Modular Expansion: The Celestia Technical Roadmap

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6 min readJul 18, 2024

Summary of Ismail Khoffi’s Talk, CTO of Celestia Labs

INTRODUCTION

Ismail Khoffi, CTO of Celestia Labs, presented Celestia’s technical roadmap in his talk. He highlighted that the community has been working on this roadmap for months, and even years, addressing three key issues that represent major challenges for blockchain, especially in the base layer and infrastructure.

MAIN PROBLEMS IDENTIFIED

Scalability of the Blockchain:
— Although there is much talk of mass adoption, the current infrastructure is not ready for it. Fragmentation will continue to intensify and become a major problem.
Verification of Blockchains:
— Currently, blockchains are not verifiable by everyone. Many teams sacrifice the basic principles of blockchains for performance gains, which goes against the main goal of minimising trust assumptions.
Bridges problems:
— Liquidity fragmentation is a problem that is intensified by modularity. Applications need to bridge between each other, and this becomes a major problem for both end-users and developers.

CELESTIA COMMUNITY GOALS

Plentiful and Verifiable Block Space for Anyone:
— The goal is to have 1 Gigabyte blocks, capable of hosting multiple users and networks like Solana. Currently, with 2 to 8MB, considerable throughput is already achieved, but the goal is to reach 3.9 million TPS with one gigabyte blocks.

2. Trust Minimised and 1 Billion Light Nodes:
— The ambition is for everyone to be able to run a light node on their device, be it phone, browser or wallet.

3. Frictionless Block Space and 1 Million Rollups:
— The aim is to remove obstacles for developers and users, and achieve a frictionless block space.

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

✔️Lazy Bridging:
— Technique using ZK beads to achieve frictionless block space and 1 million rollups. This would eliminate fragmentation and ease the experience for both developers and users.

✔️Modular Money:
— Solving fragmentation and bridging problems, improving the fungibility of assets between rollups and enriching the user experience in rollups.

PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE

✔️Acceso and Minimal Changes: The architecture is based on minimal changes, adding ZK snark accounts. On top of this is a thin layer of interoperability solutions and bridging protocols, allowing the transmission of any asset across Celestia.

✔️Experiencia Frictionless: An experience is sought where intentions or actions in one rollup are seamlessly executed in another. For more information, the Celestia research community regularly posts on its research forum.

Initiatives in Modular Money

✔️ Packet forwarding middleware: Enables IBC transactions between chains using Celestia as an intermediary, without the need for complex bridges.
✔️ Interchain Accounts: Allows to manage accounts from another chain, crucial for liquid staking protocols.
✔️ Lazy Bridging: Technique under investigation since before the launch of the Celestia mainnet, focused on frictionless integration.

Expanding Blobstream

Blobstream has so far been quite successful, deployed on Ethereum’s L2 and L3 with Arbitrum as a base. The community has realised that you can actually use this to scale any ecosystem, so for Blobstream there have been working proposals to scale upcoming ecosystems like Mina ZKApps for Bitcoin’s L2 and L3 or Solana’s L2.

Rollups Developer Experience Enhancements

✔️API V1 of Stable Log: The community is working on developing a stable version of the API that incorporates all the learnings and feedback accumulated.
✔️Separación Data Availability and Finality Sampling: Proposal for fast blocks that achieve fast completion without sacrificing data availability. Blocks are produced quickly and encrypted with periodic deletion to ensure availability.

Additional Features

Namespace Programmability: Allows developers to set predicates or conditions for the inclusion of blocks in a namespace in a minimalistic way.
Dynamic Base Fee: Adjusts the base fee according to the usage of the chain.

TRUST MINIMISATION AND 1 BILLION LIGHT NODES

✔️ Node Security: Light nodes in Celestia already have similar security guarantees to full nodes thanks to data root verification and fraud proofing.
✔️ Block Data Reconstruction: Celestia’s light nodes already play an important role, but are intended to become even more crucial, enabling block data reconstruction through sampling.
✔️ Light Node Observation: In collaboration with the Protocol Labs team, work is underway to measure the number of light nodes in the network, essential for increasing block size.
✔️ Validity Testing: Validity tests are being developed for thin clients and partial nodes, including state transition tests that could use ZK. It is also proposed to eliminate unnecessary data encryption in validity tests, improving the security of light nodes.
✔️ Private Sampling: Inspired by networks such as Tor, this technique will allow specific sampling requests for light nodes, increasing security and privacy.
✔️ Light Nodes on All Devices: Currently, light nodes exist in Rust, but work is underway on light nodes that work in browsers and Wasm. We are also looking to reduce the synchronisation time of these nodes to improve the user experience.

ABUNDANT BLOCK SPACE

✔️Bloques 1 Gigabyte: There is a clear strategy to achieve 100 megabyte and eventually gigabyte blocks. This includes mempool preparation and block propagation, node sharding techniques that split the data handling load.

✔️ Data Availability Layer: Celestia implements data availability sampling, unique in its class, the goal now is to reduce resource requirements and improve efficiency:

Blob pruning
Reduced storage: data pruning of blobs of similar headers
More efficient DA: Shwap

✔️ Specific Partial Nodes: These nodes act as full nodes for a particular role, storing and managing only the data relevant to their function.
✔️ Uniform Partial Nodes: These allow data to be stored and managed uniformly off-chain, according to business needs.

CPIs and Working Groups

The Celestia community is working on several CPIs to measure the progress and success of these initiatives. Further details can be found in the research forums and active working groups.

📌Celestia Improvement Proposal (CIP)

CIPs/cips/cip-19.md at main · celestiaorg/CIPs

Contribute to celestiaorg/CIPs development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Final Thoughts

Celestia continues to make progress on its technical roadmap, focused on solving scalability, verification and user experience issues. With a combination of technical innovations and a strong community approach, Celestia seeks to pave the way for mass adoption and a more efficient and robust blockchain infrastructure.