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Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
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Jul 7 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Rollups are far more than just a scaling solution for L1s.

Rollups are also powerful ways to deploy independent, sovereign blockchains in their own right, like any L1 chain, but with less friction.

Thread. 🧵

(Post: blog.celestia.org/sovereign-roll…)
The most important layer in blockchains is social consensus. Blockchains are fundamentally tools to allow communities to socially coordinate in a sovereign way. This means treating upgrades via hard forks as a feature, not a bug.

However, the current status quo of Ethereum rollups is that they aren't treated as sovereign chains in their own right, but rather "children" of the L1 chain and its social consensus. If an Ethereum rollup can be upgraded, it's considered to be a bug or a security risk.
A non-upgradeable L2 rollup chain is equivalent to a blockchain that can never be upgraded, unless the L1's community agrees to do so via a hard fork.

This is problematic for application-specific chains and sovereign chains.
At Celestia Labs, we envision "sovereign rollup chains".

A sovereign rollup chain is a rollup chain that does not enshrine a settlement layer to determine the valid chain for the rollup. Rather, the chain is defined by the rollup sub-network itself, similar to an independent L1.
Sovereign rollup chains have similar properties to deploying a new sovereign L1 chain (e.g. using Cosmos), but without the overhead of needing to deploy a new consensus network, as they use Celestia for ordering and DA.
Sovereign rollups will make the process of deploying a new sovereign chain as easy as deploying a server on the cloud.

And importantly, sovereign rollups have the freedom to be upgraded via hard forks, without needing to hard fork a settlement layer or using upgrade multi-sigs.
To further the sovereign rollups vision, we're developing optimint, which is software that enables developers to deploy Cosmos SDK chains as sovereign rollups on Celestia: github.com/celestiaorg/op…

We have more engineering updates coming soon!
Sovereign rollups are a very important point in the design space, but might not be preferred by everyone.

We're also working on settlement rollups, which are a type of sovereign rollup on Celestia that non-sovereign rollups may use as a settlement layer.
If you share our belief that blockchains are powerful tools to enable sovereign communities with their own social consensus, check out our testnet, join our community and keep an eye out for more content on building modular chains: celestia.org

For more technical depth about how sovereign rollups can work, and also more detail about how bridging can work, read the blog post: blog.celestia.org/sovereign-roll…

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More from @musalbas

Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
May 25
Today, we launched the new Celestia "Mamaki" testnet, bringing us closer to our vision of enabling anyone to deploy their own chain with minimal overhead.

This will lead to an abundance of shared security and verifiable computation.

🧵👇
For years, crypto has been held back with a cycle of new monolithic L1 smart contract platforms, each racing to the bottom to sacrifice decentralization and security for cheaper transaction fees, yet still not delivering.

Web3 cannot go mainstream under these conditions.
Modular blockchains decouple consensus from execution using rollups, fraud/zk proofs, and data availability sampling.

This will help crypto break free from a seemingly endless cycle of new L1 smart contract platforms, and help the industry progress into a mature state.
Read 7 tweets
Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
May 14, 2021
Thread: debunking common myths about proof-of-stake from non-cryptocurrency people
Proof-of-stake myth #1: proof-of-stake is a system where the rich get richer.

No. Everyone gets a roughly equal return, regardless of how much they're staking. It's like a bank savings account with the same interest for everyone. It has to be that way or it wouldn't be secure.
Proof-of-stake myth #2: proof-of-stake is a system where the rich "control the chain".

No, if you control most of the stake, you don't get to change the rules of the chain, because nodes should independently validate the chain. That's the whole point of blockchains.
Read 8 tweets
Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
Oct 2, 2020
This is a nice validation of @lazyledger_io design. V proposes a different path for Eth 2, where it becomes a scalable data layer for ORUs. Exciting to see Ethereum look at this approach. This is what we're building at LL with some key differences. ⬇️
Whereas Ethereum 2.0 phase 1 is a data availability layer for Ethereum/EVM-compatible ORUs, LazyLedger is a *general-purpose* data availability layer. Our goal is to enable people to build ORU blockchains with any *standalone* execution environment.
The key difference is that it wouldn't make much sense to build a standalone chain using e.g. Cosmos SDK that uses Ethereum as a data availability layer, as the chain would need to take an interest in the validity of the state transition of the on-chain Ethereum smart contracts.
Read 7 tweets
Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
Aug 25, 2020
Thesis: app-specific chains with their own consensus that do one job, e.g. Bitcoin

Antithesis: general-purpose chains that run every apps on a shared "world computer", e.g. Ethereum

Synthesis: app-specific chains that share a secure consensus layer, e.g. Cosmos + @lazyledger_io
We can draw the same parallel with how web developed.

Thesis (90s): run a web server on your own physical machine.

Antithesis (00s): run a site on a shared web server, e.g. DreamHost

Synthesis (10s): run a site on your own virtual machine, on a shared physical server, e.g. AWS
We see @lazyledger_io achieving for the decentralised web, what virtualisation and the "cloud" did for the centralised web.

It'll anyone to have the freedom to deploy a secure, decentralised chain, without the limitations of a shared smart contract environment, instantly.
Read 7 tweets
Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
Aug 6, 2020
The not-inventor of proof-of-work (which was actually invented by a woman called Cynthia Dwork in 1993), along with a few other boomer OG cypherpunk mailing list members, have sadly become senile conspiracist nutjobs that are toxic parasites to the field.
Adam Back is a particularly good example of this. When Satoshi emailed him about Bitcoin in 2008, he never thought it would work. He first got involved when Bitcoin reached it's ATH at $1000 in 2013, opening his first GitHub account the next day.
He has however never contributed to the Bitcoin coinbase. Instead, he capitalised on his Hashcash reference in the Bitcoin whitepaper to raise $80m for his new company Blockstream, which has been a shit-stain on Bitcoin technological progress ever since.
Read 12 tweets
Mustafa Al-Bassam 🧱 Profile picture
Nov 25, 2019
I think many tweets in this thread are wrong. Let me go through some of them.
Layer two scalability solutions are not an alternative to scaling the base layer. If every Facebook user maintained a channel once a year with an on-chain transaction, you still need 70 tx/s, 20x higher than what Bitcoin does. And not to mention UX issues.
Nope, it's because reasonable people realise that only scaling layer 1 or layer 2, and not both, is dumb. Only in the Bitcoin space there are 'layer 1' and 'layer 2' opposing tribes in the community.
Read 15 tweets

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