Value of Data Availability Services and Project Research — Celestia
Celestia is a data availability project based on the Cosmos architecture. As the project that provides the earliest data availability service framework, Celestia’s technology iterations have gone through the process from Tendermint to Optimint, to the innovative launch of Rollup “sovereign chain” and the release of Quantum Gravity Bridge’s cross-chain bridge contract. Celestia has significantly reduced fees through DA Attestation, provided data availability for Ethereum through Quantum Gravity Bridge, and also brought new design ideas to the L1 public chain.
Celestia also faces serious challenges. Celestia’s modular Rollup is not tied to a specific virtual machine. Celestia Rollup SDK Rollkit currently supports the Golang language used by Cosmos instead of Ethereum’s Solidity, so it is not compatible with EVM. Developers cannot develop Ethereum Dapps through rollkits. In addition, Celestia will also face the embarrassing situation caused by the Danksharding upgrade of Ethereum due to its unclear positioning.
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Celestia Project History
Founding Background
In May 2019, musalbas first proposed a new blockchain concept for sublinear verification of block data availability at the ETH Research Forum. Just half a year later, under the name LazyLedger, the project officially debuted as an Ethereum sidechain. In the initial version of LazyLedger, its core technology used Ethereum to ensure data availability and two-way bridging of assets, while the actual transaction execution was completed on the L2 chain. It is worth noting that this project uses erasure coding technology to achieve data availability proof, which not only greatly improves the throughput of smart contracts and reduces execution costs, but more importantly, it is the first to successfully solve the state expansion problem and implement a plan for sustainable expansion of the L1 blockchain.
Development Path
June 15, 2021
LazyLedge officially changed its name to Celestia and also released its MVP version of light nodes. At this time, the project’s side chain technology has successfully introduced Tendermint as its consensus mechanism and uses IPFG to store DAS data. It is worth mentioning that Celestia was originally designed to provide a pluggable consensus and data availability layer for various blockchains and Rollups. It is a new blockchain architecture that successfully achieves the separation of consensus and execution. Although the Celestia ecosystem itself does not directly serve as an application layer cluster, it provides key technical components for building such a cluster.
October 4, 2021
Celestia successfully developed the Rollups framework optimint based on the Cosmos SDK to replace the previous Tendermint. The distinctive feature of this new framework is that it can seamlessly integrate IBC for cross-chain interaction.
July 2022
The Celestia team launched an innovative “sovereign chain” concept. The core idea is that although the settlement layer and Rollups are functionally relatively independent, Rollups actually have the ability to migrate independently, so they can completely operate as a sovereign chain. This means that Rollups can completely avoid a hard fork in future development and instead migrate directly based on its existing settlement status, or choose to directly upgrade its Rollups version.
August 2022
Successfully launched the local verification mechanism for P2P distribution proof, and released the Quantum Gravity Bridge new cross-chain bridge contract.
Celestia Project Advantages
Significantly Lowered Costs with DA Attestation
Numerous Ethereum Layer 2 solutions have made efforts in data availability and fee reduction:
- Rollups utilize Ethereum’s L1 data to execute transactions off-chain and submit the results of state changes to L1 for settlement.
- Validium completes transactions off-chain via DACs. In this process, DACs are responsible for transaction verification and signing of transaction results and provide zero-knowledge proofs as evidence for subsequent verification. Although Validium can significantly reduce transaction fees, it cannot fully enjoy the security of L1 due to the lack of DA guarantees.
- Volitions allow users to autonomously choose where their data is stored on a per-transaction basis, whether on-chain or off-chain, with fees as a trade-off (off-chain is cheaper, on-chain is more expensive). Compared to Validiums, Volitions do inherit the security of L1 when users choose to publish transaction data on the chain and are therefore considered Rollups in this context.
