but

applied to blockchains and so like rather than launching your own blockchain you have this blockchain as a as a protocol blockchain is a service kind of thing protocol is a service essentially that provides the consensus and data availability for you to launch your own thing and I think um you know one of the biggest benefits is that you don't have to go through the the the trouble of actually bootstrapping a validator set issuing a new proof of State coin all these things in order to launch your your network because that is actually a significant lift and then on going on an ongoing basis you don't have to pay for the security budget right and I think one of the things that we saw at least in the cosmos ecosystem in the last over the last bare Market was that like a lot of chains were kind of

struggling to pay for their security budget like you know you're having to have you know 100 validators run these nodes that's actually that cost adds up and um then you're also issuing all this uh inflation on your on your token to pay for that so I think there is a big economic incentive or reason for these cost chains to migrate to something like Celestia now I don't I don't know if the existing ones will because they've already kind of gone through the effort right um but I I do think that going forward when new people want to launch app chains it just makes a lot more sense to build in this kind of model unless like you said you are like a dydx or osmosis or you have a specific need for your own dedicated infrastructure so

there's been this build whatever stuff that I've been seeing on Twitter and people have been tweeting build whatever what's what's the deal with build whatever good question well uh build whatever is sort of this rallying cry uh slotto that that the Celestia ecosystem and the modular ecosystem uh have uh sort of come up with and it it's it reflects this idea that people should you know be free developers should be free to build whatever they want right and um that that there's a lot of different layers to that one is you you know we're trying to one of the goals of the modular uh stack is to remove constraints so those constraints could

be things like hey I'm stuck with you know paying really high fees so like increasing the scalability so that like you don't have to worry about the the fees that you uh incur for users right uh another one could be uh just breaking free from like limiting yourself to certain execution environments like building within the evm or the svm when you have the flexibility to Define your own execution environment it opens up a whole new range of possibilities um and so like removing constraints from developers is I think one of the like main selling points of the modular architecture now in addition to that bill whatevers is is is also about this idea of just like go out and explore and like you have all these different

components that you can now mix and match and there's all all these like new possibilities it's a new frontier and so people should just go out there and like YOLO it you know what I mean uh yeat some new uh you know applications into the the the cryptoverse and then just see see what happens it's sort of like this it's like you know we're we're on the frontier of such a new era in crypto and it's kind of like come join and like build something um and so I don't know I I I'm I'm really excited because a lot of people are are kind of like getting into that mode of thinking and I think it's it's what we need to unlock this next wave of of innovation in the space what's the most uh what's the most

extreme thing that someone has built on top of Celestia so far good question I think it in terms of departing away from like a regular blockchain application good question well I mean there's a lot of different like new things you can do I mean you know well one one example that I really like as as an example bill whatever is just um is actually Eclipse because um they are kind of combining like a bunch of different different components in a way that like no one would expect um so specifically eclipse is a uh Salon of virtual machine uh rollup that's uh launching on Celestia for data availability but ethereum for settlement and then using uh risk zero as their sort of um fault

proof system and so what what I find so interesting about that is it's it's like bridging salana Celestia and ethereum and like R zero all kind of combining them all into one thing and that's just something that I think if you rewound the clock like a year ago or even even to this day it like no one would could have seen that coming right and I think this is the kind of this is what we're going to see more and more with the modular stack is people just like combining these things that you know probably wouldn't have no one would have expected essentially so uh that's one example another thing is is just like net new uh applications things like um ephemeral blockchains is another like example of like just something that's

new on the modular stack where you can actually spin up a rollup uh and do an nft Mint or something like that and then and then wind it down like we're used to thinking about blockchains as like these permanent things but actually in a in a modular world like there's no reason why they couldn't be shortlived um and just temporary the same way that you would maybe spin up a server you know to to run like a a ticket sale on a website and then like you know wind it down so I don't know that those are just some ideas off the top of my head okay interesting so then you could sort of run your own blockchain have the blockchain uh commit data to to Celestia that data would always be there you would always be able to verify that that data exists you just

can't issue new transactions after a certain point um because the blockchain and the settlement mechanism and the execution environment no longer exists yeah I guess anyone could still post to that Nam space on Celestia but the thing is that um you know there's no like no one's using it anymore sort of like it was just like it's kind of like a smart contract that you you you create and then you just like kind of like uh deprecate okay interesting so let's talk about data availability sampling because that's I think one of the major Innovations here now the this light node meme has been all over the place it's sort of also one of the very strong Celestia memes is the the light node meme uh in fact it was at this uh this

event you guys hosted in in istano which was really cool and you had like light nodes all over the place was very all very like futuristic uh it felt like felt like I was in The Matrix or something um but um yeah I think one thing that uh kind of clicked for me uh last night I was at we we hosted a Celestia Meetup in Paris was like the first Celestia Meetup and I was talking to folks and they were talking about how light noes don't just scale but they allow Celestia to scale uh exponentially and so I'd like you to maybe explain how light nodes work and how they actually

scale in this exponential way yeah sure so um well I'm glad that we're talking about light first of all I'm so stoked that there was a modular Meetup in Paris I want to hear more about it I see you that you're wearing the the T-shirt um you should show every on the back of the T-shirt I think it says uh Celestial light start yeah so that's uh on the command line when you want to start your light node that's that's the command that you enter so anyway um so light nodes are really important because they're a net new node type uh in blockchain so what what blockchains are at the end of the day are verifiable computers where you know a group of people agree to set of rules

