Celestia founder: 100 days online to continue writing DA chapter

IOSG Ventures’ 11th Friends event “Restaking Summit” recently concluded successfully in Denver. The theme of this event covers DA, Staking/Restaking, AVS, Bitcoin Rollup, Coprocessor and other hot topics nowadays. It has set up 4 Talks, 5 Panels, and a fireside chat, attracting 1862 participants to sign up, with a total of 2000+ live participants. We will organize and publish the recaps of the specific speeches and roundtable discussions at the event, so stay tuned.

The following content is the DA: 100 Days Later keynote speech delivered by Celestia founder and CRO John Adler. Welcome to read!

DA: 100 Days Later

John Adler, Co-founder, and CRO from Celestia

Hello everyone. My name is John. I am the co-founder of Celestia and the CRO of Celestia Labs. I mainly work on Protocol Research and manage engineering teams on the development side. Today, I want to talk about the first 100 days since Celestia launched, or more specifically, the 122 days since Celestia launched, and how the advent of scalable data availability has made a difference for apps and developers.

The Celestia blockchain was launched on October 31, 2023, which is 122 days ago, if I remember correctly. Here is a screenshot of the block explorer where you can see the first block created.

Since then, approximately 1 million blocks have been created, and Approximately 4.5 GB of Data Blob data has been published to Celestia. If you tried to put 4.5 GB of Data Blob data on Ethereum’s CALLDATA in the same amount of time, that would be prohibitively expensive. So, what kind of throughput does the first DA centralized blockchain launched by Celestia bring us? Of course, Celestia was one of many at the Restaking Summit. still got more. I don’t want to discuss the DA blockchain, but we can discuss the DA mechanisms that are being developed, one of which is EigenDA by EigenLayer, which I understand provides similar throughput.

But it is important to compare with what currently exists. So if you look at Ethereum's CALLDATA, the average throughput of Ethereum blocks is around 10 to 15kb per second, which is like dial-up speed, right? Dial-up speed is 56kb divided by 8, which is the same order of magnitude as dial-up internet, which isn't really much. Celestia supports 8MB every 12 seconds, which is approximately 670kb per second throughput. The relative difference between the two is shown on this chart, which you can see. You can barely see CALLDATA.

So the launch and availability of the highly scalable DA protocol is crypto’s broadband moment, right? Just like the Internet's upgrade from dial-up to broadband, it has given us a range of applications that were previously unavailable. For example, streaming, uploading videos, social media sites, delivering pictures, music streaming, content sharing and many more. All of this is not impossible to achieve on dial-up, but it would be very difficult. The previous slide talked about throughput, but specifically, what does throughput get you? Well, among other things, it can provide you with cheaper fees, it can also provide you with other things, and of course, the fees depend on market prices and so on. But as a general rule, it can provide you with significantly reduced fees.

This is why many people are excited about projects like EIP-4844, EigenDA, and Celestia, as they unlock many applications that were previously out of reach due to current prohibitive costs. For example, Manta Network will be launched around December 2023, or Celestia will be applied around December 2023, if that's correct. Since then, they calculated that they have saved nearly $2 million in gas fees by using Celestia instead of Ethereum CALLDATA. This is an agreement that was launched just over two months ago. Now, imagine if you extend this savings to using more protocols, and a higher number of rollups, then the gas fee savings are huge.

So, after the first 100 days or 122 days of Celestia launch, we still What did you see? Here’s a screenshot from today’s “L2 Beats” showing a lot of Layer 2 protocols on Ethereum. There are many Layer 2 and Rollups protocols that are not on Ethereum. Some are native to Celestia, or native to other blockchains, such as Solana. I don't know if Solana has any Layer 2, but you can see here, these purple ones, 8 out of 48. , 8 of 40 or 41, currently not reviewed, are using Celestia for DA, with more on the way.

