Thread by @sandraaleow

Spent some time reading up on @CelestiaOrg as a pluggable consensus and data availability layer.

🧵 Here are some of my findings and breakdowns on the Celestia design:

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Current L1 scalability designs (e.g: sharding) focuses on scaling block production > block verification.

Former is useless without the latter.

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Let's break down consensus vs. execution layers:

Ethereum currently uses nakamoto consensus with proof-of-work (PoW) to build new blocks. Also uses EVM to validate individual transactions.

The reliance on PoW has hindered the scalability of Ethereum as more users enter.

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The anticipated change in Ethereum's consensus protocol from PoW to PoS will allow less energy requirements but will still utilise the same EVM to process transactions.

In a way, this does not fundamentally allow Ethereum to process transactions in better ways.

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Celestia is a L1 blockchain that does something special with its execution layer.

Here are some properties:
- Celestia does not validate transactions
- All it does is that it takes zeros and ones in the transaction data and puts them in a block.

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Current blockchain architecture combines consensus + execution layer. Smart contracts are then built on top utilising the same execution environment.

Celestia decouples consensus from execution layer. Smart contracts can choose execution environment.

Source: Celestia

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How will Celestia scale?

All blockchains except for Celestia and $SOL have finite resources of an end user full node.

Bitcoin is limited to 4mb/block.

Once max cap hits, fee market emerges and fees get more exp.

Blockchain guarantees capacity, not cheap fees.

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As a recap, Celestia decouples consensus and execution layer.

Anyone is allowed to post anything on chain (even invalid transactions).

Nodes will download the transactions compute state of chain locally.

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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.

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Celestia as a modular, pluggable consensus allows for applications and devs to choose the execution layer to build on.

This can then be plugged into Celestia for shared security.

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Ultimately, the goal is for Celestia to become an important infrastructure by allowing for application specific
blockchain deployments.

Source:
maven11.com/publications/m…

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Resources:

1/ @analyticalali's notes on Celestia: A pluggable consensus and data availability layer

https://twitter.com/analyticalali/status/1475251261947584513

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2/ Celestia: A Scalable General-Purpose Data Availability Layer for Decentralized Apps and Trust-minimized Sidechains

blog.celestia.org/celestia-a-sca…

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3/ @jonathanjchang's high-level overview on Celestia:

https://twitter.com/jonathanjchang/status/1477722598138023936

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4/ @Cryptocito 's Celestia Deep Dive: Data Availability Sampling, CEVMOS, Rollups & More

(V informative and highly technical)



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