The Celestia Roadmap with Nick White

Transcript

downloading an entire blockchain on your MacBook isn't exactly the best way to use your storage space so Props for the idea of light noes coming to the market that is a true story what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup for today's episode we had the pleasure to sit down with Nick white to discuss the Celestia road map recently published by the Celestia team we discussed the path to 1 Gigabyte blocks and what this means for scaling data availability for the entire ethereum and modular ecos system we had a chance to ask Nick about some of the technical challenges associated with scaling to 1 GB blocks whether or not we need more data availability and more block space Also where the novel applications are being built within the

Celestia ecosystem we discuss whether celestian ethereum are long-term collaborators or competitors as well as the vision to scale celesa light nodes to millions and millions of users who can verify the chain from any device super fun semi- technical conversation let's Jump Around right in after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for frax and fractal the new L2 out of the frax ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling frax a modular L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling

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exclusively on say join vertex onay Network now on vertex Edge that's vertex protocol.com what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today we are going to be discussing the Celestia road map which was just released following a interesting episode we had with Justin Drake about the ethereum road map definitely going to be able to draw some parallels and quite a few differences and have some spicy takes for Nick to answer today um as best as best as much info we can we can kind of soak soak in here today um Nick's rocking his favorite shirt so love to see it welcome in brother hey what's up guys well the

spice must flow so let's do it yeah man so why don't we just kind of start with like the this the story of Celestia I think it's super important for people to understand kind of like the founding Mission how this all came together um and kind of how this H how this Vision has evolved since since midet which was almost a year ago now totally so Celestia started with this vision of building a new paradigm for blockchain infrastructure that would be modular in nature and with the end goal of making it so that anyone could deploy a blockchain as easily as a smart contract and you know when you deploy your applications as a blockchain instead of a smart contract you have all

this customizability you have sovereignty and control over the economics um you have better scaling so that was really the you know thesis the core thesis and that Still Remains the the North Star but we've made a huge amount of progress um you know I think that just launching Celestia was a big step forward I think we entered kind of a new era of abundance for for Block space and data availability um and we've have the first you know data availability sampling light node so like the the core concept of this modular data availability layer focused L1 just for rollups has more or less been proven out um and now it's about taking to the

next step right and that's what the road map is about it's you know right now I would say we're kind of in the Broadband era of Da right we have two megabyte blocks we're going be scaling that pretty aggressively over the coming years but that's not enough to take us to you know internet scale global scale uh crypto adoption and that's where you know this fiber era of data availability blog spaces where want to go to next and that's why the focus is on one gigabyte blocks because we believe that that is really the kind of scale that you need to get to in order to enable like the next era of of scalability um and we're also leveling up on all the other fronts you know light nodes are a core part of our um

differentiation right you can still verify the network unlike a monolithic chain like salana that doesn't support light nodes and users are still going to be able to verify the chain when it's at a massive SC scale and without that you kind of lose a whole proposition of of blockchains in the first place and then of course there's a bunch of um level ups that we're trying to Target on the developer and user experience everyone's aware that the big problem in the modular stack is fragmentation and we have to really take a stance and try to do what we can to fix those problems for the ecosystem and so those are that's sort of like the core thesis of this road map and how we think that we go from just like square one and zero to one to one to end for for Celestia and the modular ecosystem

more broadly yeah and I mean since since the launch I mean we've seen the adoption of Celestia I think there's like 20 something rollups on selenium now I know Eclipse has has been publishing a ton of data as of recently which has been great um what are some of the other kind of notable achievements that you guys have have kind of had over the last eight to nine months since mainnet and um also maybe you could highlight some of those Innovative rollups that you know are are a personal favorite or just some some cool ideas that you've seen and played around with on chain totally so I actually think I mean one of the things that kind of blew me away since launch is just how active

the core developer Community is um there've already been 24 cips um there's a ZK working group that is working on ZK accounts that has brought together people from ethereum World Cosmos world like all over the broader crypto ecosystem and there like the level of involvement um from really gigabrain people has just been like phenomenal to see and and again like thanks to all those people because that's they've played a huge role in actually shaping the road map and also contributing to shipping some of these Milestones so that has actually you know been been a real surprise to me I think the other one which you already mentioned to me is the the ecosystem growth really

surprising me to to the upside I mean we already knew that there was a lot of demand for people to build their own chains launch their own rollups but um it's just actually kind of like exceeded my expectations in terms of the number of teams um and the enthusiasm for this modular approach to building building rollups and I think the 20 rollups that are live now on mainnet are just sort of like the tip of the iceberg in terms of like the the the total amount of new chains that are kind of in the pipeline um you it still takes longer than you'd expect to launch a chain and and you know hopefully it becomes better and better the reality is a modular stack as a whole is still relatively nent but there's just so much that's coming and

specifically the the native ecosystem is something that I think is really po poised for um pretty pretty huge growth over the next few months like we have Eclipse they launched obviously already but they're not actually open yet for users we have Anisha which is I don't know when they're going to launch but but they're getting me excited it feels like it could be any moment now and they're going to bring like over 10 rollups um with them Astria with flame movement as well um you know their test net seems to be really successful so far um roll kit and The Sovereign CK are both like incubating a bunch of sovereign chains um so there's just a huge amount of like growth on the horizon and again that's why like um