Celestia offers the benefits of both security and scalability compared to other solutions. Although Celestia’s fees as an off-chain data availability mechanism are higher than traditional off-chain DA solutions, this is because validating Celestia’s DA proofs requires a fee on Ethereum L1. However, the data availability guarantees it provides significantly exceed solutions based on centralized or permissioned committees.
When Celestia uses Celestia DA as an L2, it will leverage Ethereum for settlement and dispute resolution. Compared to Validium, Celestia provides stronger guarantees on data availability and has lower fees when submitting data to Ethereum.
Providing Data Availability to Ethereum via Quantum Gravity Bridge
Due to data capacity limitations on Ethereum, the cost of publishing all transaction data to Ethereum can quickly increase. As demand for block space increases, so will resource pricing on Ethereum. Celestia’s strength lies in handling the sorting and availability of transaction data, so its pricing is based on the size of the data without requiring computing and storage resources.
Celestia’s data availability bridge contract Quantum Gravity Bridge has been deployed on Ethereum. L2 Rollups can publish their transaction data to the Celestia network and be packaged by Celestia’s proof-of-stake validators. This data is then passed to Ethereum in the form of a proof of data availability, which is based on the Merkle root of the L2 data and signed by a Celestia validator to prove that the data is available on Celestia.
The Quantum Gravity Bridge contract performs signature verification on DA certificates from Celestia, ensuring that the correct data is available on Celestia.
Celestium is an L2 blockchain based on Ethereum, using Celestia for data availability but using Ethereum for settlement and dispute resolution.
Support Modular Rollups: Separate Consensus Layer and Execution Layer
The modular Rollups supported by Celestia provide a rich selection of building blocks, inheriting the modular development flexibility of Cosmos, allowing users to focus more on specific functions and processing transactions transmitted by ABCI. This specialized design allows developers to focus only on the execution environment, which can be provided by the Rollups framework or SDK.
Compared with sovereign blockchains, the characteristic of the modular Rollups chosen by Celestia is that its development environment can achieve more flexible upgrades and customization, thus avoiding large-scale changes caused by technological changes. Traditionally, major technological changes on sovereign chains require community proposals, extensive discussion of specifications, and lengthy voting and community deliberation before implementation.
Integrate OP Stack to Improve Development Efficiency
Since its launch in 2022, OP Stack has quickly gained attention among Rollups developers. OP Stack helps developers efficiently build L2 Rollups applications on Ethereum. OP Stack Mod provides a beta version of a modular DA interface that allows developers to define a DA layer that allows users to inherit L1 security from any blockchain.
The OP Stack after integrating Celestia allows L2 Rollups users to submit blob data to Celestia, and then only submit smaller data reference tags to Ethereum L1, significantly reducing the cost of Calldata. In this setting, when reading data, you need to query the corresponding data on both chains, which may involve internal verification and calculation processes and may cause a slight delay compared to direct reading.
Celestia’s Dilemma
Celestia Modular Rollups Are Not EVM Compatible
As of August 2023, as L1 public chains or exchange applications such as BNB Chain, Base, and Celo have chosen to migrate to Ethereum as the L2 background, the EVM virtual machine and Solidity development methods have gradually become mainstream in the industry. The Cosmos ecosystem tends to use Golang for development, forming its own unique technical environment. Both prosperous ecologies require developers to adapt according to different execution environments, and the significant differences between Solidity and Golang undoubtedly increase the technical challenges for developers.
The modular Rollups SDK rollkit provided by Celestia is currently only compatible with Golang and is positioned in the Cosmos sovereign chain ecosystem. Although rollkit can interact with the Cosmos ecosystem safely and efficiently through IBC and easily add functions, there are still obvious technical barriers between it and Ethereum, the largest blockchain ecosystem today. This prevents developers from using rollkit to develop decentralized applications based on Solidity.
As the Ethereum ecosystem continues to thrive, demand from Solidity developers is sure to grow. They may prefer to use the more friendly OP Stack framework for modular Rollups development. Celestia’s modular Rollups concept has a head start in its initial stages, but its technology choices are conspicuously lacking in compatibility.