and then we enforce those Rules by running nodes that audit the chain and make sure that hey the chain is actually like authentic no like the chain is following the rules and no one's breaking the rules right so a node nodes are like core to what blockchains are all about because again that's how the users verify and enforce the rules now um the problem is that in traditional monolithic blockchains um you running a node means that you have to download and verify every single transaction and that doesn't scale and that's this is the fundamental reason why monolithic blockchains don't scale is that you know in such a system as there's more transactions to that the blockchain

needs to process you have to download and and verify that many more transactions and so at a certain point you've maxed out on what your computer let's say your laptop or your phone can process and now of a sudden now you as a user can no longer run a node so now you have to go back fall back to you know a trusted system where you're trusting someone else who's running a node on your behalf and the beautiful thing about modular blockchain and what Celestia has built with data availability sampling is it changes what the requirements are to run a node and no and and what what it is is essentially in a modular blockchain rather than having to download every transaction and verify every transaction

one by one if you want to verify the chain you just download a small sample of the underlying block data you sample randomly from the block data and that helps you verify that the data is available data was published and then what that enables you to do is verify a proof either a fraud or ZK proof that the execution of those transactions was done uh according to the rules of the chain and so with those two things together all of a sudden you can verify the blockchain and that requires an amount of work that does not grow very much with the an increase in the number of transactions in in on the chain and so all of a sudden you have this uh ability to actually scale the the

throughput of the chain the number of transactions without uh pricing out the average users and so that what I was just describing of like sampling randomly and verifying proofs is what like a light note is and um and so specifically what's so cool about it is it's so light in fact that you can run it on a smartphone or on like even people have done it on Kindles or Nintendo's like uh you know game consoles or like just random all these like uh you know any kind of like Hardware device you can think of people have been running light nodes just as a way to demonstrate that they're so light uh you can run them anywhere and we can run them like in really remote places with barely any internet connection on

planes um you know you can really like they're so light that like the idea is that anyone anywhere with any device can actually verify the chain and and then the the scaling part the other side of what light nodes do is not just that they enable users to verify the chain really efficiently but they also power power the scalability of the underlying Network in Celestia because um the way that the data availability sampling scheme works is that the more people who are sampling the block the bigger the block can can grow securely and so it's not exponential though it's it's it's a more of a linear relationship of the number of of nodes increases the size of the block can be uh in in in a linear

way um however the the I think maybe what they were referring to when they were saying exponential scaling is the fact that the amount of work that you do as a light node scales as the square root of the size of the block so that is kind of that is exponential in the sense of like the the uh the growth in the block size uh like is is uh does not increase it starts to increase almost like very really slows down and the increase of work as it gets bigger and bigger so there's this economy of scale and kind of this exponential uh nature to the way that um the block size can increase without increasing the the work that a node has to

do okay so even if the block size increases a a light node uh uh doesn't like a night the load on a light node does not increase linearly with the size of the block yes it increases as the square root but the right the number of light nodes that you need to securely sample uh a a certain size of block uh increases linearly with the the block size so let's say like we went from 2 megabyte blocks to four megabyte blocks you're going to need so the blocks has just doubled you're going to need twice as many light nodes however the work that the light that each individual light node has to do did not grow linearly it it stayed actually

quite flat right okay is there like um is do you think there because light nodes are allowing uh Celestia to scale um I mean for the moment like light nodes are not remunerated for this for this work right but you know is there a future in which light nodes could be receiving some kind of uh fee like some rev share for essentially running the I mean you know validators make the line share of uh of uh of inflation and like fee rewards but like light are also allowing the network to scale in that respect um is that

something that's like being explored or that could potentially work or do that like not work at all it's something that we're definitely interested in the problem is that um light nodes are uh not civil resistant meaning that you know uh if say we wanted to incentivize or reward light node operators um there's no way to stop someone from just spinning up a million of them and kind of capturing an unfair amount of of the rewards for themselves and so you know as opposed to like validators like there is simple resistance because there's proof of stake you have to put up stake to be part of the active validator set um and so that's that's really the challenge here so maybe in the future if there's some kind of like identity

system or something some way of you know gaining civil resistance then that could make sense but so far I mean that's a but that's an age-old problem and so far I don't think there's yet a good solution but I'm not saying that there wouldn't be in the future future and and that that would be really awesome I think however I'll also say that um you know running a light node first of all is is going to be extremely cheap like really really cheap like you won't notice it um if it's running in the background and um it's also going to be embedded in wallets and in browsers and and things so that in in a way that like a lot of users won't even necessarily be aware they won't have to have any expertise to do so it's kind of just going to be part of like using a

blockchain in the future that's the way we envision it and that's the kind of the the the thing that we're working towards and in the same way that um and like the incentive to do it like the way I I talk about this is like why I run a light note it's sort of like the same question as like why lock your house it's like yeah you know I wish I lived in a in a neighborhood or in a world where like I didn't have to worry about you know leaving my house unlocked um but the reality is I do because we you know we we can't just trust people not to like walk into our house and like steal everything and the same thing like running a light note is like as more and more of our assets are online more and more of our lives are are on blockchains

then it makes sense for us to to just take the the added you know amount of security to actually just verify and and make sure that like there's no nothing like wrong is happening and it's very similar to a lock right a lock is a very low effort thing it's like oh it just takes me one second when I leave it's the same thing with running a light node it's like you know I don't even notice it but it's something that gives me a feeling of safety and Assurance uh that you know my my all my online life my onchain life is is safe yeah no I think that's kind of the Holy Grail right because right now if you're interacting with any blockchain through a wallet you're going you're most likely unless you're running your own node uh or your own client using someone else's RPC now you know you can

