To understand why Celestia is so revolutionary it’s important to understand the 3 core features of a blockchain. These are consensus, execution, and data availability. Consensus is how nodes in the network agrees on what transactions have happened and in what order. Execution is the interpretation of those transactions (determining what transactions are valid and how they impact the network’s state). Data availability refers to the ability for transaction data to be made available for nodes to download.
Every blockchain so far has been monolithic. This means that the 3 core features occur simultaneously. This bottlenecks the network and limits scalability because a full node must execute every single transaction. Celestia solves this issue by separating the 3 core functions of a blockchain. Celestia is a modular consensus and data network, built to enable anyone to easily deploy their own blockchain with minimal overhead.
Anyone can run a full Ethereum node. But it’s not scalable because as more transactions are processed and the size of a block increases, running the node becomes increasingly resource-intensive. Celestia is able to solve this scaling issue.
Since celestia decouples (separates) consensus and execution, a full node in Celestia doesn’t have to execute every transaction that happens. This makes Celestia extremely scalable. Celestia just needs to make sure that the transaction data in the block is available. Celestia’s modular design allowed it to ocme up with Data Availability Sampling. Data Availability Sampling allows small, random chunks of a block to be sampled. Once you’ve sampled enough of them, you have probabilistic certainty that the whole block is available. Data availability sampling is incredibly scalable. It can be run on a phone.
Celestia provides consensus and security on-demand. This enables anyone to deploy a blockchain without the overhead of creating a new consensus network. Celestia is essentially cloud computing for Web3. Cloud services like AWS allow users to launch website on VMs that share physical servers. Celestia allows developers to launch Dapps on chains that share a consensus layer.
Developers have the flexibility to define their own execution layers on top to form their own blockchains. This will allow for increased specialization and more efficient blockchains.
Because Celestia does not validate transactions, its throughput is not bottlenecked by state execution like traditional blockchains. Thanks to a property of data availability sampling, Celestia’s throughput scales with the number of users. Developers also have more flexibility and Dapps can be launched extremely quickly. Celestia is still early, but it’s really exciting. There will likely be a token launched too. I would keep an I on Celestia.