it's been such a uh so we we realize that scaling is a really high priority because even though it might feel like oh we have a lot of throughput to you know accommodate everything right now literally Eclipse could turn on for users tomorrow and we could be congested so there is a there's actually a pretty extreme amount of urgency to increase uh capacity um so that's that's kind of like what's I'm glad it's a great it's a great position to be in right like every chain kind of wants to have enough activity to to be congested um that's kind of like you know kind of success in a sense but the the thing is that for Celestia we don't want to be we don't

want to have any of these outages like ethereum where the fees Spike so much and becomes us unusable we don't have want to have similar problems to what salana had like a you know earlier this year we want to continue to have a stable scalable abundant block space um that can continue to scale with the ecosystem yeah and there's there's an an element of almost induc Demand by by increasing the supply of block space um you guys are able to almost outpace uh the adoption and then by opening it up there's more scale uh and then you end up in in this element where because there's more Supply um projects are a little bit more apt to to adopt it and use it um for and push some greater uh

transactions through it because because it has more abundance and so there it's it's almost like a like a seesaw effect where you guys can spiral upwards with your adoption and you guys have had pretty significantly more adoption especially more so than some of the other uh da specific providers and then etherum and and its da source as well is is is at that level as well so when you when you're looking at some of the other da providers that are out there you know why do you why do you think that is that you guys have had kind of this level of success do you think it is kind of like the the um significant Community push around modularity do you think it's a first

mover effect of kind of pioneering this minimalistic blockchain design or is it something entirely separate that differentiates you from some of the other da providers great question so I think you know right now Celestia's da market share is currently like 45% roughly um which again like I'm I really um you know surprised pleasantly surprised by that given that we launched 10 months ago um and I think the reason why um Celestia has come out with such a bang is because um we have been at this the longest uh we we kind of originated the idea of a DA layer um to begin with

and you know some people aren't aware of that because ethereum sort of actually pivoted their road map to more sort of like um emulate what Celestia is trying to build um but we were the first team to say hey we want to build an L1 that just does Da that's it and we we like we were the original Ro of centric road map if you will um and you know we as part of that we ended up attracting this early Nexus of Builders really high quality builders who were nerd sniped by this vision and we've been incubating those those teams and th those ecosystems those relationships for multiple years now and so there's there's a kind of like a lot of just like momentum that's been building you know you can't can't just start you can't launch and then try to build

momentum right like we've been been building momentum for since like we kind of like started espousing this new modular way of doing things so that's huge I think we've also been deep in the trenches with those users and like helping them solve their problems and debug whatever is going on like there's you know again this whole TCH stack is so nent that there's it's riddled with with problems frankly and no one's built a DA layer before right so we had an idea of what it should look like but it you know when you're when you're building when you're designing something in a vacuum you can't really know ahead of time how it's really going to play

out and work and so by having these early testers and early Partners who have been building stuff with us from before we even launched um we've gotten to use and leverage all that feedback and again that's informed the road map in a in a huge way um and I think that those relation ships also then just lead to and that that that stability the fact that the the product is better and more robust more well tested all kind of like you know feed into each other to create um you know an effect where celesia is kind of the The go-to Da provider for the moment um I also think I mean one of the things that's been uh surprising to me is how sensitive A lot of these users

early users are actually to the scaling road map because a lot of people who are building applications want to shoot you know for the fences and they are looking at where to build and they're thinking like well is this da layer going to be able to scale like if I have some you know large amount of adoption of my application I don't want to hit congestion I don't want to be crypto kitties right and so they want to also feel that you have a credible road map to scale and so that's another reason why we spent so much time like really piecing together okay how do we actually actually how can we feasibly get to gigabyte blocks so we can communicate that to the community so people can like trust in us and believe in in the Celestia Community to to to to

deliver that right because you're you're when you're building on something you're taking a risk um and we want to do do good and and honor people who are who are risking by building on something that's that's so new could could you expand on like why is it that one gigabyte blocks is is the North Star that you guys are moving towards for anyone who's unfamiliar like what is the significance of one gigabyte blocks and what why are you guys prioritizing this so first of all it's a good meme just kidding uh but but it is I mean it's so it's so clean right it's just like one gigabyte blocks it's like wow and for me like the first time I heard it and and started like saying it

and hearing it it's just wow it's like whoa gigabyte blocks like that just s almost like below is open the Overton window of like what is possible to do on chain you know um like it's just a level of scale that just feels alien to us right we're we're we exist and have existed for the past 10 years since the Inception of blockchains and crypto in this world of scarcity where it's like you know like everything on chain is really expensive and and and we you know we have to gas golf we have to optimize we have to you know worry about scalability and when you say something at gigabyte blocks it just like blows that out of the water and you're just like wow what can we what