do that in a trust in a trust minimized way but you're still you still have that liveness risk and you know if infura goes down or Alchemy goes down then you know so does all of web 3 and so that's why you know I'm I'm quite bullish on teams like lava Network that are building uh a Marketplace for RPC providers and data Pro and data uh apis you know for for uh for blockchains uh disclaimer we're we're investors in lava U but uh but for Celestia you know if like if if the light node can just be embedded in browsers right to the point where you know if you know if if Celestia like basically you know gets the lobby w3c to

make this kind of a web standard and it just like I don't know what what organization but or maybe just wallet just maybe just browser browser manufacturers or developers uh uh then yeah you can have the light node right in your browser every time you launch a browser your light not is running in the background or like right in right in the wallet on a phone and then you're not relying on someone else to to do that verification for you you're doing it by yourself and um and there's I think a tremendous benefit to that and then it's all about you know creating the right you know ux uh abstractions to uh let users know that their data is in fact you know on the blockchain the same way

we have you know SSL uh you know locks on our little icons on our on our browser that shows us that we we're using a safe a safe uh a safe connection so I think that's yeah it's very cool um what so what are the other types of nodes uh so like last night at the Meetup we we we were talking about the different types of nodes and I realized I wasn't like super aware of the the the the the the two other types of nodes that exist in in Celestia so could you explain like what are the different roles here yeah before I do that I want to just comment respond to sort of part of what you were saying because it's a really good point about RPC like you know the the way that majority of users currently interact with blockchain

applications is via RPC right so uh there's there's a few different problems with that and and actually uh Moxy uh you know who sort of like a crypto OG he wrote this long critique about crypto uh I don't know if it was last year or the year before and one of his big points was like yo you everyone uh uses all the users just use rpcs and so like this whole like trust minimization thing doesn't actually uh like count in practice because basically what happens if you're using an RPC first of all you're not actually verifying the chain yourself so you're again like trusting someone else to verify it for you and tell you the truth right so that's that's a really big one because then

you're making an honest majority assumption on either the validators or you just fully trusting whatever this RPC person tells you like hey this is your balance this is uh yeah the actually went through how do you actually know you don't know you just you're just trusting that that end end provider right so that's one one issue and the other issue is that um like you said you know your your all your transactions have to route through them so it's not really a peer-to-peer Network in in the in the in the realest sense right um because you're you're not actually connected to the network you're you're connected you know via proxy to you know to the network and so um the cool thing about light nodes is that they they flip this on its head and every user is actually is their own uh sort of like

RPC in a sense they actually they're verifying everything themselves directly by running the light node and they are actually directly connected to the peer-to-peer network of the chain and so they're sending their transactions directly to the network not through someone else and um and we just think that's the future that's actually what I think blockchain's always meant and aspired to be but we had to take shortcuts because of the limitations of the infrastructure back back at the time so like light nodes I think will will also like Deliver Us to this much more decentralized secure place for for blockchain architecture now in terms of other nodes that we have so there are um uh validator nodes right so they are the

ones that are actually voting on blocks and minting new blocks into the chain then you have what we call Bridge nodes which uh Bridge from the sort of the consensus Network to the data availability Network because currently those are two separate networks that are that that overlap via the bridge nodes and so the bridge nodes kind of facilitate this communication between the consensus and the data availability networks and then you have like you know data availability nodes who are more just you know um checking the data is available and there's different sort of tiers of those um some you can have like an archival node that's storing everything eventually we're going to um uh Implement pruning that's like the the next closest thing on our road map so

that uh data availability nodes don't have to store data forever and then you kind of have tiers eventually we'll have partial nodes that if you want to uh for example just listen to a specific namespace and store that data you can do that uh and then we have light nodes which are just doing the The Bare Bones uh sampling of of the underlying block data to verify that the data is available but they're not necessarily like uh you know actually downloading the full full uh full data in the block so you've mentioned name spaces a couple of times uh already so can you explain what this is and how it relates to Applications yeah so you know one of the benefits that Celestia has is that

um you know as as compared to other l1s is that it was designed specifically for this rollup Centric world right it's a L1 that is built to provide uh scalability and security for rollups and and a better like user experience for rollup development and so one of the key things that Mak Celestia unique is uh this idea of a namespace Merkel tree so all the data that gets posted to Celestia is organized in a certain way that makes it really easy for someone who's using Celestia to just listen or or sort of pull the specific data that is relevant to them and that is that

data is is is like a is is in a particular namespace you can think of this as like an address like the same way that ethereum smart contracts have a a contract address it's a similar thing um where all the data associated with a given rollup lives in in a certain namespace address and um this just makes it way more efficient to for example prove the inclusion of certain data in in a Celestia block and also to pull that data the specific data that you care about uh for your rollup rather than having to like sort through you know if it if it wasn't organized that way you'd have to like find some other way of like filtering out and sorting through uh the the specific data that you care about does does that introduce

any um does that introduce any issues with potential collisions or um or having to check like yeah I don't know I mean does that introduce any problems also with applications maybe that are um wanting to interoperate like where an application might want to check um the data from another name space uh do make sense yeah so well one of the cool things so Celestia also one of the benefits is um it's really helpful for chains that want to interoperate with each other for a host of reasons um but essentially um you know let's take an

example of those two separate chains um that are running you know in parallel with each other but they don't share a common consensus and data layer like Celestia then when they want to interoperate they uh don't have a way of verifying the or like seeing directly the uh sort of consensus and the data availability of the other chain and that means that they end up having to trust the other validator set and um whereas if they are running both these rollups both these chains are rollups that are running posting their data to Celestia they can they're already natively verifying each each other's data availability because they're both uh both their data is being

