Initia taps in Celestia to scale a unified system of thousands of interwoven rollups
The Initia Platform’s unified ecosystem of VM-agnostic modular chains scales securely by leveraging Celestia, addressing the developer complexity and user fragmentation that have held back rollup adoption to date
Modularity is inevitable
Unlike monolithic blockchains, modular blockchains were built to provide developers the freedom to customize every layer of the tech stack: execution, settlement, consensus, and data availability. They decouple these functions among multiple specialized layers as part of a modular stack. Celestia, the first modular blockchain network that scales with the number of users, recently launched and introduced data availability sampling (DAS) and namespaced merkle trees (NMTs) that enable light nodes to verify DA by picking and choosing only relevant transactions. As a result, the burden of downloading entire blocks is completely removed for the execution and settlement layers.
Over the past few months, the interest around “modularity” and “modular blockchain infrastructure” has exponentially risen, but not without its critiques. Critics often argue that modular systems substantially increase the product complexity within the development cycle, exacerbating developer experience. As a consequence, negative downstream effects convolute the end-user product experience within modular frameworks.
Reflect on your own experience using multiple blockchains: tens of bridges, multiple standards of the same token, lack of fungibility, new explorers, different gas fees, managing multiple wallets, and becoming a portfolio tracker wizard. Modular systems supposedly create the same experience for developers: multiple DA layers, execution VMs, lack of interoperability, and an absolute overload of choices. Yikers!
Existing modular chains and rollups are still incomplete products without application-tailored architecture that abstracts away the disjointed pieces of the underlying infrastructure. Initia is designed to create universal consistency and address the existing obstacles of modular systems with the help of Celestia.
In comes Initia.
Initia is a platform for 0-to-1 omnichain rollups that enables applications to build secure, powerful, and scalable modular blockchains harnessing Celestia’s novel DA infrastructure. The Initia Platform is purposely crafted to eliminate the fragmented experience of multichain systems through vertical integration of the entire tech stack. Initia integrates an underlying Layer 1 with Layer 2 application chains (called “Minitias”) through the Initia rollup framework and facilitates inter-minitia messaging through the communication layer.
In Web3 (much like Web2), the average consumer should not be required to jump through infrastructural hurdles arising from choices made in the underlying infrastructure. Similarly, the average user does not care about whether a service is hosted through AWS or GCP. The Initia design philosophy is rooted in the belief that dApps will prevail by providing a useful application with a seamless user experience without requiring underlying tech to be directly exposed to the end user.
Overload reduction
Despite providing remarkable app-chain flexibility, there still remains tens of additional infrastructure burdens RaaS and Modular systems create for new chains. Some examples include fiat rails, CEX support, data pipelines, bridges, and more. The Initia Platform ensures that these burdens are solved from day 1 through specialized use of the Layer 1. It serves to organize data and offer support for these critical services directly to L2s so that application developers can focus purely on building a successful product.
By reducing choice overload and making pointed integration decisions upfront, Minitia L2’s provide a comprehensive set of features that come out-of-the-box that an application developer would expect to have access to on day 1. Highlights include instant bridging, native USDC and CCTP access, token fungibility across Minitia’s regardless of VM choice, oracle interfaces, fiat rails, developer tooling, and frontend widgets to minimize barriers to entry for end users. Additionally, Initia provides well-crafted user products designed to promote consistency across the network of interconnected L2 applications.
Initia’s new VM-agnostic optimistic rollup framework, the OPinit Stack, enables teams to build vertically integrated applications in any computation environment (EVM, MoveVM, or WasmVM) while accessing a common denominator for interoperability and data availability through the CosmosSDK and Celestia.
Versatile applications
Minitias enable teams to develop extremely versatile applications in their favorite smart contracting language and customize the rollup through all of the modules of CosmosSDK. Examples include utilizing AuthZ for native account abstraction or Skip’s Protocol-Owned Builder module to unlock EIP1559-like fee markets, mempool lanes tailored for programmatic gas-free transactions, or even sequencer-enforced top-of-the-block oracle updates.
Securing thousands of interwoven applications
With Celestia’s DAS and NMT solutions, the Initia Platform is able to scale this vision to thousands of interwoven applications. With a shared DA Layer, the Initia L1 validator set, challengers, and instant bridge operators within the Initia system have access to state data to construct fraud proofs to dispute invalid rollup operations. Minitias can directly post transaction data to Celestia, which actors use to deterministically derive the rollup chain’s state and verify correctness of state transitions. Initia’s L1 validator set employs Omnitia Shared Security, a system that natively-integrates Celestia light nodes within the validator nodes to verify data across every Minitia without needing to download entire blocks. Furthermore, relevant actors can utilize Celestia’s NMT design to only download appropriate transactions. OSS allows Initia to scale without bloating the state of its L1 validator set or requiring them to run full nodes of every Minitia.