can we build it forces you to dream bigger and think bigger so I think that's that's a big part of it right now like more specifically like why why is scaling an abundant block space like a big deal why what does it unlock well first of all right I I totally hear the feedback that like okay well we don't have you know no one needs a gigabyte BLX right now we don't even have applications that want to use like we hear that all the time yeah I was going to kind of push you on that a bit here like the blocks currently are still you know they don't get filled up all the time right so it's it's a big lofty goal for a a small small demand but as you're kind of saying the vision is kind of what supports the growth um but yeah I was

gonna kind of push there as well like it's you know the gigabyte blocks is where we're headed um you but perhaps we ought to figure out how we get the the the four megabits you know filled up first yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's and you know what that's that's totally fair and we are really actively incubating and working with teams and frankly um I would say objectively this is the best time uh there's ever been to be a builder of applications in crypto because there is like a totally new unlock of uh like features and functionality that just did not exist before and and it's not just you know

scaling like scaling is not the thing that's like going to unlock more users but like things like chain abstraction and embedded wallets and all these things that are just making the user experience and developer experience so much easier are going to enable completely new use cases so anyway like I'm super bullish on the next like few years of of people innovating on on the application layer so and and so why do we need gigaby blocks why do we need scale is because I think we're going to we need we're going to need to scale the existing applications in crypto that have some degree of product Market fit I genuinely think like in over in the next

five years we're going to see a uh crypto payments app go like fully mainstream and you know if we want that we're going to need a ton of TPS right if we want like literally you know hundreds of millions of users on some like P app and hopefully even more in the future like we're going to need a lot of throughput right same I I actually Al also think we can scale defi in like in parallel to that once we start to sort of like have adoption of some kind of stable coin payments thing we can scale up defi to those people those users right and all those things are going to take just that alone you're going to need a shitload of box space right next is enable and like there's other you know use cases that already have product Market fit that I think

we'll we'll need to scale up the next thing is that we can enable new applications right so one is just the fact that we can now do like high performance l2s like eclipse and movement and actually start to push the boundaries of execution and see where that leads to like eclipse and movement can actually probably push their performance Beyond even a salana right that that wasn't possible to do before you couldn't just like spin up a salana scale type of network um you because you where would you where would you deploy it we would you deploy it on Salo would you deploy it on ethereum like Celestia's throughput is going to be so vast that you can actually support multiple networks of that size and so I

think there's going to be like a lot more it's going to just enable this fundamental Innovation at the execution layer um and we're seeing a lot of uh cool apps like um onchain AI like there was this um there's this team open gradient who's been building on top of roll kit and just like I think a week ago they were showing how they're publishing the data that allows for like verifiable uh inferences to be run on chain and like again I don't think first of all you need the customizability modularity and then you're going to need a lot of Da to do that at scale um so like there's going to be a a whole class of new applications that um you know we we couldn't build because we were just

con so constrained so I think it's a combination of those two things and and like again just to like sort of wrap up like ultimately the infrastructure layers job in my view is always to be ahead of the curve right because growth and and the growth of of adoption is not a linear thing right it might look we might be in this flat zone right here but dude in six months or a year we could be hitting a crazy inflection point and so it's Celestia's job to always have an O to have an overabundance right and to be ahead way ahead of the curve a few steps ahead so that when that happens we don't have and people are getting all excited about some new crypto app right your mom and

your dad or whoever um people around the world it's not like it just fails it hits a scale fail right we've we've been through that uh multiple times and I I'm hoping that for this next wave of crypto adoption maybe you can we can avoid that maybe we can actually have a super cycle after all because we won't have I'm just kidding about that but yeah that's the way that I see it no I mean I hear you it it resonates big time on like defi summer 2020 on ethereum had rollups been more rollups been where they are today and then I would also maybe add where interrup and perhaps in the next six months where I think some of these chain abstraction Solutions are going to get to then I think the experience that we would have had on boarding people in

kind of like you know that that time would have been way different and and the outcome would have been way different so definitely agree on the infrastructure Pace side and I think that's a that's that's a good framing for uh the vision as well as kind of like growing demand over time now kind of a bit more into the the actual process of getting to the one gigabyte blocks um obviously there's quite a bit of technical requirements to kind of get there I think one specific thing that that we're curious about and I think that this is probably one of the larger technical challenges is kind of how you foresee th this road map towards one gigabyte blocks um while keeping the Celestia node requirements manageable um especially as you guys are looking to do

improvements to the data availability sampling aspect uh as well as thinking about internally sharding these nodes talk to us kind of a bit how how this this kind of challenge is going to be tackled and how you plan to scale this while uh making sure that the internal Tech uh you know stays strong and you know kind of reduces Tech debt you know there's a lot to unpack um scaling is not easy um one of the advantages that Celestia has in terms of scaling or are two things one it's just a data availability Network there's no execution right so when you're trying to scale something that is actually a

monolithic chain there's so many more moving parts and so many things you have to optimize for and when you remove execution it just becomes this very a much simpler problem where it's just like we need to propagate data and synchronize data and we need to publish and allow people publish like the the block and allow people to sample from it um so it's it's it's still a really hard problem but it's like a a significantly simpler thing than trying to scale a monolithic chain and that's a massive advantage and it also means that we can that's why we can exceed the throughput of any monolithic chain like we that's why I believe we're going to be able to have a throughput that is equivalent to like multiple salonas right um so the

