Celestia serving as off-chain DA for Ethereum rollups 🧵
The main reliance that rollups have on L1 is the cost of calldata and its data throughput. While Ethereum is in the process of implementing its sharding solution, rollups should have a source of cheap data…
and high data throughput to alleviate some of their near-term scaling bottlenecks. While transaction fees can become cheaper when amortized among a larger batch, there is a point at which the fee decline reaches diminishing returns.
This is where volitions and validiums come to alleviate the problem. Volitions are a type of zkRollup that give users the option to post their transaction data on-chain or off-chain. Similarly, a validium is a zkRollup construction that only has off-chain data availability.
Yesterday, @jadler0 took the stage at @ethereumDenver to talk about "Secure Off-chain Data Availability for Rollups".
Miss it? Below are some key highlights: 🧵
"A monolithic blockchain, in its base consensus layer, does data availability, settlement and execution, and usually settlement and execution are tied together."
What's the problem with monolithic blockchains? "The problem is that if you do all these things at the base layer, you're doing a bunch of work, and that work limits the capacity of the system. It limits the total throughput." ~@jadler0
Blockchains that are sovereign have freedom to choose their preferred execution environment. A sovereign blockchain on Celestia has no restrictions imposed on it, giving it the ability to upgrade or fork if necessary.
Ultimately a sovereign chain can make changes in accordance with its own social consensus, independent of Celestia or any other chain.
As such, these blockchains on Celestia are flexible in design possibilities. They can be composable shared environments for many applications…
or single instance applications that don’t require composability with other applications. What Celestia’s shared security provides is that clusters of blockchains can be created which facilitates trust-minimized communication between them.
The Celestia Labs team is excited to introduce Celestiums, which are Ethereum L2 chains that use Celestia for data availability (DA) and Ethereum for settlement and dispute resolution. Read more: blog.celestia.org/celestiums/
Celestiums have a higher threshold of security than previous off-chain DA solutions by adopting a PoS validator set, and will allow for better data availability throughput.
At the core of a Celestium is the Quantum Gravity Bridge, a Celestia to Ethereum data availability bridge.
We’re excited to serve Ethereum L2 teams! Stay tuned for part 2 for more analysis on how Celestiums compare to other off-chain DA mechanisms from a cost and security standpoint.
Modular blockchains are the result of separating the core components of a single blockchain and running them on separate layers.
Here’s what makes them powerful 👇
Scalability
Layers that specialize on a couple of core components allows for greater scalability innovations without the burden of making tradeoffs that come with a modular blockchain. For example, a modular DA layer with DA sampling can scale linearly with the number of users.
Interoperability
Blockchains can utilize a modular shared security layer, like Celestia, to enable trust-minimized bridging between blockchains in the same cluster. This increases both the security and ease at which blockchains can communicate with each other.