Celestia: 1Gb Blocks, Rollup Interoperability & Lazy Bridging. Ismail Khoffi & Mustafa Al-Bassam 567

Transcript

Celestia is a very basic Bas layer that's optimized to make it very easy for anyone to deploy their own blockchain on top of it you have a specialized layer that is only made for one purpose that doesn't have a state machine for like General compute that makes it easier to scale it up for the demand of like rollups and layer twos so there's no sort of onchain smart contract environment for developers to use there's no layer one applications it's all Layer Two because the whole point of of this architecture if you just want to customize one part of your stack you can just deploy roll off within minutes and change something about your roll up you can already launch multiple Visa scale networks on top of Celestia and even like the whole

salana chain like would fit so to say into Celestia even with 8 megabyte blocks right if if we get to a gigabyte that would already serve most use cases welcome to EP the show which talks about the technology project and people driving t centralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Brian Crane and today I'm speaking with isma Kofi and Mustafa Al basam who are the co-founders and you know CTO CEO respectively of celestial labs this is the second time we're having a moment actually I was listening to the first episode earlier today uh was exactly four years ago so it's a lot of has happened since the end I'm excited to to have on again but you know before we

talk with them we'd like to briefly let you know about our sponsors this week if you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence look no further than course one more than 150,000 delegators including institutions like Bido pent capital and Ledger trust corus one with their assets they support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake is responsibly managed thanks to their Advanced meev research you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards you can stake directly from your preferred wallet set up a white label note restake your assets on IGA or symbiotic or use the SDK for multi-chain staking in your app learn more at kus1 and start taking today this episode is proudly brought to

by nosis a collective dedicated to advancing and decentralized future nosis leads Innovation with circles nosis pay and metry reshaping open Banking and money with hashy and nosis VPN they're building a more resilient privacy focused internet if you're looking for an L1 to launch your project nosis chain offers the same development environment as ethereum with lower transaction fees it's supported by over 200,000 validators making nosis chain a reliable incredibly neutral foundation for your applications nosis Dow drives nosis governance where every voice matters join the nosis community in the nosis Dow for today Deploy on the evm

compatible nosis chain or secure the network with just one gno and affordable Hardware start your decentralization journey today at nosis doio cool thank you so much uh both for coming back on again yeah it was it was a long time ago we had you guys on for the first time it was still called lazy leer at the time I think it was just sort of at the beginning I think rollups actually remember you you guys already mentioned rollups there but I think that was something that kind of uh yeah you were also starting to think about uh so a lot has happened since then right you guys have come a long way but and then I think in the I'm sure most listeners or

probably pretty much all listeners have heard of Celestia right they have like some vague idea uh but I think at the same time it's not always easy to wrap your head around like what Celestia is and what it does so maybe just uh to kind of introduce people can you explain like what's the what was the vision for celestian what are you trying to create sure so in Asal Celestia is a very basic base layer that's optimized to make it very easy for anyone to deploy their own blog train on top of it using things like rollups and the tws so because obviously we have all this new roll up and Technology but um no one

really tried to build a layer one that is optimized just for layer twos and you can think of Celestia as basically just layer one that is only optimized and only has layer to so there's no sort of onchain smart contract environment for developers to use like all the applications there's no layer one applications it's all in Layer Two and whenever you press main net last year in November there was this huge need because a lot of people were deploying Wallops on ethereum but they were extremely expensive to deploy because this because there was an updated availability capacity which is what rops need so so year when launched it was the first kind of like specialized data

availability layer for rollups and since then many rollups there's been many rollups have started to use last year to effectively make the transaction fees a lot cheaper and so we basically solved this kind of free depressing need in the Market at the time that um no one else was sold there at the time which was cheap which was scalable and cheap da for so of course ethereum right since like years ago uh has also chosen to kind of go into the direction of you know trying to be this layer one that primarily scales in uh through layer twoos and serves layer twos is the the what is the biggest

benefit of having a layer one that's you know specifically focused around like serving layer 2s is it just around uh cheaper cost cost or like what what other advantages are there obviously there's cheaper cost but you can you can think of it as like a layered is highly optimized for one use case only and that itself um brings like the main benefit which is like you have a specialized layer that is only made for one purpose that doesn't have a state machine for like General compute and um yeah that that makes it easier to scale it up for the demand of like rollups and layer

twos I would say and also like another main I would say another key benefit is that ver like you have more like the focus for Celestia is also verifiability so we we put light clients and end users first or like users are like key players in the system so I would I would even go back and say like Celestia is not only like a layer one which is basic but which is right but I would also say that it's an architecture for like abundant block space where you can like have massive scale and um but this doesn't mean we you just deploy uh on a centralized cloud or something um where

you could have like AWS which would would give you more scale right but instead you have like verifiability by end users and um by rollups that they can verify the chain even with uh low resource requirements I think that's also a key benefit so let's let us maybe recap briefly so the way with rollups right so with rollups we generally have a bunch of different roles right so we have like a sequencer we have the data availability then generally there is some kind of like execution thing or L1 can you explain again like