main bottlenecks are kind of like if you look in road map there's a consensus um track and there's a a DA Network track uh the consensus side like da is really like a b a bandwidth uh constrained thing because again it's all about like sending and receiving data and synchronizing it and stuff like that and so um one of the big big bottlenecks right now in our in s implementation is just gossiping so gossiping transactions in the men poool gossiping the blocks um there's just a lot of redundancy and unnecessary overhead and so we're doing going to be doing like a series of different um upgrades that basically will make reduce the the overhead on the um the bandwidth for gossiping across

the network and that's going to make make it so that like like as you reduce that overhead let's say it's like 15 times to like only two times or whatever you get a huge unlock of like now we can produce just way bigger blocks with the same amount of resources so that's that's one of the really really big things um and Nick just to clarify that just briefly that's like like light nodes inter like gossiping amongst each other as well as with the more uh like full nodes in the system and there's a redundancy in the amount of kind of confirmations and messaging and gossiping happening and you're basically saying that you can that through these upgrades we can reduce the amount of redundant uh kind of uh communication to

effectively scale more more or less so actually I'm specifically talking about the consensus nodes not the light nodes it's the consensus nodes themselves that are building the blocks gossiping these these Big Blob transactions or whatever they're just like not efficiently using their bandwidth resources and so that means that like for to create a 2 megabyte block they're using just like you know 10 times the amount of bandwidth that they could if we optimize it more and then when you you know when you reduce the amount of bandwidth overhead all of a sudden you you can basically translate all that into building a bigger block more or less so it's more about the consensus note side um there are improvements to the you know light node sampling stuff so

there's a big upgrade coming not in lemongrass but actually in the future maybe in a few months called schwap on the da side and and so the da side of the network what we need to optimize really is uh storage overhead so right now um we already did pruning right so pruning enables people to only they only have to store uh you know 30 days or so of data on the network and after that they can just like delete the rest of it so they can just follow the typ of chain you don't have like the storage that just grows indefinitely as more and more time goes on so that's a big one and then this schwap that I was mentioning is something that overhauls the whole sort of like storage uh implementation of of The Da Network and it's going to

be they claim a 15x Improvement on storage so that means like the da nodes can you know make that much more efficient use of their storage so like if you have you know two two megabyte blocks like you might have you you have to store like I don't know let's say 10 megabytes of data whereas before it used to be like 100 megabytes or some crazy amount of overhead so that's going to be really big and that also makes light nodes lighter because light nodes are already you know very light on bandwidth um we want them to be really light on on storage as well um so those are some big you also mentioned node charting which is sort of like the the the final it's like the endgame um for scaling the consensus Network where we can actually

have um you know one consensus node it look it looks like a you know single node from the outside but inside there are actually multiple machines that are in parallel um you know doing the the coordination of gossiping transactions and and things like that to build a block super efficiently um and and sort of allows you to parallelize and like add more uh bandwidth uh resources essentially to to a consensus note so that's like the the real endgame awesome um one one confusion that I think that we've uh fielded from the community as well just kind of thought about is the the kind of big the big picture message is one gigabyte blocks um and that's

where we're kind of heading however we're trying to figure out what the actual Target like throughput of this is because right now the blocks if you look on selenium every 12 seconds they go through um you can actually watch the little ticker slide which is which is kind of funny um but what's the actual Target throughput of uh these 1 gbyte blocks is it 1 Gigabyte every every 12 seconds is it per one second like what is their what is the endgame on that on the target throughput so you're right the D like saying a block size in absence of clarifying what the block time is is kind of meaningless right because like you know Bitcoin has four

megabyte blocks right whereas Celestial only has two megabyte blocks difference is bitcoin's block time is every 10 minutes right and Celestia's is every 12 seconds so the even though the block size of Bitcoin is bigger it's said like you know orders of magnitude less da throughput so um when we say gigabyte blocks that is assuming you know this 12C block time that we have and so that Target throughput ends up being something like 8 83 megabit megabytes per second roughly of Da throughput and you know we can just kind of like squint and like round that up to 100 megabytes uh per second of Da throughput I think is like a reasonable um memorable like Target for for the da throughput and

it's it's interesting to you brought that up too because one of the other goals and is included in in the road map is um a desire to reduce the block times of Celestia um and so I think that's something that like we will continue to sort of shave off the latency um and that would be enabled by things like um separating the consensus from the da Network in terms of you can have these faster consensus blocks and then only build the data Square uh at a at a lower frequency because the reason why we don't want to have super fast da blocks is that um the more of those blocks you have the more sampling overhead there is whereas if you have one less frequent larger block the the overhead for light

nodes to sample and verify it it you know is much smaller so those are those are um that's sort of the way to think about the the target through but sweet so we're in a world in the future of you know almost 100 megabits per second on Celestia um and we kind of touched on this a little bit but curious you know if you have anything concrete here or perhaps just a little bit into the vision and I think I think we want to dive into some of the stuff that we talked to Justin Drake about as well as some of the ZK accounts here but kind of lasting on this one gigabyte blocks conversation as the o o overarching Point um this this gets us to a point where uh and you know you've said this previously on streams and even earlier today about you know entering this fiber

