Celestia (TIA)

A pluggable consensus and data availability layer. Makes deploying a blockchain easy.

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on:
• Testnet release: had their Devnet release in H2 of 2021, testnet planned in 2022 (3-1-2022) Update: first testnet launched on 25-5-2022.
• Mainnet release: Planned (3-1-2022) in 2022

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].
• Has no bridge to post proofs on Ethereum in order for L1 users to know the data is available (28-11-2024). There is no delay on upgrades and there is no relayer failure mechanism.

Governance

Admin Keys

Can upgrade without delay (28-11-2024).

Token

Other Details

• From its FAQ (3-1-2022):

"Celestia will have a token that will be used to secure the network via Proof of Stake, and to pay for transaction fees on the network. We plan to implement a fee-burn mechanism similar to EIP-1559 in Ethereum so that burnt fees will offset new token issuance as Celestia gains adoption."

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed here.

Implementations

• Built on: its own layer.
• Programming language used: Optimint "This is a replacement for Cosmos SDK's consensus framework Tendermint, that publishes blocks to Celestia instead of going through the Tendermint consensus process." 4-11-2022
• From its website (3-1-2022):

"Celestia will support all flavors of rollups, but we are initially focused on the EVM and Cosmos SDK."

• According to this thread (3-1-2022): Smart contracts can choose execution environment.

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency; from a thread on different DA layers (21-1-2024): "Celestia uses Tendermint, which is fast in terms of block finality time, but they also use a fraud-proof design to determine the accuracy of transactions."

How it works

• From Analyst DAO (22-4-2022):

"Celestia node receives rollup transaction (rollup transaction is submitted by a rollup node)

1. Celestia node ensures appropriate fees were paid
2. Nodes order the data (ie produce some sort of time sequencing for the TXs)
3. Attest to the data by collectively signing off on the block’s integrity
4. Compartmentalize the data based on a DNS mapping that corresponds to a particular rollup that plugs into Celestia  

And that’s it! Just receive transactions, and order them into blocks. Unironically, Celestia was previously called Lazy Ledger before rebranding, a nod to the intentionally minimal functionality that the protocol affords.

One of the interesting properties of Celestia is the versatility it affords for execution. As demonstrated above, Celestia provides a protocol for ordering transactions into some sort of time sequencing, then applying consensus to these transactions. While seemingly trivial, its importance cannot be understated.  Now that we have a) a group of transactions within the block b) a collective view on the order in which these transactions appeared, any rollup node can apply transactions to its initial state in the ordering format as produced by Celestia, and compute the new state.

To stress this point further, the Celestia protocol is completely blind to the data within the transactions they are putting into blocks. It’s the rollup’s job to figure out how they want to interpret the data embedded within these transactions (i.e. the rollup themselves establish protocol rules).

There are two ways in which these rollups can configure their architecture to plug into Celestia:

1)      Sovereign Rollups

2)      Settlement Enforced Rollups (CEVMOS, Celestiums, etc)"

• Acoording to this thread (3-1-2022):

Anyone is allowed to post anything on chain (even invalid transactions). Nodes will download the transactions compute state of chain locally. Here is where data availability proofs comes to play. It ensures coding and it will download a few random pieces that can confirm whether a transaction is valid. This happens irrespective of how high the block is.

• From its website (3-1-2022):

"Celestia is a minimal blockchain that only orders and publishes transactions and does not execute them. By decoupling the consensus and application execution layers, Celestia modularizes the blockchain technology stack and unlocks new possibilities for decentralized application builders."

• From Ansem's Q1 report (1-1-2022):

"They are building a blockchain dedicated to being the most efficient and decentralized data-availability layer and will be able to connect to other execution and settlement layers to complete the full modular stack. Since Celestia is only focused on data availability and ordering transactions, their methods for block verification can be simplified with data availability proofs. Essentially, each node in the network is required to sample a small piece of each block to confirm its’ validity and through this collective sampling the network comes to consensus. Because of this, as more nodes are added to the network, it actually increases the throughput of the entire system so the network benefits from being as decentralized as possible."

Upgrades

• An upgrade to the testnet Mamaki is scheduled (19-10-2022) for late October 2022.

Staking

• Celestia supports up to 100 validators (21-1-2024).

Scaling

• From its website (3-1-2022):

"Because Celestia does not validate transactions, its throughput is not bottlenecked by state execution like traditional blockchains. Thanks to a property of data availability proofs, Celestia’s throughput scales with the number of users."

• From its FAQ (3-1-2022):

"Celestia is able to scale as the number of users (light nodes) in the network increases. Celestia remains secure so long as there are enough nodes on the network to sample the entire block. This means that as more nodes join the network and sample, the block size can increase accordingly without sacrificing security or decentralization. Doing so on a traditional blockchain would sacrifice decentralization because a bigger block size would create a larger hardware requirement for nodes to download and verify data. Rollups also depend on data availability for their scalability, so better scaling potential for Celestia will also translate to better scaling potential for the rollups utilizing Celestia."

Their Other Projects

CEVmos

• From Citadel One (1-3-2022):

"In December 2021, Evmos announced a partnership with Celestia to build CEvmos, Celestia-EVM on Cosmos. Celestia is a layer 1 built to handle data availability and settlement but not execution, allowing devs to utilize their own execution environment and using Celestia’s data availability and security.

CEVMos utilizes Celestia and EVMos to create a modular stack: EVMos for settlement, Celestia for data availability."

Roadmap

• From their updated roadmap (5-9-2024):

"A mix of technical innovations on the roadmap are paving the way to 1 gigabyte blocks, including a content-addressable mempool, compact blocks, optimizing CometBFT block propagation, internally sharding nodes, and an improved data availability sampling protocol."