you know how do these different components work together and what is the architecture I mean in Nell a rollup is simply just a blockchain that posts it blocks for the blockchain so I think the easiest analogy that I use is a rollup is basically like a virtual blockchain that you Deploy on some other blockchain the same way like you might deploy a virtual machine using AWS on on a bigger machine so there isn't like any specific um like set of hard components that every ROP needs you can literally take a 10 minut chain and Pur blocks Celestia or some other data and it becomes a roll up in

theory so um there there is in there some specific set of specific key components like every Ro have different components but of course in a common component that roll have rollups have is a sequencer so you might have a um so like all rollups either way to sequence transactions so most commonly current rollups they use a centralized sequencer so this is how like like arbit one or optimis main net would work works for example it's single Seer that takes in transactions from users and generates up blocks and process blocks to to the base layer like AUM or cesia however um the nice thing about rops is that even if

the even if the sequencer caliz in theory If the roll up is constructed correctly you don't have to trust that sequencer because the Roll Up is is inheriting security of the Bas layer because if the secreter misbehaves then because the data is available you can generate a fraud proof or ZK proof of the Mis of the behavior or the misbehavior and if the and if the sequencer is censoring transactions then the user can go back to the base layer and force the sequencer to include those transactions by in the transactions directly on the Bas layer but not all rollups have sequences and some rollups there's a category of Base rollups RS called base rops that don't have any

sequences and they just like rely on the base layer for SE sequencing so like there's no sequence all and the user just posts the data to the Bas so there's many there's many different configurations for rollups and there isn't like necessarily all rops don't necessarily share the same component or have the same architecture but that's also that's also the kind of the beauty of rops and modularity in general because the whole point of this architecture where developers use rollups for applications is that the whole point is that it's extremely customizable that developers have full stack customizability over how they're deploying applications and because historically if you wanted to have full St customizability over your application you would have had to deploy a new layer

one using something that the Coss SDK or starting from scratch and that's a lot of other head but now if you just want to customize one part of your stack you can just deploy roll up within minutes and change something about your roll up you can you can you can add a new up code to the evm and you can choose to have a centralized sequence so that captures that that captures the MV and fee Revenue rather than leing leaking to the Bas a for example and there's so many there's so many customizability options and I think that's a big reason why developers depl playy rollups so you mentioned the fraud proofs and at the same time right Celestia is is sort of like very minimal layer one right where you uh where you basically just put the data for uh for

availability so like let's say that does happen and you have a roll up that uses Celestia and now the sequencer does something and like you know I have a fra proof like how does like do you need another chain as well than the function or like how what would you do with that FR proof so if assuming it's optimistic C up if a if the sequencer tries to include in val transaction on the Chain would change the state of that chain of the roll up in in valid way like let's say I try to steal people's money for example then because the sequencer is posting those blocks to Celestia that everyone can see the misbehavior and then they can generate a for proof that misbehavior and then the

that for proof depending on how the RO is set up would be can be uh for example distributed to their nodes of that roll up and that would all or like clients of that roll up and that would allow the users of that roll up to reject that block and treat it as invalid or in the case of um in the case of a bridge for example you can imagine um a roll up has a bridge to some other chain for example like an if he an optimism roll up has a bridge to ethereum for example then what would happen is that you would prst the fra proof to the bridge contract and then because the bridge in the in the case of optimistic problem the bridge has a sday uh challenge period and so like every block can be challenged within seven days and if some

so then someone can purse a fraud fruit within a 7-Day challenge period and then that would cause that rollup block to be rejected by the bridge and then they would have be able to steal money out of the bridge so in the one example uh you basically have okay if all the clients run a light client then they will just basically recognize okay the thing that is being sent from the sequencer or is is not legitimate so then sort of the blockchain doesn't Advance yeah exactly and the bridge it's just a it's just like a onchain light yeah and then you would recover from this because like now you still

like you you then I guess would want to have some kind of process for maybe switch out the sequencer or yeah I mean it would depend on um how the sequencing works for roll up like if it's a centralized sequencer presumably you would need some way to I mean actually I mean in theory you don't have to switch out the sequencer because not like nothing like the sequencer could just continue because the sequencer does not have to be trusted like even if you can't replace the sequencer the sequencer yeah it generated any Val look but it can still continue generating valid blocks but uh obviously um e either way it's not desirable for roll up to early with one sequencer because if that sequencer goes down then that that roll up loses livess

so at Le like rollup still be the way to recover if if a if the S goes down and there kind of like right there's kind of different ways that can be achieved like many rollups have a have like a governance system and where you can have have like control per of the roll up or more commonly what arbitr does for example is that if the sequence revers down the the end users have the ability to uh post transactions to this onchain inbox which forces which effectly forces the transactions to be exe executed on L2 even if the sequencer might be this malicious or or offline actually I'm I'm glad you