posted to the same underlying data layer right so when when this one's nodes verify the data availability for its own chain they're also indirectly verifying the data availability of this other chain and there's nothing stopping since they're also now connected those nodes are all connected to the same like core Network it's really easy for these nodes to say hey I actually want to pull some data from this namespace and and look at that and see what's going on um so it's uh becomes very easy for that kind of interoperability to to take place and also another thing that they they they they know the ordering of each other's blocks that way because they're both following the The Ordering of the the underlying cons Celestia consensus blocks so uh there's a lot of benefits

for for interoperability um within a Celestial like Paradigm cool I want to talk about ethereum because uh over the last couple of days I've become aware that U ethereum is a much larger part of Celestia's go to market as I had initially anticipated see I just thought Celestia would be this chain that would host rollups and like live in its own ecosystem but um you guys recently announced blob stream and [Music] [Music] blobreport really allows them to

reduce uh the the cost of data available on ethereum and it it's it's a really great I think product strategy because you you're you know if you're an ethereum L2 there's sort of like no reason not to do this right if if if you care about cost um so yeah sort of given some some high level context here for for blob stream but um yeah how important is ethereum and sort of evm l2s in the in the broader like Celestia go to market and and product Vision that's a great question so um ethereum so there's a there's a long history of Celestia and ethereum and in fact um lazy Ledger the

original idea behind celesia was was initially envisioned as a as an ethereum side chain like the Hope was like hey we can enhance ethereum with uh you know data availability sampling and and and like a whole new capability for for the ethereum protocol itself um but then uh it it's it turns out essentially that there are limitations uh to doing any kind of data availability as a side chain uh to ethereum um and uh for that reason it turned out that we have to essentially launch our own network with our own token to to build this um and that is because basically you can't actually there's no way for an ethereum smart

contract to verify the data availability of another chain um it has to be done in the protocol in the nodes themselves because data availability withholding is an unattributable fault anyway we can talk about that all later but basically uh and and another kind of overlap with ethereum is that a lot of the original ideas for Celestia were proposed in the ethereum uh Research Forum and so like a lot of a lot of what celesia is is kind of like born out of the same values and research Community as as the original like ethereum community so uh obviously one of the major goals for when we were launching Celestia is was to help to supplement ethereum with additional data availability because we saw that as a real need for their

ecosystem because there's a there there's a lot of rollups on on ethereum already there's the demand to launch even more rollups and but the problem is there's just this really constrained supply of data availability on the ethereum L1 and that leads to really high fees for these rollups and makes it kind of you know uh you kind of almost have to be a vc-backed uh you know uh rollup team to be able to like afford launching and an operating rollup on ethereum is sort of the state of of of things today and so we wanted to provide something to the ethereum community that would enable that the the price the cost of operating a rollup in L2 on ethereum to be

significantly lower and that's basically what blob stream is is it enables you as a L2 Builder in the ethereum community to settle on ethereum like still have your role up based uh and rooted in ethereum but use Celestia for data availability and uh Celestia's blob stream basically routes it sort of forwards uh relays a commitment to that data uh to the ethereum L1 where it gets verified and then that is like the rollup uh contract that you deploy in ethereum can then look at that bridge The Blob stream bridge and verify that the data is uh is actually available so the the the benefit here is we can drop the cost of operating a rollup on

ethereum or an L2 on ethereum by orders of magnitude and so we're we're really looking forward to sort of like opening up the floodgates of like all these people who I think have been waiting to to deploy l2s um but have kind of been blocked on on just the underlying cost and the the good thing is too that like there's there's other Solutions right like data availability committees that people are talked have talked about or have launched but uh the difference is a data availability committee is basically just making as a very like strong trust assumption on The Operators of that of that committee that they're not going to rug you right and the good thing is that Celestia is a decentralized blockchain with many many validators as

well as the fact that it has actually cryptoeconomic stake behind it so you have this much higher security guarantee than if you use a a standard data availability committee and you you in order to do that you need to actually have a separate chain like you actually can't use ethereum as a reaking uh sort of collateral to secure an offchain data availability uh service so um I think Celestia is kind of like through blob stream is kind of the optimal uh source of of Da that uh could can exist outside of like the ethereum L1 itself and what about existing l2s so you talked about this this these new l2s

that want to launch in ethereum and where you know the cost might be prohibitive can existing l2s like say arbitrum or um you know some of the ZK VMS could could they leverage this as well and and transition to using cestia data availability they absolutely could and I think you know that's that's a decision that's up to them and their Community right um and there are security trade-offs right like when you post all your data to to to ethereum right you have the full sort of like da uh guarantees of ethereum itself right and that's that's really I would say the um you know top tier security that you could get for an ethereum rollup like if

that's where you want to be that's the best you can do uh however it's really expensive so um you know it's a kind of a trade-off for them it's like okay well do you want to if they migrate to Celestia they can save a huge amount on their fees and still like achieve a pretty good degree of security now it won't be as high as ethereum but I think it's like uh for the most part like you know really really strong and probably sufficient for for a lot of these use cases so it really comes down to their their decision about like what what is the trade-off of cost and security that makes sense makes the most sense for them the one thing that I'll say is that in a blob stream like Celestia offchain da type of security model um you know the Celestia validators could always lie

to you right and and withhold data and um in so doing they could steal funds in the bridge for example so you have to consider uh the risk that way of like okay well how many how many Bridge funds are at risk uh that the celesti validators could you know feasibly well Cy validators in in combination with the rooll of operator could feasibly um you know steal if they wanted to and is that is that amount of value going to be more or less than the amount of value at stake in the celestial protocol because if it's uh more then it could be rational it could make rational sense for the validators to do such an attack but if it's less then it's like well why