optic era of of blockchains and kind of handling many Visa transactions Visa networks worth of transactions in in parallel um what kind of apps do you see this unlocking that were previously considered perhaps unfeasible or just in the current times just aren't going to be able to work without this kind of level of data availability scale um and throughput so I think I I would kind of go back to what I was saying which is um we'll be able to support you know the traditional apps that everyone has wanted and thought you know would be great you know product Market fit for for crypto like payments even decentralized Finance obviously um at scale for the first time because I don't

even think frankly that um salana could actually handle a um you know global scale like payments and defi type Network um I think we we're going to need like a shitload more throughput than even the fastest monolithic chains today so um I think that's that's another that's like one of the one of the big ones um and then I think you know we're going to end up with um just enabling things that we didn't think you could do on chain like one of the things that's uh was really cool to see was this chopan framework um built by modular cloud and essentially what it's doing is it it takes your TP like your standard web2 application and it's like you know runs

in JavaScript or whatever and it just turns it into a rollup and like that would not be possible if well first of all you need you need s like modularity but second of all like none of those applications were written in this in the way that you would if you were like building something to to to run on a constrain system right but by having this abundance it's like oh I don't even have to care about that anymore I can just um you know publish my data for my you know application that that is like just a total web to type thing and now all of a sudden it's verifiable so we can bring more and more things that we wouldn't even expect on chain um you know the onchain AI example is a really

interesting one AI is all the rage I think there's you know uh probably some really cool things to emerg from that I think it's still very early um and I I like the actually the mega eth people were talking about something interesting which is like when you have this abundant throughput you could even um just build applications differently where you have like assertions within your own so like smart contract or your application to uh make it harder so like if if there's a bug or there's a hack like it becomes more secure because your your application before like you know actually completing something just does some some checks to make sure like is there anything weird happening here if it is actually let's just cancel this um so you can start to have um better security as as a side effect of this

right um I think that this is like um the the thing that um like all these base level infrastructure things are just meant to remove the constraints so that people can just start to think out of the box and I think if I had the answer of like what is what is the the new application that's going to come out of this that's going to like blow everyone away um that's the that's like really the you know billion dooll question and I think that's that's why we need to attract a new cohort of people who are like excited yeah you never know like no you know when ethereum was launched right no one maybe some people thought about defi but like no one could have predicted it

right like you can't uh you can't know in advance like this it's just like a fundamentally like creative thing where you know once it's once it's there and it's obvious in retrospect but beforehand you don't really know um and so um someone someone out there is going to like for sure take advantage of this and and build something that's going to really um I think um just kind of open our eyes to what's what's possible in this new paradigm awesome yeah thanks for that I I realized that we touched on that in the beginning a bit but good to kind of hear hear some new ideas in there as well I think a lot of people are curious about applications um and and kind of what this enables and keeping the infrastructure ahead of the game will

you know eventually enable that the these ideas as well as these applications so one of the kind of other aspects of the road map is this idea of verifiable block space um and specifically my my first somewhat pointed question here is from what I've heard using fraud proofs like what Celestia does um for data availability sampling is like in many cases of optimistic versus ZK is somewhat subpar to using validity proofs now celestial was able to go live very quickly um get the fraud proof mechanism for data availability sampling out um and kind of thus grow market share but there's now this kind of trend towards okay is it

possible for Celestia to you know do something like decreasing the fraud proof window as you guys improve uh reconstruction performance or even eventually replace fraud proofs with validity proofs which some of the other data availability providers are are are I think you guys might be the only one using fraud proofs so kind of how are you guys thinking about this with regards to fraud proofs and validity proofs um and then you know we can tie this into to the light node and verifiability conversation so the the whole fraud prooof um thing let me just sort of explain it to the audience like what we're talking about because it is a little bit technical so

essentially to in order to enable data availability sampling you have to eras your uh code the block data the original like transaction data that you're trying to publish um the thing is the block producer can actually extend or like encode that data uh in a way that's actually malicious so that even if you had all the data you couldn't re reconstruct the original block so part of the security model for data availability sampling is you have to have a way to make sure that the encoding is done correctly you can either do like do that via fraud proofs or via validity proofs such that like the there's no way to commit to um data that was not encoded properly right so

in Celestia's case we just do read Solomon encoding and we we have a fraud proof mechanism such if the block producer um does it maliciously a full honest full node can just send out a fraud proof to all the light nodes and say hey look you can see that this is this is wrong don't trust this block right um in let's say ethereum like dank sharting their approach is to use kcg commitments um and that has the property of like that you can't you can't like fake it basically so it's it's valid right you you just know um by default and so the the the there's a lot of trade-offs here right so like um kcg commitment so the really what's the difference is that the um there's two