bringing up this thing right because one of the one of the criticisms that you hear a lot of rollups is actually that it you know the the centralized sequencer which is you know still basically pretty much all the rollups right have a centralized sequencer and at the same time I think many of the are working on some kind of you know decentralization of sequencing do you think this is essential or do you think like the kind of guarantees that rollups can uh can produce such that like you know decentralized sequencer isn't absolutely necessary or like how do you kind of view that so technically if a all is constructed correctly it's not it's

actually not necessary or it's not mandatory to centralize the sequence because the the whole point of a r up in the first place is that you're inheriting security from the Bas layer which means you're inheriting um State validity and sensorship resistance for the Bas ler so ideally that if you construct the roll correctly you can you can get away with using centralized sequencer and still have the roll up um completely sship resistant because users can can force transactions to be included with un trained inbox and because you have fraud proofs and ZK proofs the sequencer cannot include in transactions in my my view like it's it's perfectly fine uh like it's perfectly bad have the RO of the central sequens because the r is still sens resistant if it's constructed

correctly that's actually like a massive advantage of rollups you can get away like with just you can get away with very little infrastructure while still having full s resistant and security but that being said there are still advantages to decentralizing the sequencer because um if you have a single sequencer the sship resistance you guarantees you get are slow in the sense that for example um my understanding with the arbitr on inbox is that if you users use this onchain inbox to force transaction inclusion the transaction is only included in 24 after 24 hours so it's like this it's like this slow sensorship resistance that takes 24 hours to get

around so I think the still Advantage is to have the C seques but the main advantage of that would give you immediate sensorship assistance rather than this kind of like slower form of C resistance where you have to wait 24 hours and that's what some protocols like for example asria do so asria for example which Builds on Celestia is creating um this shared decentralized sequencer so it's like it's a decentralized sequencer that many rollups can share effectively that post the data toer and I think other projects like espresso are also building things like this so I recently saw some statistic you know that seemed very positive about Celestia is basically that the uh the market share right in in this blob space

right as as reach something like 40% that is celester is being used for can you talk a little bit about like you know what are the main H is it primarily ethereum layer twos that are using Celestia and is there anything like what's noteworthy about the like the current usage pattern that you see of the Celestia chain so yeah currently it's uh the majority of chains deployed on Celestia are actually eum l2s like or l3s so like optimism arbitrum chains that said I think it's called Eclipse recently launched which is like a bit it's also an eorum chain in one sense but it's

also different in a sense that it uses the svm for execution so it's more like Solana um execution but uh ethereum for settlement and Celestia for da so I think that also uses up quite a bit of um Celestial block space but there are a few Sovereign chains like uh fora um and there's more in the pipeline so there will be more uh Sovereign chains built on Celestia 2 which are not necessarily there won't be necessarily evm chains or ethereum chains so yeah maybe we can go into that a little bit right cuz I I know there's like one project right that is a part of

the kind of Celestia core team my understanding is roll kit and then there's this notion of like The Sovereign rollup can you tell us a little bit about like you know what is a sovereign rollup and what are the kind of different assumptions that you have in a sovereign rollup versus one that's non Sovereign like Ro we started Ro because effectively one else was building a general purpose contract framework so at the time like op stack didn't exist you had like you had optimism but there was op stack you had there was didn't have arbit Nitro there wasn't like no General framework for people just to deploy the

it's so you have to use other people other people's RS like optimism but now we do have a lot of Frameworks now we have Nitro and so on and so forth and and that's why we that's why we started building roit about three four years ago and R is a sovereign rollup framework so yeah what what is a sovereign rollup so if you look at um ethereum's rollup centur in word map initially they were originally they were seen as these l2s to extend or scaleter and now it's also we have like this concept of network extensions on salana where people are building L2 of salana and they're calling them Network extensions but soes takes a very different philosophy to rops like we don't see rops as just

something to scale some other chain or just something to extend from other chains we see rollups as a way to deploy your own chain that's independent in its own right so like just the same way that you might you might deploy your L1 chain like why do people like why do people deploy cosw chains people deploy people deploy cosw chains because they want to have their own independent chain not because they're trying to scale Cosmos it's because like it's not scaling technology it's just like they're trying to build or chain and trying to build a good product so we see roll Ops as just like a way to play your own chain way more easily not just a way not just as a way to scale and some other chain so whereas like rolls on ethereum scale are there to

scale ethereum so that year does not exist for rollups to scale cesia CIA exists to scale rollups and so that's where the concept of a sing rollup comes comes from and because V on ethereum they are kind of like enshrine ethereum as a sell they kind of enshrine ethereum as like okay like I have a bridge to ethereum and that bridge defines my chain right but a s Roll Up is just like you have a chain as a rollup but your chain isn't like defined by some other chain execution it's like it's own chain own right and it's Sovereign because the the the upgrade part of the rollup or the use