According to our analysis, Celestia tends to choose modular Rollups, which may stem from the token pledge system within the Cosmos technology system. This mechanism can attract more decentralized applications to issue tokens and then transfer them to its ecosystem, thereby achieving a greater economy. benefit.
With Celestia’s slow development progress, the mainnet has not yet been launched after years of testing
The Celestia project was first proposed through a paper in 2018, and development has been proceeding steadily since then. But unfortunately, as of August 2023, its official mainnet has not yet been launched. This leaves decentralized applications such as dYdX that hope to migrate to Cosmos currently lacking an effective deployment solution.
Celestia modular rollups bring professional application development opportunities to developers. Take dYdX as an example. In order to get rid of its dependence on StarkWare technology, the platform chose to build its own Cosmos sovereign chain in the first half of 2022. This strategy can provide better staking opportunities for its tokens and bring new token economics mechanisms to further connect the Cosmos ecosystem and promote the interaction and prosperity between applications. If Celestia’s modular Rollups can be integrated, it will be able to achieve the dual advantages of technical expansion and economic mechanisms at the same time.
It is expected that after the official launch of the Celestia mainnet, modular Rollups will attract more decentralized applications to join.
Celestia Faces Danksharding Upgrade Impact
Danksharding’s concept of implementing DA on the client designed by Ethereum has been scheduled to be completed in stages during the Cancun upgrade in October 2023. EIP 4844 implemented in the Cancun upgrade, also known as Proto-Danksharding, adds the blob data type to the client for Ethereum, and can also prove data availability through KZG polynomials and erasure coding.
In comparison, Celestia uses an additional blockchain to store relevant data and requires the participation of a certain number of nodes to effectively achieve data availability. Celestia is in a rather awkward situation when there are already effective solutions for the Ethereum mainnet, and it has not been able to effectively and clearly position its own development direction.
Danksharding, used by Ethereum for its own expansion, provides data availability services. However, Celestia currently only considers providing Ethereum’s data availability services without considering how it is compatible with other ecosystems. If Celestia is also willing to provide data availability services for the Solana and Cosmos ecosystems in the future, it may be able to differentiate and compete to open up space for more applications.
Considering that Celestia’s solution for providing data availability services is not complicated, but the token economics involved have not yet been launched and are facing the impact of the token value due to the reduction in demand for upgrading Ethereum itself. Celestia may need more technical solutions in the future. Only through improvements and ecological construction can we usher in long-term development.
Predictions for Celestia
New Design Ideas that May Be Brought to the L1 Public Chain
Celestia and modular Rollups continue to test and improve the performance of Ethereum and achieve effective expansion, which will inevitably affect the competition of L1 public chains in the future. Currently, L1 public chains such as BNB Chain and Celo have chosen to become Ethereum’s L2 Rollups. We believe that this situation arises because a large number of public chains need to pursue richer ecological liquidity and hope to capture Ethereum’s liquidity into their own Ecology to achieve its own ecological prosperity. But when this happens — almost all dapps and even mainstream public chains that have been operating stably for many years take the initiative to become Ethereum L2 Rollups — appear on a large scale, innovation in the public chain field will undoubtedly be hit.
The effective expansion achieved by Celestia and modular Rollups has ushered in a new situation in the “impossible triangle” of decentralization, expansion, and security issues: freeing public chains from expansion problems and improving decentralization and security mechanisms. New exploration and expansion.
For example, if light nodes are combined with DA to achieve effective verification of light nodes, it means that all light nodes can participate in verifying block transactions, their verification ratio can be designed, and their voting ratio can also be adjusted. Ultimately, with more nodes participating in the maintenance of decentralization and network security, the consensus and communication modules of the L1 public chain will usher in new design opportunities, which means more innovation in the entire field of blockchain.
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