things the fraud proof makes the finality window slower so after you sample right you still have to wait for a certain amount of time before you like to to make sure that you don't see a fraud proof right your light note has to wait um and that fraud proof window is not that long but it's long enough to make the latency slower right the validity proof side obviously you have it's just like a ZK roll up you have inant finality now the the the the downside is that the like kgs and a lot of these approaches to do like validity proved uh I guess uh like eraser coding are slower and a lot higher overhead right whereas like reall en coding and stuff is like just really highly

optimized and um for us that trade-off was better um and it was just too early to try to to to sort of bet on something like kg's even though there's been a lot of improvement in the performance and whatnot uh it's still it's still too early unfortunately we can swap that out you know when we're ready when we think that something has come along that is like it's the same way that optimism can upgrade to you know ZK proving like I think succinct was just talking about how they're like already building like a ZK proved you know op stack type thing right so uh I think it's it's just a matter of like adopting it when it's ready one of the really interesting new technologies out there is called Freda um which is uh promises to solve that

problem and also even make commitment sizes and then like the overhead for sampling for light nodes significantly smaller so um I think it's I think it's better to like in this case wait until we see the right technology come out and be like okay okay this is this is a massive upgrade it's like a no-brainer let's do that welcome to the ignition Mantle's newest campaign to liberate the growth power of Bitcoin fbtc ignition has officially begun with a total token supply of over 2,000 fbtc with a tvl of over 150 million right now you can go on the fbtc website to see all of the featured campaigns saking opportunities and liquidity pools where you can

utilize fbtc on chain today for some of the best yields available on l2s the ignition Sparkle campaign can be found at ftc.com ongoing dampa yeah and you guys I think have done a really great job of making running a light node very very easy like even modular Summit you could scan a QR code and you could see the blocks and you guys had it on projectors and TV screens and you could literally see it happening and I think this is very core to the to the crypto ethos dating back to Satoshi where don't trust verify was a philosophy that there there he goes light note right on the phone light just

Bo it up on my phone Lum see starting to sample baby so there it is right there on the phone running on people want to try this Lumina RS uh you can run you run on your laptop any browser it's it's a light node that is natively embedded in your browser um hats off to Iger the Iger team who built this um but yeah I mean sorry to to interrupt you but yeah I mean like that's a so that's that's a perfect example yeah please a lot of people talk about okay well light nodes they're not incentivized right why can't we incentivize light nodes because they're not civil resistant so anyone could just go out there and you know run thousands of light nodes and like take all the

rewards for themselves right um and they're not really contributing to the the security of the network um so Lightnings are not satified so then they're like oh well who's going to run them you know what I mean um and the the reality and and it's true that it's a problem if I had to actually open a terminal window I mean I I do it because I'm me uh you know but if if if my mom or I don't know whoever your your friend had to who's not Crypton native had to open a terminal window and run a light node and whatever just so they could verify the application I feel like unless they had a ton of like value which I think in the future we will have a ton of value on chain they probably wouldn't bother doing it right they're just too lazy people are lazy right lazy

Ledger um and the the goal of light nodes is that not only now is it it's already extremely low resource so you can run it anywhere you can run it on a phone you can run on a Kindle you can run it people run them on all these different devices right so we have that down but it's still a pain from a from a user perspective to actually you know boot one up and eventually so Beauty of Lumina is that it is embeddable into browsers it's embeddable into uh mobile applications and front ends and that means that a user doesn't have to have any technical knowledge they don't even have to like click a button it's just you load the page and you're already running light node and the vision that I have or that we like the celesa

community has for the long term is that in the future in the same way that https you know when you're using the internet you see the little padlock and it tells you like this internet this connection is secure this website is secure your your data is not going to be leaked to someone you know um and you feel safe using those things we're going to have a similar thing for onchain applications except it's going to be powered by light notes you're G to have a padlock saying like you are verifying this there's no Shady stuff happening here it's all like secure and you can trust it right um and that's really like the the game and and and like even I can imagine like a browser or your wallet if you connect to

something where you're not running light node or you're not able to verify directly you can like you know pop up a thing same same thing with htps where it says like warning you're entering a site that like doesn't support it's not secure so like you know you sure you want to do this uh I think I think we should actually strive for that kind of user experience uh in the endgame because that's what web3 is all about it's about verifiability that's how you as a user can be you know safe know that your funds are not going to be you know stolen by a committee or validator set or whoever um and that's what differentiates crypto from and blockchains from web 2 applications that you as a user can

verify it and know from top to bottom everything is legit and um that's why you we can trust this these systems with billions of dollars in the future trillions of dollars right um and a lot of people are like oh well no one demanding this this level of decentralization and verifiability it's like yeah they're not doing that yet because we're just we're playing in like the little like the kitty pool sandbox version of crypto right like we where we want to go is the entire world economy is on chain right like your the deed of your house is on chain all these things like so much of the world in same way that so much of the world is now online on the internet that's the same vision that we have for blockchains and the

onchain world and when we're at that scale we're going to want these things to be ultra secure and I'm not going to want to just like have my life savings uh and not be able to like verify that that that thing is safe you know um so yeah we we we're going to need that for where we're where we're trying to go yeah I think absolutely I I heard uh Jeremy alair the the founder of circle kind of speaking to the level of scale um and in in terms of some of these Capital markets that he anticipates not just stable coins as the the total addressable market for stable coins but but value in general is at the order of hundreds of trillions of dollars and how