the is using us hard foring or uses directly choosing which is the correct shade for the Rob up similar to like how that how a hard fork and cosw or any other L1 would work it's l some other chain deciding and what is theic chain it's the US users of that robot deciding it and so that's why it's called Sovereign because it's a rollup that that has sovereignty the same way that a cosmo shine or any other one has sovereignty and so when the the the the upgrade process so this hard for upgrade process like you know for example Cosmos chains right generally use some sort of governance thing right where you have like uh the the stake and values

especially you know the vote on like okay let's let's make this upgrade and then the validates coordinate so in the case of a Sol and rollup this could basically just be done in the rollup itself right that maybe you have like some rollup native tokens and then maybe the the owners of this token say like okay hey I approved this upgrade and then it upgrades like the clients that um that people use to to verify the state is that how it will work yeah kind of so like one of the core values of Celesta is that um offchain governance uh is more important than on chain token hold

governs because like like if you look at what what the whole point of a blockchain in the first place the whole point of a blockchain is to create this is to kind of like a create a shared computer or a Shar environment for people to use such that you don't have to trust any middlemen or you have you don't have to tr and that includes you should not have to trust a majority of tget holders and that's why um like we're very against to hold rence for upgrades because to me that that defeats the whole point of Wass like if you're if you're saying that um 51% of the token holders can just rewrite the rules of the chain then then how is that that's not really a blockchain it's a blockchain

but that if you to hold a blockchain like that's just like shareholder governance like why you like similar to a normal Corporation whereas the whole point of the blockchain is that um it's not like no single majority majority of token holders should be able to arbitrarily change the rules of the chain it's like what if they what if like 51% people vote to do something bad or like I don't know they were compelled by some court or some government like what if that especially Dev bators for example so if you look at like how for example um upgrades work on bitcoin or ethereum there's they have been on there like very fluid offchain process so every time for example ethereum is a good example right um ethereum doesn't

have onchain governance for upgrades it has this offchain process where has eips and stuff um etherum Improvement and then there's kind of like this rough consensus and then there's a hard fork and if people don't agree with a hard Fork then they can kind of like focus into the own chain and that's that's basically what happened with ethereum and ethereum classic right that was onchain govern so um and so part of the reason why I think Sovereign Sovereign rollups are important um is because if you look at how carbon followups work on eum for example the devil is always in detail because the the the upgrade part of the rollup is kind of the most is almost the

most important thing from a security perspective and in many cases it kind of defeats the whole roll up because if you look at the upgrade path of M rollups for example the upgrade the Roll Up is basically decided by some multi or um some governance process the kind of like almost defeats the point of a roll up because the whole point of a roll up is that you're inherit security Bas but then if you're saying some multi can change the entire rules of the roll up to uh rug you basically then that's not really that kind of is very bad from a security perspective so that's why for Celestia for example um for S rollups we kind of see a upgrade path where we're not

ensing the bridge into some committee and then we and then the committee decides with upgrad should be instead we're saying the bridges are secondary to roll up and then if Will UPG up that roll up it's the users that roll up and the nodes of that roll up that decides what the chical chain is so the upgrade process would be the same as like any other all one right or like ethereum or or or Bitcoin the developers will propose a new version of the node software and then people can choose to adopt it or not and if people don't uh adopt it it won't happen and if it's contentious then there'll be a fork and so you have this you basically have this this right to Fork and the right to Fork is kind of

like very important to blockchains first of all it assumes right and and I know this like a big Focus for you guys is that you have these kind of like light clients and that you're not just quering some RPC node for the state of the chain but that you're actually verifying it I mean that helps for sure for like users that do not run full nodes right but like it is not like it's what most ster said about the right to Fork it's like is independent of um if us are running light notes or not literally the nodes of the network right like that that can be validated but also full nodes can the community as a whole can

decide which Fork to follow it's more like a social contract so that is is yes the the light noes like the more users run nodes the more direct impact they can have to choose on which which uh Fork to follow for instance but um it's not it's not a hard requirement that everyone runs a light note for that yeah I mean I I guess I can I imagine that to degree to which this sort of works will depend a lot also on you know how are these applications created right cuz in the end if you have some some app that's being run as a rollup and you know there's like one team that's just

building like the application and underneath it uses uh uses roll up and and they just you know upgrade the application and everyone sort of automatically upgrades it then I guess it's going to be pretty hard to coordinate some Fork yeah I mean it's definely it's also true for example like in ethereum and Bitcoin is the core developer the core developers have a lot of power over um kind of like what upgrades get approv but it's also the case that even though they have a lot of power deciding whats get approved it's also the a big part a big point of it is that it'll be very difficult for them to propose an

extremely contentious upgrade so if you look at like these the contentious upgrades on the theum like imagine imagine like um some imagine the codep like increasing the supply by 10x was a good idea uh that way they can be contentious upgrade that let nodes or the the city probably probably would not adopt so um it's kind of like more that the ability for nerds to choose which for they follow basically provides a some level of accountability for the developers because makes it way lik for them to um try to deploy a a contentious upgrade and that's that's almost what happened in the D in the D

