zk accounts give celestia functional escape velocity without sacrificing its core principles
a fundamental design choice of celestia is to minimize on-chain state. this means foregoing an integrated smart contract system
while this comes with all sorts of nice properties, until recently one of the biggest perceived downsides was that you couldn't use tia in rollups building on top of celestia without additional trust assumptions
this perceived limitation was imo a big deal because it limited the use of pristine tia as trust-minimized collateral (for example to borrow against, create stablecoins, restake etc)
in may last year, mustafa posted a breakthrough on the celestia forum that showed how zk could be used to give celestia functional escape velocity without a smart contract environment (something that even vitalik previously thought was not possible)!
this opened a research path that is now culminating with zk accounts.
zk accounts don't turn celestia into a settlement layer per se (whatever that even means), but they do achieve something that is far more important and tangible -- they allow tia to be used as trust-minimized collateral across the celestia ecosystem. this, in turn, is a big first step towards realizing the vision of tia as modular money
a fundamental design choice of celestia is to minimize on-chain state. this means foregoing an integrated smart contract system
while this comes with all sorts of nice properties, until recently one of the biggest perceived downsides was that you couldn't use tia in rollups building on top of celestia without additional trust assumptions
this perceived limitation was imo a big deal because it limited the use of pristine tia as trust-minimized collateral (for example to borrow against, create stablecoins, restake etc)
in may last year, mustafa posted a breakthrough on the celestia forum that showed how zk could be used to give celestia functional escape velocity without a smart contract environment (something that even vitalik previously thought was not possible)!
this opened a research path that is now culminating with zk accounts.
zk accounts don't turn celestia into a settlement layer per se (whatever that even means), but they do achieve something that is far more important and tangible -- they allow tia to be used as trust-minimized collateral across the celestia ecosystem. this, in turn, is a big first step towards realizing the vision of tia as modular money
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