• Older one can be found here (3-1-2022).

Usage

Projects have been deploying the first 20 rollups and Celestia blobs represent 40% of total data published (5-9-2024).

Projects that use or built on it

• Osmosis is expanding outside of Cosmos and into Celestia’s DA layer (11-8-2023).
• From their blog (20-10-2022):

"To date, modular blockchain projects such as Eclipse, Constellation and dYmension have chosen Celestia to be their data availability layer. Currently, Celestia is nurturing 26 projects in Modular Fellows, a new program that supports and mentors modular builders."

Competition

• From a comparison (4-10-2024) written by someone who worked with both Celestia and EigenLayer:

"Celestia is a blockchain. Celestia focuses only on data availability and consensus and does not incorporate execution or settlement, instead offloading these to other actors in the network architecture who are also more specialized in their own feature set and functionality. Blocks in Celestia contain primarily transaction data, not state information. This focus on data rather than computation is what allows Celestia to scale for its purpose of offering more and cheaper data availability than what was possible or available before it launched. Unlike EigenDA, Celestia also supports sovereign rollups. This means developers can build rollups directly on Celestia without relying on Ethereum for settlement or security. This is an advantage for projects seeking more independence or different security models. A core takeaway is that Celestia is a blockchain and benefits from all of the properties of a blockchain while also having to adhere to the constraints, including consensus, data replication, network topology, leader selection, etc...

EigenDA is not a blockchain. EigenDA takes a minimalist approach to data availability. It operates without peer-to-peer networking, consensus mechanisms, or data replication, and lacks a central leader. This architecture enables scalability while still eliminating censorship bottlenecks. By leveraging erasure coding and direct data commitment to a decentralized network, EigenDA significantly reduces overhead typically associated with P2P systems and consensus protocols. EigenDA scales horizontally with the number of nodes, allowing for efficient utilization of bandwidth. Its design principles enable any node to encode and submit data directly, facilitating a highly incentive-compatible environment. This approach not only ensures high throughput and low latency but also supports features like self-verifiability and the potential for cryptoeconomic penalties through slashing and token forking if data becomes unavailable. TLDR: EigenDA is secure, inexpensive, and already has very high throughput relative to other solutions."

• From a thread on different DA layers (21-1-2024):

"Celestia and Avail use large blocks, data availability sampling, and light nodes to serve increasing demand. EigenDA uses DACs, which are also considered scalable, but more centralized."

• Has similarities with Cosmos and Polkadot, however within Celestia, its chains do not inherit the security of the main chain.
• Avail works in a similar way, rollups do not (4-11-2022):

"Celestia and Polygon Avail (and probably others that we’re not yet aware of) are new blockchains that have been specially designed to solve the data availability problem, in what is called ‘modular blockchain’ architecture. These blockchains don't verify transactions, but simply check that each block was added by consensus and that new blocks are available to the network.

Rollups do not post their blocks to a smart contract, but directly onto data availability chain as raw data. The Celestia consensus and data availability layer doesn’t interpret or perform computations on the rollup blocks, nor run an on-chain light client for the rollup."

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Has no bridge to post proofs on Ethereum in order for L1 users to know the data is available (28-11-2024). There is no delay on upgrades and there is no relayer failure mechanism.
• Had recent investment from bankrupt FTX. This could mean fall-out risk. The investment turned out to be $1.75M in tokens, this is before Celestia has announced a token (8-12-2022).

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Mustafa Al-Bassam, self-proclaimed co-founder of LulzSec
• Ismail Khoffi; co-founder, has been in the Cosmos ecosystem since 2018 while working at All In Bits.
• "The community has already drafted or proposed 24 Celestia Improvement Proposals (CIPs), representing six different core dev entities." (5-9-2024)

Advisors

• Zaki Manian — Co-creator of IBC and early Cosmos contributor
• Ethan Buchman — Co-founder of Tendermint and Co-founder of Cosmos
• Morgan Beller — General Partner at NFX and Co-creator of Diem≋ (fka Libra)
• Nick White — Co-founder of Harmony
• James Prestwich — Founder of Summa (acquired by Celo)
• George Danezis — Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at University College London

Funding

• Raised $100M in new funding (24-9-2024):

"Led by Bain Capital Crypto with Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures, 1kx, and Placeholder participating."

• Announced a $55M raise (25-10-2022):

"Led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital with participation from Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, and select angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Eric Wall and Jutta Steiner."

• Celestia Labs closed a $1.5m seed fundraise (3-3-2021) from Interchain Foundation, Binance Labs, Maven 11 Capital, KR1, and others

Partner

• From Dose of DeFi (4-11-2022):

"Celestia’s first partners (or ‘Modular Fellows’, as it calls them) are mostly projects that enable easier rollup deployment by utilizing Celestia’s data architecture, which is designed to store rollup data, not transactions. Important examples include:

1. dYmension: ‘Home of the RollApps’. This allows rollups to issue tokens and choose which data availability layer to use (e.g. Celestia or Polygon Avail).
2. AltLayer: Ethereum-compatible tailored rollups-as-a-service. These are high-throughput ‘disposable’ rollups, where NFTs are minted and then bridged to an L1.
3. Eclipse: Rollups using the Solana VM and the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol."

• From this thread (9-2-2022):

"In mid‐Dec. 2021, EVMos announced partnership with Celestia to build modular tech stack for EVM dApps; it will be rollup centric at the execution layer ‐ Data availability: Celestia ‐ Settlement: EVMos EVM ‐ Execution: rollups (zk‐RU or optimistic RU)"

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