hack right like that the where Ser has D hack um the the Developers for chain to undo the hack you know and that was extremely contentious that eventually eventually it was fine right because eventually the fork happened and the eth ticker is now on that fork that developer chose but it was extremely contentious and it wasn't for free like there was it did end up somewhat splitting the ethereum community and you had eum classic which was big for a while now it's found dead but like it wasn't it wasn't for free it basically makes it there's a big social cost to at proposing contentious upgrades do you think that in terms of

you know creating uh sort of decentralized networks you know that are really like robust sensorship resistant can't be shut down you know sort of realize the ultimate goals uh that uh you know I think Bitcoin and etherum and all pursued do you think that um um are are there good Arguments for building like layer ones versus rollups or are they basically sort of like equivalent in or or maybe are they even advantages of rollups because of like this that maybe Forks are a bit easier or like how do you see that I I see a lot of advantages for

change to build rollups and I think the the main advantages that you inherit like what what what Mustafa said in the beginning is you inherit the security of an exist exting layer one so that means that you don't have to bootstrap your own Security in your own valid data set I think that that's the biggest um advantage in the sense especially in the bootstrapping phase of the like the early stages of the project that's I think like the the key Advantage I think other than that um you don't you have very little like downsides and or no down downsides basically you it's like um for especially in the case of a sovereign rollup it is more or less the same sovereignty uh that you get as

running your own layer one like if a community launches a layer one or if a community launches a sovereign rollup is not that different from this the the actual like say amount of sovereignty they they get right like they don't have complete control over the consensus or the data like the the data availability part but they can verify the data availability part completely and then over the state machine that's what people usually care most or the communities care most about which which contains the logic over the token and the the more of the social contract of that Community um is ENT shined in that and then I think that's the more important part uh for for for for these these Community or Community computers

so to say and like there's literally no disadvantage unless you want to for the sake of itself deploy a different con sensors right like that's that's uh that's the only reason I can see where it just makes a lot more sense to deploy um a new layer one instead right you want to try out a new consensus algorithm directly and you don't want you want it bootstrapped from scratch like that's the that's the main reason I can see I'm curious a little bit when you uh when you look sort of at at you know this case and to what s can Celestia like satisfy you know all the

needs that exist for data availability and I especially curious uh I mean I know there is this uh I think path to go to one gigabyte blocks so like is that you know how much is that is that enough for like you know 10,000 rollups all the rollups or do we need more I would assume that like 1 GB would be sufficient for all existing rollups for sure but also um beyond that like needs that will arise beyond that if you if you that depends on how you calculate it but if you use similar compression techniques as like Vell mentioned in in

in his blog post for rollups I think already with like four or eight megabyte you can um you can already launch multiple like PayPal or or like Visa scale networks on top of Celestia and even like the whole salana chain like would fit so to say into uh Celestia even with 8 megabyte blocks right so and then with like like a gigabyte so you can have like many of these right like again multiple solanas multiple visas and and and Visa scale networks and so on so forth so um yes I think that would if if we get to a gigabyte that would already serve um

most use cases I mean I know saw some uh projects that are basically arguing that oh but there's like some sort of AI use cases or some use cases that maybe not rollups that like actually have like much larger data requirements like do you think there are examples like that definitely there is so for example like we've talked to teams who are doing like ai ai applications where they want to deploy like entire AI models on chain for each user like each user might have like a 5 megabyte AI model that they want to upload chain and that requires Bast amount of their and I think use an analogy is like

it's very similar to um development of like internet bandwidth like certain use cases like streaming uh weren't possible with they for up there there's a lot of like internet use cases that were only possible once we had once you had greater internet speed and I think we'll see a very similar story with blockchains like once we have much greater the through Port I think it's a matter of induced demand like we'll see uh like use cases are lck that simply went a in the past and and I guess connected with that so does latency matter I mean currently like the celestial block time is you

know like 12 seconds is that is that the limitation or does it cause problems for particular types of use cases I mean so I mean the cool thing about thata is that this the only kind of like da solution with single slot finality or finality on every clock because we use tmid so for example like Solus finality Solus finality time is for seconds so like we have the same pral time of SL and we want we plan to decrease that at even further for example like there's a um there's a network upgrade coming to to to half the time for 6 seconds and in the future we want to decrease that even further but

um we have to decrease it carefully because if we just decrease it uh like na naively then it will make it very expensive for light noes because light noes have to download a lot more block headers so what we're trying to do is trying to decrease it but and having this idea of micro blocks so like we have like very frequent micro blocks but we have less frequent blocks and like have to download blocks not the micro blocks so it doesn't affect how much data they have to download but um I think Cel is a unque positioned by having this kind of like this fast finality because it makes the user experience a lot better especially if trying to do cross roller transactions like if you have two wups of