yeah it it's okay for us to use multisig and centralized sequencers but when we're talking about global economy scale and trillions of dollars these corporations and governments are not okay with centralized sequencers and and literally like single digit number of individuals on a multisig like there there's too much keyman risk to in order to uh leverage those systems and so I think on the order of decentralization it does make sense and you guys have done a tremendous job of making the hardware requirements of running a light node so so low I think there is still somewhat of a knowledge Gap where someone comes to the to the light node and it's very easy for them

to get there but someone looks at and they're like what am I looking at and I think some of the features like a like a padlock that you you're mentioning someone who's non-technical can still and verifiability is like a fractal so like you can always verify one level deeper and one level deeper until you get into the literal Hardware that you're using right but but I think kind of Bridging the knowledge Gap so that when a rather non-technical person does pull up a light note to verify their transaction it's as easy to read as maybe a block Explorer and and making it easy for General populations to interpret what they're seeing on the light node so that so that it is easier

to verify and we have just less trust in the system completely so one thing that I'll say is you know if if we think about um you know nation states and and economies right the the um there's this tendency for the the most robust economies to form in the countries that have the most uh robust and fair rule of law and property rights and all these things right um and the equivalent for that like blockchains are like kind of like little like governments or little like economies on the internet right and you know for the same reason you wouldn't like it's hard to start a business in a corrupt you know third world country because like oh it turns

out the dictator is just going to come and rug you right it's the same thing for blockchains like the more decentralized they are the more fair and the more credibly neutral the the rule of law is on that chain the more that the the rights your rights are going to be upheld you can believe in that and Trust in that the more secure that Foundation is the more people are going to want to invest there the more businesses are going to be want to start it want to be started there so that's like the I really think that this is like I it's just it's crazy when people are like oh well no one cares about de centralization and it's just like so shortsighted to me but um the other thing that like people forget too is that if you rewind the clock and I

actually really recommend people to watch um uh C node colluding node Connor's uh talk at modular Summit about light nodes but people forget that back in the day when Bitcoin was uh early when ethereum was early the way that you interacted with the chain was you ran a light node or sorry not a light node you ran a node on your computer and then as as things like progressed people got lazier and lazier became impractical for example for I can't run a ethereum light note on my laptop right it would just take too much um computer bandwidth or whatever but like we used blockchains actually used to be fully peer-to-peer and they used to be genuinely verifiable and that used to be the default user

Behavior it's just that we got lazy now we now we rely on rpcs we you know that we that we trust to serve us the right state that we trust to relay our transactions um and what we believe in is actually returning back to this original Cipher Punk Vision where you're fully verifying by default as a user you aren't you know interacting with the chain via an RPC you are actually it's fully peer-to-peer um and that's again like all in service as this building this TR truly incredibly neutral peer-to-peer trust minimized global system that we can all invest in and build a like a onchain internet native economy on yeah I think

that that Rings pretty um pretty close to home for Robbie here who uh found himself downloading the entire ethereum blockchain uh I believe to engage in uh his first crypto experience in high school and then realize that uh back in 2016 that downloading an entire blockchain on your MacBook isn't exactly the best way to use your storage space so Props props for the idea of light notes coming to uh to the market that a true story um Nick we just have a couple more minutes uh I want to talk about ZK accounts in the lens of the podcast that we recently had with Justin Drake and I think you'll find it fascinating if if

you haven't seen it but towards the end I asked him about the data availability road map and the data focused road map of ethereum and he actually brought up Celestia and I mean he rightfully so uh spoke about Celestia in high regard but also in some sort of a competitive lens um in the sense where he was he came to the conclusion that he is confident that ethereum is going to be the endgame for data availability um with the rise of ZK accounts on the road map um we kind of can there can be an argument that can be made that ZK accounts are adding settlement to Celestia um and I think the original vision and the vision still is for celes to help scale ethereum and

kind of this modit ecosystem but I think my question is are ZK Accounts at all threatening to ethereum is this engaging in more competitive kind of long-term Outlook than you you may have previously kind of anticipated when you guys were creating Celestia um and perhaps we can even touch on as well just kind of how ZK accounts and lazy briding lazy bridging work first and then maybe that'll help to kind of pave the answer for our community as well [Music] cartey is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing

new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology cartey enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cy. that's cy. to learn more about building your own app chain today so the first thing I'll say is modularis not maximalism and I genuinely mean that in that it's not Zero Sum and I I believe two things one is we need all the da that we can get all the like verifiable genuinely decentralized da

that we can get the more the merrier and I think um so like it's it's great to have both Celestia and both ethereum scaling da right and um Celestia genuinely has been helping and will continue to help the ethere the broader ethereum ecosystem to scale da3 but I I actually think there's a lot of people who like I think 444 has been great right um but it's like it's very likely that it's going to get saturated before they're able to you know ship Petra and like increase the blob sizes and number of blobs and whatever and so like Celestia is here to help make sure that the broader ethereum ecosystem doesn't get screwed over when