There is a Tab here, which is the upcoming Layer 2. Screenshots, a lot of us are using Celestia for DA, we also saw some things that people have been talking about for a long time, but haven't been deployed for a long time, one of them is the lack of scalable DA solutions, if there is no scalable With a DA solution, large numbers of executions don't have much value because the execution is not the bottleneck, the cost of DA is. But since then, we’ve seen Layer 3 deployed and productionized. For example, in the Arbitrum ecosystem there is Arbitrum Orbit, and there is also the Optimism superchain.

Of course, there are some teams that are developing their Layer 3 solutions. in progress. For example zkSync Hyperchains, I think they were talking about it a few years ago and it's still a work in progress. And Starknet, I forget what it's called, but Starknet is also working on Layer 3. Layer 3 application chains are hosted on the public Starknet chain. Layer 3 has this fractal scaling that has been talked about for a long time. However, since DAs are the bottleneck of execution, they were not much needed before.

Now that you have scalable DA solutions, you're going to see things like Arbitrum Orbit and Optimism Superchain going into production, and people can spin up tons of Rollups, with all kinds of different nice features. You can share bridges, share liquidity, share common community values ​​and governance, and more. Until Celestia launched, this wasn't really a big deal. Needless to say, this is only for the first 100 days, and as additional data availability tiers are rolled out and future developments continue, these previously unachievable things will only accelerate.

There is also the launch of RaaS or Rollup as a service provider. For example, this is a screenshot from Conduit, which I think was released publicly on February 21st of this year.

So it was almost two weeks ago, not even two weeks ago. It actually lets you deploy a Rollup and choose which stack to use, such as OP Stack, Superchain, or Arbitrum Orbit. Select its chain. So, it could be Ethereum or something else. So this will start a Layer 2, or it could be, for example, Base. So this will be Layer 3 based on Base. Of course, choose your data availability tier. This stuff is like the Layer3 of those modular stacks that everyone is talking about, right? There is an execution layer, there is a settlement layer, and there is a data availability layer.

You can choose to use one of these stacks to deploy your Rollup. With a few clicks of a button, click Deploy, and your Rollup is deployed. It's just as easy as deploying a smart contract, or maybe even easier in this case. This kind of thing simply didn’t exist before modular blockchain. Right? Before this, if you wanted to deploy your own blockchain, you had to do a lot of work, modify various codes that were not suitable for forks, etc.

Of course, then you have to start all the peer-to-peer networking yourself and do all that, start the validator set yourself and so on, only before you even start building the community, bringing in the applications and so on, you It takes all this work. In this case, there are these Rollups as service providers. You can deploy Rollup with a few clicks of a button.

Okay, here's what we've seen over the past 100 days. what's next? We're not done yet, of course. We need more throughput, but we're afraid there won't be more throughput. So we're targeting at least 1GB blocks, which will provide roughly 100MB per second throughput, which is another order of magnitude increase.

The launch of Celestia was two orders of magnitude greater than what existed at the time. We hope to increase this by another two orders of magnitude. This will allow you to have a billion users and a million Rollups. In addition, improving the security of data availability sampling, which is the basis of security for all these data availability protocols, including Celestia, EigenDA, Avail, and even Ethereum Danksharding all use some form of data availability sampling, which is the basis of security. So we're developing what we've been calling level-5 light node security, which includes everything up to anonymous data availability sampling. Finally, this protocol scales as the number of users running light nodes increases.

Users contribute to security in a way that traditional protocols cannot. So you can run a light node anywhere, for example, even run a light node in a browser, so you can turn on your phone, open a browser, and run a light node on any device you want, with just a very low Resource requirements. This is something that many agreements do not fail to emphasize. They say just trust the majority of validators, but no, you should run light nodes. You should accept fraud or validity proofs to guarantee that the validator is honest and require very few resources.

Okay, last but not least, a call to action to build anything under Celestia. The benefit of these data availability layers is that they don't have any opinions.

Due to their flexibility, they do not dictate or limit what you can do in their content built on. So if you want to have a different settlement layer, if you want to have a different execution layer, even things that don't exist today, you can build it. And you can build it with Celestia support.

Okay, that’s it for today. Thank you everyone, and thank you IOSG Ventures for organizing this Restaking Summit event for everyone.