Celestia and you want bridge between them especially if there ZK rollups if you do etherum for example you have to wait 12 minutes 12 minutes is the minimum is as lowest possible timer see you're posting ZK proofs every block and 12 minutes is lowest possible time because e the finality time is 12 minutes but because vality time is in seconds that means you can have a very you have a much faster us bridging experience between these problems yeah I mean I think that actually is a is a great Segway into topic yeah uh we wanted to bring up as well I think like is also like talked about this a little bit so yeah let's

talk about I guess a bunch of things about bridging interoperability and and I'm curious where the role is of of ZK I think you mentioned it sometimes I saw it mentioned in the you know Celestial road map uh so yeah maybe just start here where you think makes most sense sure so like one of the core values of Celestia is that we want to have a very minimal execution environment and because we want to minimize onchain State because one of the things that limit ability is State blood so if you at ethereum like one of the ball necks for ethereum is the share am of State there is they have to store a ram to one

Lo so and that's why we that's why there's a conrete design decision that we don't want to have a smart contract environment last year we're only focusing on availability and scaling that but the problem with that is that like if a roll up on to use a t token in a trust minimized ored way they would have to reuse third party Solutions or third party Bridges so like for example they have to transfer that t to over IBC to some other chain and then the other chain have to bridge to them first so right now there isn't really like a native way to bridge assets like TI for from the celes base to eups they have to use third third party Bridge

basically but in all in order to make that possible you basically need some kind of like um expressive way to have programmed on the baser and the naive way to do that would be to basically have a smart contract if the baser but it turns out that you don't have to do that you can just add um support ZK proof the Bas erer and then what happens is that instead of programs being directly executed on the B layer the programs are executed off chain and then proving on the base ER and that's basically how ZK rollups work so so then if you have a ZK rollup that means you can now Bridge directly using by verifying Pro directly on the base this

is kind of really powerful because it's basically like the S will be the first based ER to have this thing called um fun functional escape velocity which means that you can extend the functionality to Bas arbitr charity but without us needing to support onchain my contracts we just have to support ZK proofs and basically the end game if it's last year becomes a Bas layer that only does Da and verifies proofs and that's it and I think that and that's also kind of like the end game for ethereum right but etherum is stuck with this unchain cont environment that they kind of inherited

and then has become has become a kind of a baggage that limits scalability so and the kind of cool thing is that um so these wups will be will be able to have to bridge directly year and we call this lazy bridging because it's lazy in three ways it's like it's lazy for the user because the idea is to create an end user experience where Everything feels like one chain so if you're interacting with multiple rops ideally we should have a wallet where interacting with all of those different RS you feel like you're interacting with one chain and that's possible with things like chain attraction for example but it's also de enabled by the fact

that Celestia has an immediate finality on every block so because we have like our finalities a few seconds instead of 12 minutes these actions that users can take they they will feel like they're happening on one chain so let say you have t on rollup a you can go and mint an NFC using that t on roll up B without having to bridge it first right and that's already possible for example with um forb chain using asria so so it's like it allows the user to be lazy but it also allows the developer to be lazy because the developer can have access to all kinds of assets within um not just the celestic system but outside of the

Celestia e system because Celestia supports IBC and the kind of cool thing about that is that means Ro off Celestia have ative way to access assets outside the ecosystem um without relying on these kind of non-neutral third party Bridges so if you look at like for example like the bridge between ethereum and Sala it relies the Wormhole right so there feel doesn't feel ctive right it feels like you have to trust some third party to use that bridge but so like and Celestial have assets outside the celestic system because Celestia has supports IBC so for example um you can go on mint usdc on Nole and then you can bridge that usdc to celesia and then brid that

usdc the rollups the rollups will have a will have native access Toc for examp for example and not just USC but any other assets on any other IBC support chain and so that kind of like makes cesia very uniquely suited to being this um baseda that allows users or um developers to have access to assets as this kind of like a bridging up and finally it's also lazy from a from a base layer perspective because it keeps it's still keeping the base layer lazy because the base layer is only responsible for verifying proofs like it doesn't actually execute the transac ons it's just verifying proofs are we're not

adding small contracts to the baser it's almost a year right that Celestia launched and now I think yesterday right the first uh upgrade with lemon grass came through what were the biggest changes in that upgrade I mean the biggest changes were also bridging related one is like or or interoperability related one was adding interchain the support for interchain accounts and the other was um the um packet forwarding middleware such that you can like basically you can forward IBC packages through Celestia or or like yeah basically that there was two these two features mainly were like requested by many liquid staking provider teams

but also from teams that want to uh build better ux for bridging on top of Celestia so that I think that was the that that are the biggest changes um but there were also many many smaller improvements um I think one of them which is a like a precursor for um fee burning is is adding a Min Min gas price right like which is enco like hardcoded into the um into the software instead of like uh having validators only choosing the their own local gas price actually I think that would be interesting to to talk a little bit about here is the economics I mean I

mean one thing that's been interesting right to see on ethereum is that uh you know ethereum used to make a lot of money from the uh fees right that were paid on the layer one and now they've had this kind of strategy to scale uh using rollups and it has led to uh dramatic decrease in Revenue right for the ethereum layer one I mean I've also seen uh you know numbers for Celestia I don't know what the numbers are exactly right now but you know basically that like you know to the the amount of fees that are being paid for theability on seles is still like very very