that happens if that happens I should say and so like Celestia is there hopefully with abundant throughput to enable any l2s or l3s to uh shift over their da when they need to right um so and and also just another modul not not maximalism thing and and like build whatever the mentality is like the more choices developers have the better and I don't think that um there necessarily has to be one da that is strictly more optimal than another right they're all they're all going to make different trade-offs I think that they're probably will be consolidation in the market like long term so with I agree with Justin on that um but like ethereum's value proposition as da layer is like

completely different to to Celestia they've made U just totally different design decisions whether that is like the fact that they have a fully stateful execution layer um that can serve a settle it can actually just also just do execution some people in the ethereum community apparently want to scale execution right they they they they starting to think wow why are we doing this worldcentric road map focusing on da like and you know salana is eating our lunch kind of thing right so ethereum fundamentally just it might be more modulith in the long term right um the da Network itself uses kggs the blob sizes are bigger celestius blob sizes you can have a much smaller blob um so like there's all these like differences

I would say that that that mean that different developers are going to choose different da layers because they're they just offer different trade offs essentially um now what I will say is that Celestia has had the advantage of being able to start from scratch right and be fully optimized for this endgame modular thing uh we don't have that's why we would have as minimal amount of state or execution on the base layer as possible and I I still continue to think that that is what is going to matter long term um so anyway you asked about ZK accounts right and this this notion of lazy bridging um there is a lot more to come on that but like a much bigger story to be told uh in the future but

like to touch on it briefly um people probably heard about ZK accounts what they are is it's a way to you know Celestia has no smart contracts right uh on purpose because we want to keep the layer one minimal so that when you're building a roll up you don't have you don't have to run a full node that like re-executes all this and has all this State and stuff like that like running uh your rollup uh should inherit minimum amount of overhead from the the underlying da layer so um so there's no smart contracts which is it's it's a power but it's also a weakness because it means that for example we can't have a uh fully verifying trust minimized Bridge from Celestia to the rollups built on top of it right there's no way

for us to implement a bridge that can verify a rollup fraud proof or ZK proof right and so right now we're stuck in this space where Celestia can Bridge Tia via IBC to another chain which then can you know that has smart contracts or has some other bridging functionality enabled that it can bridge to these other rollups so it creates this kind of like I don't know kind of web and like more trust assumptions when you're trying to Route the Tia token to the rollup ecosystem and um the ZK accounts the first thing that it's going to enable is what what it what is it by the way so ZK counts are a new um sort of like ability for the the Celestia base chain to verify ZK proofs um and so

there's no smart contracts or anything like that but it kind of gives you the same type of functionality as if you were adding like execution to the base layer but there's minimal amount of state and minimal amount of execution happening and so what this enables for example is you can have a bridge to a rollup where you route Tia through this like ZK account um and then the Tia can be bridged up and when you want to bridge it back down this ZK account can verify ZK proof that says okay this amount of funds is being bridged back essentially so that's that's kind of square one and the original motivation for it it also can unlock things like more trust minimized liquid staking protocols or reaking Etc um people can

build things like like privacy uh enabled uh things and but long but there's sort of like this broader vision of right like like the fragmentation of of modular chains and you guys have done a ton of work and ton of episodes which I've watched about chain abstraction uh in tense all these like really interesting technical Concepts they're going to make it so that the the all these different chains feel more unified and ZK accounts can play a role in that by enabling uh kind of like creating this way of routing assets between rollups in a in a trust minimized and sort of like One-Stop shop type type of way um again there's like

there're we're we're still sort of crafting the full story um but but that's sort of like the the the broad Strokes kind of vision for where we can go from here yeah looking forward to seeing like that that native Tia movement around the The Sovereign rollup in Celesta ecosystem um you know powered by ZK County soon I know that that that's been kind of on the on the Forefront of of y'all's Focus for some time and then also some looking forward to uh seeing Tia out in the initia ecosystem and kind of seeing how that kind of interoperates and kind of spreading the the the the Tia asset itself uh around through different parts of the modular stack um

and and different ecosystems and I think we totally agree with with regards to we need more da um right now it's still very much like a onchain versus offchain less so uh you know it's not ethereum versus salana or Celestia versus ethereum versus ail versus Ian lir it's like us versus all of the amazing builders that are going to try to come on and build really Innovative apps as well as just bring on the outside world on chain um and as always there's different trade-offs with those different designs generally I think that that the road map was pretty well received by the community and um this has been an absolutely great episode

unpacking everything that has has came a bit from the tech to the vision to kind of how you guys are thinking about the imminent next steps the community um yeah and kind of answered some answered some tough questions quite well so appreciate you joining us man and I'll see you in Singapore and um yeah thanks thanks for joining I appreciate it guys this was an awesome conversation as usual you guys have just um been complete leaders I think in the the modular ecosystem helping to like explain what's going on to everyone out there and I just really appreciate it and um thanks for your interest in Celestia and looking forward to hopping back on some point maybe next year when maybe we've scaled the block size which

I think is is coming imminently um so there'll be a lot more to talk about I'm sure let's go four megabits soon 8 megabits and one Gab eventually so thanks Nick Block size is up only