would they do that because they would lose more money than they would gain okay so here you're talking about the the the the bridge um so so you're you're talking about the bridge between uh the celes DAT availability layer and the blob stream contract on ethereum I'm talking about yeah so there's multiple bridges in this this is where modular blockchains yeah where the where are the where are the bridges so you can think of a roll up right as its own chain and then they have a bridge to ethereum right and so assets on ethereum get deposited in this bridge and then they get they appear on the rollup um and so one of the the uh the the the the things

you have to protect against as a rollup is that the funds in the ethereum bridge get stolen right so let's say you have a billion dollars worth of eth in that bridge if the rollup operator is able to withhold data they can post like a fraudulent sort of like header to the ethereum bridge contract that transfers all the the ownership of all those that eth to themselves if that makes sense and but in order to do that they have to they have to be able to withhold data so that's where the the Celestia Bridge comes in that um what could happen is the Celestia validators would post something to the Via blob stream to ethereum saying hey we've ensured this

data is available when actually it's not and if they do that then the rollup operator could all could then post a you know a header to the bridge that steals all the steals all the funds um now if the data was actually available someone would be able to post a fraud proof or you know there' be a way to to prevent that from happening so hopefully that makes sense there's like three chains in this situation Celestia ethereum and and the rollup and they each like interact in different ways okay and and the fact that Celestia so the way the way I see this is like there's the there's the L2 the L2 is sending proofs to ethereum right and it continues to send uh like vity proofs um

or or fraud proofs to ethereum and then the transaction data gets sent to Celestia and then that transaction data also Al makes it into the contract because Celestia so it's you know it's you know you guys have this this this diagram on the website it's like L2 is in the middle Celestia and theum it kind of goes like each way and so the fact that that Celestia is also sending an attestation of The Da so essentially a proof that that data has been um successfully committed to Celestia to ethereum does that not mitigate some of this it does in the sense of now if you know someone wanted to lie about the data being available uh to the bridge contract on ethereum uh

they would have to like get the whole validator set of Celestia to collude to do so and if they did that also the Celestia validator set would get slashed uh for withholding data and so uh there's a huge cost not only is it hard to coordinate that but also there would be a huge economic cost to someone doing that so um that that's that's that's the way in which it works yeah okay and and I also read about this uh this ethereum fallback for the op stack how is that related to blob stream yeah so this uh is something that we're really excited about is this idea that um in so let's say you're a rollup right

posting your data your transaction data to Celestia you're you're then kind of like uh dependent on you know Celestia to make sure that your rollup can can continue to operate right but if there's in case there's any sort of like disruption to the like Celestia service for whatever that whatever reason it could be you know Network downtime or it could be congestion or you know there could be lots of different reasons why for some reason the the service uh is no longer like available for like maybe temporarily um the the good news is that you can build in this fallback mechanism whereby okay I'm having trouble posting my my data to Celestia for whatever reason I'm going to post it to ethereum directly instead and so what's what's

nice about that is it provides you this like back stop of service reliability of of ethereum itself so you don't as a as a rollup operator now if you're running an L2 that uses Celestia Forda like you can at least you can sleep better at night knowing that like well at the very worst in the worst case I can always post my data to ethereum now what I want to note just uh so people are clear this is doesn't mean that uh you have ethereum level data availability guarantees um it's it's like the the celestial validator set could still withhold data it's more about this like sort of like uptime reliability um that it gives you it's just it's just cool

because again this is another example of how modular blockchains just kind of like you know enable these new things that that uh you know there's no analog you know to to other Chains It's like wow I can use I can use either or I can use Celestia or ethereum you know at the same time and um you know get the be Best of Both Worlds uh from that perspective and it's it's it's like it's kind of magical I I call I call it modular magic cool um so I I I think like in in the last few months there's been this this this narrative that has been kind of coming up at least in in Cosmos

about uh about alignment right like do applications want to align with the cosmos Hub uh what you know what applications uh align and and um and supplement their security by uh committing also to ethereum and then there are there's ideas of things like mesh security uh which which could potentially also implicate um ethereum security or E3 staking through igen lair you know where does celestia fit within All This and like in a world where you know um mesh security exists and Cosmos app chains secure each other potentially are also uh being secured by restake eth

uh on Igan Lair there's a couple of projects that are uh like very early projects that are working on this uh how how does celestia sort of fit within this modular security future where chains are securing each other ethereum is also acting as security maybe even Bitcoin through things like Babylon good question well um yeah there there's quite a quite a range of different approaches to these to solving these these things of like how do I secure my my chain or or whatever service that I'm trying to run and um I think that uh like igen layer or like reaking or interchange security uh those kinds of approaches are actually quite

different to the sort of like Celestia model of shared security uh in the sense of um you know what reaking does or interchange security is it enables you to reuse well actually even interchange security is slightly different than Nan layer but anyway they allow you to uh reuse existing like uh like assets for to to sort of like collateralize a new Comm right to to operate some kind of service and um so that you could use that to bootstrap a new consensus committee like every every consensus network is a committee at the end of the day or you could use that to bootstrap a new uh

committee for an oracle right because every Oracle also has to be committee um and uh so I guess like that saves you the the the the problem of having to you know issue your own coin for example which is is a is a big benefit but the thing is it it's you're still having to bootstrap that set of of of validators and and actors to run this this service or this this committee um and on top of that um when you're what you're sharing right is the underlying asset you're not actually sharing under like actual Security in terms of do do these protocols know anything about each other are they actually able to verify each other more efficiently now in the