low uh how do you see how do you see that kind of developing and what are your expectations about the the kind of economic uh Dynamics we're going to see here yeah I mean it's kind of interesting because um like every few years like someone comes up with different Value ofal Story for why L1 value like i s like like a few years ago it was like the main value of story for East was like it was used as a monetary asset for as and defi coll collateral for defi ecosystem now people are fixating on the revenue so it's like every few like it's like every few years

people have this opin this opinion about how L1 token should equ value ultimately uh like Revenue fee Revenue in all l1s is Rel relatively low like even on salana and Bitcoin for example but the way that weate is kind of like it's kind of twofold so firstly effectively um we believe that it's possible to for the base area to be sustainable using economy of scale so historically the way that l1s have acrude value by fees is by uh kind of like this artificial scarcity but so like ethereum used to have a lot of fees

because it had very limited lock space and people were paying $20 transaction fees $100 transaction fees per transaction to get access to liquidity and like that's just fundamentally not sustainable like uh even like maybe you maybe that's that's successful in the short term but someone that that then liquidity is just going to move to some other chain with the transaction fees are that expensive so parament We Believe like the only way to make a a change sustainable is by offering like by selling many transactions a scale to millions or billions of users so for example if even

with 8 megabytes than one gab of workpace if each user is paying a 10th of perent per transaction then that can still equate to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of critical Revenue depending if it's a what of it is whether it's a zko ortic and fundamentally and I think that's I think fundamentally that's the like only way to uh scale Revenue if if that's what if the revenue is import about the story ultimately I think that's a that's that's a theory of value cral as it been proven like there's no proven value ofal mechanism for for L1 tokens as I said it's like it's still

very early and um like no L1 really has that many Fe even like Sal for example compared to his valuation like ethereum had Fe had a lot of fees for a few years until they had rollups so there's no kind of like proven theory of that yet but but the other kind of like value mechanism or the other use case for the cesious open is that it can be used as a token to boost trrap new rops so just like ethereum can be used to uh pay for gas for rops or pay for um a c for defi or as a bond for sequencers similarly a TIA can be used to effectively as a way to Bap new

rollups whether that roll up need a gas token or that roll up needs some way to bond some stake to Opera the sequen set and that's already what's happening today for example with the former chain and Astria on Astria chains on Astria USF for the papay for gas for the for the rollups and also for example you can buy nfts on for using TI and we expect there that kind of usage to continue especially as we roll out Daisy bridging that makes it much more native and much more frictionless for developers to gain access to tier for the roll up and all assets via Celestia so is like accessing Celestia with lazy bridging or TR going to be

easier than uh other assets that are not native to Celestia so no I mean it should the beauty of it is that it'll be as easy to access other assets as well as long as they come through IBC because like you can Bridge a usdc from their to cesia and then you can go go access that for your rollup because it's all just IBC right like the way that the lazy version will also be using IBC it's just like a different type of IBC client that verifies DK proofs instead of validating signatures um is you mentioned before a or like interchain accounts being added what are the kind of ways you hope to see it being

used literally whatever you can do with it um so so it's not like the this upgrade is basically like a precursor to to Lazy bridging right like lazy bridging requires ZK accounts there's still like ongoing research work um or like very concrete research SE work is very applied but like it's it's it still requires some development work there um until ZK accounts and ZK RBC already but like we don't want to block the ecosystem so to say um on on using existing interop Solutions and um that's why pfm and I interchain accounts are already in the upgrade but I mean I

think given that the teams um that requested these features are mostly liquid staking uh providers I would assume at least that these are the major use cases like for ICA at least for interchain accounts at least um but there's no there's no opinion from like I don't I don't want to say like this is what I what it should be used for because like literally whatever it can be used for it should be used for um that said I think for the uh for interchain accounts I think the set of messages like SDK messages um are somewhat uh uh limited

for instance you cannot do um outz at least that's the what the CIP proposed right like you cannot use outse messages via interchain accounts so there is some opinion is like the minimum set of things um are allowed such that the is useful um so when I said whatever can be built with it's already a bit limited but only a very little amount maybe zooming out a little bit uh I think in general it seems like in the crypto space uh there is a lot of kind of concern that you know there's been all

this investment in infrastructure scalability propability and at the same time you know we don't see a lot of uh user growth and adoption is that something you guys worry about like where and where do you guys think we are in this sort of crypto adoption cycle yeah I mean that's AAL question right like where are the apps uh but I do think I do think like we are seeing kind of like cooler and cooler apps coming online I think that the original application of P of like crypto is ultimately payments so I think um that's s like the biggest problem Cy how how

can we actually make payments crypto payments M stream because to me that's that's should be clear application but with rollups like we are seeing um like cool experiments with with payments that are possible without rollups so for example there's a project called pay like p y y that is a roll up that usually that is kind of like a a privacy preserving way to transfer stable coins and and new payments and so I just think we kind of like need need a lot more experiments in payments to see kind of like which payment application can actually achieve this this breakout option and so far it's been like it's been usdc on Tron

