Celestia — Blockchain Data Availability and Scalability
Celestia is free astronomical software that allows users to view stars, planets and satellites. It also enables the user to navigate spacecraft and to explore the galaxy.
Founded with the goal of improving blockchain scalability, Celestia has become the first modular data availability network to launch on mainnet. Its innovative architecture separates consensus and execution, enabling dApps to benefit from a host of advantages.
The Future of Data Availability
In blockchains, data availability is all about verifying that the transaction data of a new block is public and accessible to anyone. It’s a fundamental requirement for maintaining security in a distributed network.
The problem is that a growing blockchain leads to massive amounts of transaction data. This can be hard or even impossible for full nodes to download in order to verify a block. That’s where Celestia comes in.
Celestia is the world’s first modular data availability blockchain, with a live mainnet and a diverse ecosystem of rollup chains and apps that rely on it for consensus and data availability. It achieves scalability without sacrificing decentralization by separating execution from consensus and implementing a revolutionary technology called Data Availability Sampling (DAS).
DAS lets light nodes inspect just a random sample of a block, rather than the entire blockchain, to know that the data in the block is indeed available. This allows for much faster and lighter nodes — which can run on standard computers or smartphones — to verify a blockchain, saving both time and bandwidth.
Sovereignty and Customizability
Most blockchain networks today have a monolithic architecture, with core functions of consensus and execution all happening at the same time. This creates a significant demand for enhanced computing power and bandwidth, driving up operational costs and slowing network performance.
Celestia solves this problem by decoupling these two key functions of a blockchain. Our fundamental layer-1 consensus and data availability layer allows developers to build their own execution layer (or layer-2 rollup) atop it, providing the scalable infra they need without sacrificing decentralization or security.
This allows dApp developers to choose how they want to make their applications perform. For example, they can implement ring signatures that enable standard computers and smartphones to act as light nodes while still ensuring transactions are validated. They can also implement stealth addresses, which hide the sender’s address on the public blockchain to prevent identity theft and fraud.
Unmatched Scalability
Celestia solves scalability issues that have plagued monolithic blockchain networks by decoupling execution from consensus. This allows each rollup to only execute txs that are relevant to their applications.
Furthermore, Celestia’s light nodes are able to verify transactions through data availability proofs without downloading full blocks. This helps to reduce bandwidth costs and make the network more scalable.
As a result, Celestia can support massive user demand without sacrificing security or decentralization. The platform also aims to alleviate the strain on primary layer 1 blockchains by providing a venue for the reams of data generated by the rapidly growing ecosystem of layer 2 networks that work atop them.
A Dynamic Ecosystem
With a modular approach, Celestia is enabling a future of interoperable blockchain utilities that serve one another. These blockchains will be able to take advantage of Celestia’s superior data availability and scalability.
Celestia’s scalability comes from the fact that full nodes only need to verify data availability, rather than both transaction ordering and validity. This allows for blocks to be made larger and more extensive while still achieving high confidence in the published data. The platform also utilizes fraud/validity proofs to enable light nodes to check the validity of transactions without downloading the entire block.
Developers can develop specialized blockchain applications on the Celestia platform using their own execution environments and programming languages with minimal setup. This is possible because the Celestia blockchain does not perform execution or settlement functions and instead focuses on consensus and data availability. This enables builders to create rollups and other layer-2 blockchains that are secure, scalable, and interoperable. The rollups can then post their data to Celestia and inherit security from the blockchain.