Celestia like version right you don't have to spin up a new committee you actually plug in and use an existing consensus committee which is the Celestia validators to have consensus and you just pay for that service so it's very it's very different from that perspective you're not actually having to create a net new committee and uh on top of that you're these chains that sort of plug into Celestia these rollups actually are are sharing Security in a very real sense that they are able to verify each other more directly because because like I was mentioning earlier they're they're sampling the same underlying data availability layer so it it really um is a completely different

uh sort of like uh means of of like thinking about what shared security means and I think like also you can't really like what celesy is is also at the end of the day a scaling solution and that what scalability is is about verifying something more efficiently like uh the cost of verification does not scale linearly with the amount of uh transaction data that you can verify whereas like interchange security or or reaking or things like that they're not actually scaling or solving scalability they're they're just creating net new uh things that you still need to verify with the same amount of effort if that

makes sense now I guess like the difference is also that like with Celestia you know if you want to launch a new chain with with a like net new consensus that's not something something that's lessia can offer you like you do need to to boot trp a new committee for something like that so there just sort of like different they're different offerings I guess but oh actually one thing just on my mes security what's really interesting is you know I've been have been having a lot of exchanges with sunny over over the past year or so about like mesh security and how it could work and interestingly like you know the only way that mes security can work is if there's underlying data availability between these chains because if you are putting taking stake

from one chain onto another if these validators uh that you Stak to with a non-native asset do something wrong there's no way to prove to the uh issuer chain uh that those assets should be slashed and uh unless you have fraud proofs and data availability so um at the end of the day like the security model for mesh security boils down to basically needing to run rollups and needing to have uh data availability and so that's why there's like in the latest uh iterations of mesh security that I've seen there's this idea of using Celestia as a shared da layer to facilitate mesh Security in

the interchain I think you just like blew my mind on something are consumer chains in mesh security actually rollups to the provider chains they kind of if you want it to actually be secure then yes they they they not necessarily rollups to the provider chains necessarily but they need to be able to verify each other and so they need to be rollups to a common data availability layer that's that's that's the way that otherwise there's no way for you to slash for misbehavior on another chain right so having your own so okay so uh um a provide so a consumer chain to a

provider chain even if it has its own valter set would still need to post data to a a shared data availability layer it would be a roll up to that data availability layer because it is providing it is sending its data there but it is still securing uh it's it's still it's still securing itself with its own validor set and securing other blockchain's state with its uh Stak assets yeah so like here's one way to think about it is like okay let's say we have osmosis and I don't know Neutron right and let's say they're doing mesh security osmosis the people are taking OS osmo and staking it VI mesh security to like validators on Neutron now when those validators on

Neutron are Cosmos validators oh yeah right okay neutrons are Roba use like all let's talk about on the same semantic yeah yeah what's another name another Cosmos chain the cosmos Hub okay yeah Cosmos Hub there we go whatever right so now they're they're taking osmo uh two validators in the cosmos Hub now let's say the cosmos Hub validators commit an invalidate transition so they they do something that is like just breaks the rules of the chain but they've all signed it right the osmo the osmosis validators have no way the osmosis nodes and network has no way of knowing that that is actually fraudulent all they can do is verify the signatures of that thing they can't actually reexecute the

state transitions of the they don't have the data yeah especially if there's data withholding right and so all of a sudden now it's like hey like they're like hey we need to slash these guys because they just the full nodes on the on on the cosmos Hub are like hey we need to slash these guys because they just like broke the rules but then the they in order to slash them the the the the stake that was you know you know committed to here osmosis uh Network and nodes need to understand that and be able to interpret that but they can't unless they are sharing a common data availability layer and there's some kind of fraud or ZK proof system between them so they can verify hey like yes this was this is an invalid

block that was signed by these guys therefore we're going to slash all of them including the osmosis stake on our chain so hopefully that they're using blob stream essentially like they end up using blob stream right yeah in this case they would be probably more uh it would be better if they were just like native rollups like they're both posting their data directly to Celestia okay got it boy this is this gets complicated real fast but also gets really interesting yeah okay um yeah I've got to I've got to spin more time in mesh security like for for now it's just sort of like this nebulous concept that I've not spent a whole lot of time like digging deep into and it just seems like there's a lot of

really interesting stuff Happening Here great well uh let's let's talk a little about other da layers it it seems like a lot of other projects and teams are hopping on the da narrative uh there's um like aail we had anag on the podcast recently I think they're uh building this something that's quite promising but also very different from cestia potentially like on the especially on the consensus side and also I think they have a um they they have an ambition to like really have a um a much broader valador set right that that has different like tradeoffs than uh than tender consensus and then also

near has announced that they're going to do some some da stuff although I don't know very much about it for the moment so the this this this emerging landscape of Da protocols like which which are you Mo which are you the most impressed with and what do the what like in the future would would it be useful for applications to post to multiple Das to to just in increase uh the security provided uh to their application or does that not make sense so um the da landscape is growing which is great because frankly I feel like there's um you surprising to me that that uh there's so few actual like dedicated da Solutions out there in the

market even in the fact like we're 2023 almost 2024 right and um I kind of categorized them into two broad things like the first are you know genuine da layers that are designed from the ground up specifically for this new future and those uh also support data availability sampling because data availability sampling is the gold standard and how you scale secure like uh band bandwidth like da bandwidth um and so the only projects or protocols that I'm aware of that are doing that are Celestia which is live ail which is uh you know on testnet and then uh you know DK charting which

is still sort of like a proposal but I think you know EIP 4844 which is Proto dang charting which is kind of the first step towards that um uh is is another one uh and then you have a suite of these other solutions that are either like committee based or there are existing l1s that like near for example who are saying hey well we can be a DA solution too right um and the reason I separate those two things is that like data availability sampling enables users to verify da directly it enables the da throughput of the chain to scale with the number of users and nodes in the network and um provides you just the best the best security um now the other