usdt on TR is used a lot so for some usdt yeah usdt sorry but uh I think we're also seeing like outside of payments we're seeing a lot of other cool um applications like onchain gaming is getting a lot more advanced and like you know like a few years ago you be like onchain gaming was very basic it was like made trade like NFC based onchain gaming but now we're kind of like seeing people develop much more advanced onchain games um this cool project called B3 which is like a game Studio a new game Studio that is launching three games I mean also ultimately I think we'll see what kind of is unlocks by um like greater dat to put I mention like I mentioned for

example there's a lot of AI use cases that people are building that involve users uploading AI models I on CH and especially use cases like ZK machine learning as well I don't think like it should be one or the other like there might be a lot of emphasis on infrastructure but I think that's a necessity to actually have um cool applications they like like Mustafa mentioned for these AI models if no one was building something like Celestia for instance they it wouldn't be possible so I yeah I'm I'm pretty sure that we will see more and more um cool applications but also I'm I'm also not I

also don't think we're done with the in infrastructure yet right like it's it's not we're not fully like all the infrastructures doesn't need to change anymore there still needs to go a lot of like engineering effort uh to actually scale the infrastructure that we have and then also to the upper layers a bit right like there's there infrastructure that makes things possible from like a like a base layer perspective but like for end users I think there's a lot of infrastructure is still missing um to make their user experience as smooth as possible and then I think once that is all done um well will never be fully done it's like it's it's it's Tech it's

engineering so it's never fully done but like once that improved significantly we will see more and more applications I do agree with Mustafa that like payments like even just payments would be just payments would be like the killer applications right um I'm also very I'm also excited about um all these gaming rollups coming um uh like coming to existence more and more so I'm I'm I don't have time to play them myself but I always believe that like games and um um on blockchains or crypto um are like a perfect fit so I think like AI gaming and payments um we'll see more of that and

also applications that we cannot foresee yet and maybe maybe SM so we we talked about a few things so weal about some consensus improvements and the the CK accounts what what are some what are the main other technical things that are you know like on the road map for the next two years yeah so I mean the the main thing is like abundant block space right and that uh basically has two components to it one is on the consensus layer like the block producing layer um so so basically the 10m Network like peer-to-peer Network and like the me pool like there's a lot of optimizations

that will happen there um to make it way more efficient than it currently is and optimize it for throughput and similarly the sampling and the um da Network side needs to improve a lot and besides like this goal like this not North Star like one gigabyte blocks it's abundant block space we want the block space to be verifiable by anyone and we want it to be frictionless so I think like um for the verifiability basically the idea is that you can like run a node like a Celestial night node on every device like you can everywhere wherever you are whatever device you have you like verify the the the correctness of of of

Celestia so to say one one of the main features that is required for that is like a proper um mainly rust implementation because it's easier to to have it compiled into wasm that exists today already you can already go on Lumin RS right and and run a Celestial light node what I find even cooler is that this celesia light node is now integrated into selenium which is like a a block Explorer so what we what you ideally want is actually that you instead of using like uh kepus infrastructure for IPC to submit transactions you'd actually have these light clients running in your browser in your wallet essentially and you

communicate directly with them so you can like even have less trust assumptions for end users um and having them instead of using some like um like centralized API and RPC you'd have them oh I run this thing I've verified it like it's it's not something they have to do consciously but like it is something that we um are pushing forward such that the like end user gets the same experience that they have today or even back better but at the same time are actually running their own Noe so um that's like the the verifiability part and then we want the block space to be frictionless um that that obviously includes like you

you ex like developer ux improvements or developer experience improvements like um API improvements for the for the for the rollup developers but it also includes things that like Mustafa mentioned um with like ZK accounts and and and um what we call Lazy bridging essentially um such that you can like more easily stream like any asset in and out uh through Celestia and I think the the mental model here is that while you interact with um an ecosystem of very heterogeneous chains on top of Celestia like evm chains salana like sbm chains execution environments don't even exist

yet and Rocket chains and and so on so forth like while you interact with in this like while you move in that ecosystem it should feel like you're on one chain right like that's the idea is like as if you were like on etherum or on salana like uh one layer one and you would interact like with these smart contracts it should be at least as good as this and um yeah I think that's the like high level summary of the of the road map cool well thanks so much guys for coming on I think this was super great to to C catch up on Celestia and yeah it feels like it's it's uh it's really sort of getting to the place where we're going to hopefully start see

this uh the consequences right of these uh abundant cheap high performing blog space and uh you know I really hope that Mustafa is going to be right that there's all of this demand in use cases that are just sort of like waiting to happen when you know when we have that structure when we have that like cheap fast uh scalable interoperable block space so I'm super excited to see what's going to happen in next year and two years for Celestia and in the ecosystem likewise thank you cool thanks so much for coming on thank you thanks