da Solutions like uh I da or or near or whatever that don't support this um just don't have the same scalability uh or security uh sort of like properties and um and so to me they're just not that interesting longterm uh as actual like long-term solutions to to this to this underlying problem um so I guess that's so now kind of like setting that aside um comparing for example Celestia to aale I think a lot of the um there's a similar vision of creating a very like minimal uh da layer with G uh and I think where aail is different is they

like you said they have a different consensus algorithm so they use polka dot babe Grandpa consensus and they use uh a different uh way of of committing to the the um the the data that uh uses kzg commitments and what that means is um that they uh like uh we we use sort of a fraud proof mechanism and then what they use is more of like a validity proof mechanism is one way to think about it and um I think the real difference is is ultimately a lot in a lot of these cases with with da layers is is like execution like there's a lot of um you know Theory but like who can actually ship something that is scalable and that works uh works well and uh and

so I think like the like you'll see a lot of claims of like da throughput probably circulating around uh on crypto Twitter you know over the next year and uh the real thing is like well the proof should be in the pudding and like who who can actually ship something that is really usable and actually efficient and effective and I think um so far you know only celesia is really live so it's hard to tell and compare apples to apples between these da Solutions yeah I mean it's a space that I think I'll I I I'm I'm trying to keep my pulse my finger on the pulse here about you know the um promising like da layers and I think uh obviously like Celestia you

know has a a huge uh Advantage by being first to Market by having attracted you know all of these projects to build on Celestia and just solfi the narrative but you know there will be others and and that I think that it's going to be a landscape of you know multiple da layers that will align with different ecosystems and um and sort of capture market share in different parts of crypto so it's going to be interesting to to watch that uh play out um what uh yeah coming back to the ecosystem So currently Celestia is still in in beta um but applications are are already starting to to build there what's the most exciting stuff that is currently being built on

Celestia um like I know I I saw this uh uh Milky Way liquid staking project pop up in my Twitter feed the other day um and some other some other projects so yeah how many projects are building there what are the things that people should be paying attention to yeah there's uh there's a lot um I think the the first few that I'm like most excited about um and I'm I'm probably going to leave out some and uh because it's just inevitable but um one that I'm really excited about in the near term is Manta uh Manta is like a is a an evm chain but with o like special op codes that make it really efficient to verify various

like snarks and ZK uh ZK proofs and what that enables is like and they and they've like built in all this like like uh Native functionality for like Randomness or other like privacy like ZK kind of functionality and and so it kind of has like this ecosystem for people to build really interesting applications that tap into that as like a fundamental building block and um they're currently a roll up on an ethereum um but they will when we launch blob stream they're going to migrate uh their da to Celestia while still settling to ethereum and there's uh just a whole bunch of people who are building applications on Manta that are currently just too expensive to

actually be like you know usable essentially and so what what like their whole Community has basically been saying like hey when when Celestia when Celestia essentially and um I'm really excited because like it's going to unleash uh and enable all these new applications that the their Community has built to actually like flourish and so that's that's a big one that's coming soon another one that I'm really excited for is Eclipse they are launching a salon of virtual machine uh rollup I think we talked about this earlier and um I think what's cool about eclipse is that uh you know salana is the the second biggest sort of developer ecosystem after ethereum and uh yet there's still only one salana chain

right whereas like for for ethereum there's been multiple evm chains for many many years and there's all these different rollups and so I think it would be really interesting to see how the um sort of like you know does like how does the salana ecosystem like developer ecosystem grow with this first non salana L1 svm chain and and I think what's cool about it too is like that we're combining The Best of Both Worlds because I think salana uh to their credit has have built an amazing you know virtual machine that you know has paralyzation has this like you know special gas fee sort of like Market that makes things like more more efficient

and I think uh Celestia brings this really scalable underlying da so you can kind of by combining these two things I think it could be really really powerful like a really fast really efficient really cheap uh blockchain on both the data availability and the execution sides so that's another one that I'm excited about I'm also excited about um things like Argus so Argus and and by the way both eclipse and Manta for example are using blob stream and will be settling to ethereum while using Celestia for da Argus on the other hand is is a little bit different it's it's a onchain gaming uh uh project where theyve built a specific VM that is tailor made for onchain gaming and um they they have some games I think in the

pipeline that will be ready to launch uh soon and um what's what's cool about it is that like it's another example of why of kind of build whatever right and and the the the reason why this modular blockchain thing is so revolutionary is that they've um you know people have been trying to build games within the evm or Sal ofm or or like these um sort of execution environments that are not actually designed from the ground up for this use case so they've gone ahead and built a whole new execution environment that has a high tick rate has like uh native sharding to be able to like scale the game game worlds and and all these other features that are going to make gaming on Argus like just a superior experience uh and um I think uh yeah I'm

really excited for for them to launch and uh I think unchain gaming is another just good example of of like a use case that celesy enables uniquely because unchain gaming needs a lot of data throughput and there's currently not really a good place for someone to launch something like that and um so just the by the nature of having all this scalable block space is is making aching gaming uh you know possible in in in a way that it wasn't before cool I've uh noted down all of those to look into them actually I'll also mention another one what I'm really excited about because you know there's a lot so I I also feel bad because I won't be able to remember all the the best

ones but Dimension is a really interesting project yeah of course Dimension um and but they're they're building is sort of like a cosmos uh SDK based um sort of like rollup ecosystem with a a hub that all these rollups like settle down to uh and then and they'll post their data to Celestia and and what's cool is that they've made this they have this like roller framework which makes it really really easy to deploy a new rollup and so I think they're going to un unleash just a crazy wave a crazy amount of like people just deploying rollups um I current think currently on their test net they had already over 10,000 rollups deployed um so there's like that's how easy they

made it is that like you know it it really just a few few uh few commands and you can deploy a rollup out of the box and they've done a lot of work thinking through like you know the product aspect and the user experience um to make it really really slick so um really excited for them to launch as well great before we wrap up here I I wanted to ask you your your thoughts on this and so I've been thinking a lot about as we enter this modular era uh you know we we've we've had we've had of course like the the Bitcoin era which was like a singular blockchain doing a singular thing and then we had the ethereum evm era which was a virtual machine uh that was able to do multiple

things and build you know where people could build applications and and and daps but but using a single-purpose blockchain only built for like doing this one thing right like running uh this VM and now we have the modular era where every application is essentially its own Sovereign um um rollup I mean that that that appears to be like where we're heading where every application is its own rollup in in this context you know I think there it appears like there is uh um that there will be a shift from uh evm based applications to non-m based

applications and and and the reason why I think this is going to happen is because the the evm was not built for this modular uh World it uh it it was built like what almost 10 years ago uh it has a bunch of issues with security you know solidity is not like a u um a very secure programming language has like a bunch of issues that we have not resolved yet um the it's not it's not built for the modular stack and now with these new VMS whether it's you know uh the cosmos SDK or kmom or the salana VM or or things like move that are much more modern that use programming languages like like rust which are much

better uh equipped I think for for blockchains um you know I think developers that are coming into the space you know that are coming out of college in the next 5 to 10 years are going to to prefer to use those uh those programming languages and those VMS rather than than the evm now I I I don't think that that means that the evm dies I mean the the evm will continue to power some of the world's biggest defi applications like Unis Swap and a and and all of the value that's been created on ethereum just the new applications the new uh billion dollar protocols will probably use something something different and again we can make analys to web 2 here like PHP still Powers 75%

of the web websites on the web because like 60% of the websites on the internet are are are PHP but it has a very like narrow set of applications that it runs it will continue to run and continue to be maintained as long as those applications exist but college kids now that come out of school like they're not coding with PHP they're coding with like node or whatever like some other more modern um uh language so I I wonder if that resonates with you and if you agree and like we where there might be holes in my theory here but that's sort of where I see things heading and I wonder if you could yeah share your thoughts on that I absolutely agree and I think again this is one of the exciting things that the modular Paradigm enables right is uh in the past right it was very

expensive to uh try to uh innovate at the execution environment layer right so either either you know you had to convince the ethereum community or some existing L1 to you know make make a change to the to the uh sort of evm right but that's really risky if there's already like assets and all this stuff and that's why the innovation of of the evm on on ethereum has been so slow people have all these aips they never get shipped because it's just too uh you know it's it's very dangerous and like fraught with you know making making a mistake so like it slows it down from that perspective then your other option is like okay well I'll just launch my own uh you know new chain with with a know a different version of the evm that

I I'm going to like you know iterate on but the problem with that is again now you have to launch a new chain which is extremely expensive you have to bootstrap a new consensus Network issue a new coin all these things so like there was basically no way to innovate or the only ways were just highly really slow and costly to innovate at the execution uh environment layer and now with and there's actually a lot of parallels to this of like pre ethereum right if you wanted to launch a new decentralized application you also had to launch a new chain like Bitcoin like there was like namecoin and uh I don't know I can't remember all these different like every time someone wanted to yeah everyone well yeah anytime someone wanted to launch a new

decentralized application they had an idea uh that was different from Bitcoin they had to launch a whole new chain until ethereum came around and was like hey actually we could just build a chain that enables anyone to launch their own application as a smart contract and then once that was done it was like boom it opened Pandora's Box there was this Cambrian explosion of new decentralized applications written as smart contracts because it just dropped the cost of innovating to almost nothing right it's like okay well kid a kid in their college dorm room could like write a new smart contract and deploy it right um and so that's what I think Celestia brings it does the same thing but at the execution of ironment layer where now if you want to launch a new chain let's say you want to launch the evm but with

parallelization or you want to launch the evm like like Manta with these op codes that make verifying ZK things more efficient then you can do that permissionless and basically for free because it's just as simple as like writing it up deploying it as a rollup on Celestia and now like it's there and and uh I think so I I expect like a an enormous acceleration of innovation in that in that layer and I totally agree with you the evm is not the be all and end all it is you know kind of like I think it's the most popular it's kind of like like very very similar to PHP is something that that works and is is has spread and has a network effect that I think is like very

formidable but I don't think uh it's at all like the end state of like where where like web 3 blockchain development will end up there's a lot of like exciting new execution environments not just the svm but move and and wasm based things that I think are underexplored and I think uh over time like there's just going to be way way more options um that are going to be enable new use case and to just be more secure and have all kinds of benefits so that's I think the world that we're heading into great and I think that's a great note to end on uh Nick I want to thank you so much for spending some time here with me on the podcast today learned a lot about Celestia about the ca Market

the you know the alignment with ethereum in some ways and also like the future of the modular ecosystem uh which is very exciting feels like a brand new you know I've been in crypto for 10 years and and it really feels like now is like a new era in crypto that is starting uh with the modular stack becoming reality and so very excited to be u a part of it yeah thanks again well it's my pleasure to uh be on the podcast thank you for inviting me and I hope that people get inspired to uh you know build something uh in the modular stack whether that's a rollup or you know sequencing things uh rollup Frameworks applications on top of existing rollups

like it's really um an exciting time to be a builder in this space so hopefully those of you out there listening will will uh feel inspired to jump in and and participate great thanks Nick