Celestia (TIA): Modular Flexibility for a Collaborative Blockchain Ecosystem

The end of October marked perhaps one of the most pivotal events in the blockchain industry — the arrival of the modular blockchain concept. Celestia, the first truly modular blockchain platform, was launched on Oct 31, 2023, having generated massive publicity thanks to its genesis airdrop.

Celestia blockchain allows developers to create their own highly customizable decentralized networks within the broader platform by decoupling the execution and consensus layers. Besides the innovative modularity concept, Celestia gained significant buzz online by distributing its native coin, TIA, to 580,000 users at the time of its mainnet launch.

Read on to find out more about Celestia and how its modular blockchain technology can potentially revolutionize the entire blockchain landscape.

Key Takeaways:

• Celestia is a newly launched blockchain platform with an innovative modular design that makes its execution layer autonomous from the underlying consensus and data availability layers.

• It allows developers to launch apps and networks written in their own execution engines, while providing shared consensus and security mechanisms.

• The major use case for Celestia is sovereign rollups. These operate similarly to Layer 1 networks, rather than the typical Layer 2 rollup protocols, which are highly dependent on their underlying blockchains.

What Is Celestia?

Celestia (TIA) is a blockchain platform built with Cosmos SDK. It facilitates customized blockchain building, thanks to its modular design that keeps the network’s execution layer separate from its core consensus and data availability layers. This allows developers to easily create or port in customized networks and apps that use their own transaction execution mechanisms. Platforms with diverse execution engines can easily be integrated into Celestia in order to utilize its consensus mechanism and security features, while retaining their engines’ properties.

Source: Celestia.org

The Celestia project was initially founded in 2019 under the name LazyLedger. Perhaps recognizing the less-than-perfect initial brand name — hardly anyone would be excited about a "lazy" platform — the project rebranded to Celestia in June 2021. With this rebranding, Celestia aims to become a universal consensus network that’s as expansive and boundless as its name.

Celestia was developed by Celestia Labs, and is also supported by the Celestia Foundation.

How Does Celestia Work?

Blockchain developers can program their solutions and apps using their preferred execution engines. They can then port them to Celestia to access the basic consensus mechanism and data availability checking — processes that are critical to blockchains and decentralized apps (DApps). This modularity lets developers use programming languages and execution environments of their choice.

On the underlying consensus layer, Celestia uses the proof of stake (PoS) block validation method for transaction ordering. Initially, the block validation process will be carried out by 100 nodes. The platform also supports staking delegation from one node to another. Meanwhile, the interconnected data availability layer distributes and stores valid data across the network. The data availability layer contains two main features: data availability sampling (DAS) and Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs), which will be discussed in the next section.

Two types of nodes work to secure the Celestia blockchain: data availability nodes, and consensus or validator nodes. The data availability nodes are further split into three types: light node, full node and bridge node. Light nodes help conduct data availability sampling on the data availability layer, while full nodes store all of the data and submit fraud proofs to the light nodes. Bridge nodes act to connect Celestia's data availability layer and consensus layer.

Celestia’s modular design also makes it a great environment in which to utilize rollups. The pluggable modularity feature of the Celestia platform makes it possible to launch optimistic, zero-knowledge (ZK) and sovereign rollup solutions. Besides rollups, developers can also choose to build custom chains using smart contracts on Celestia.

Celestia Key Features

Data Availability Sampling (DAS)

The data availability layer helps enhance the blockchain's security by utilizing light nodes to check that transactional data is public and valid. As such, the concept is distinct from data storage, which supports the containment and retrieval of historical transaction data.

Celestia’s modular data availability network uses a unique data availability sampling (DAS) technology to ensure the network’s data integrity. Thanks to DAS, Celestia's light nodes need only a small subset of the overall transaction data to verify the overall validity of blocks posted to the network. This means that anyone can easily run a light node on Celestia as long as they have a working internet connection, because very little computational power is needed for data verification. This promotes effective scaling of the layer, because as the number of light nodes increases, more data can be downloaded for verification.

Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs)

Another unique feature of Celestia’s data availability layer is Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs). Merkle trees can be thought of as indexes or tables of content for blockchain data that are used to ensure data validity. Unlike standard Merkle trees, Celestia’s NMTs reserve a separate namespace (partition) for each individual app on the platform. Thanks to the NMT model, each app on Celestia needs to download only its own data, and can ignore the data of other apps. This further improves the efficiency of data validity checking on Celestia.

Sovereign Rollups

Celestia’s modular design allows rollup protocols to operate independently from the shared consensus and data availability layers, while allowing complete autonomy at the execution level. Such autonomously operating rollups are called “sovereign.” This is different from a standard blockchain, for example Ethereum (ETH), whose rollups are dependent on the smart contracts of the mainnet, which then acts as a consensus and data availability layer for the rollups.

On Celestia, sovereign rollups can post their blocks directly on the chain as raw data, instead of relying on smart contracts. Instead of blocks being computed on the Celestia consensus and data availability layers, sovereign rollups execute their own computation. In essence, each Celestia sovereign rollup is similar to a Layer 1 independent network.

While Celestia isn’t exclusively an environment for rollups, its architecture is geared primarily toward supporting rollup platforms, and it’s expected that rollups of various kinds will be the main network types on Celestia.

Modular Blockchains vs. Monolithic Blockchains

Many of Celestia’s advantages stem from its innovative modular design. A typical blockchain — such as Ethereum, BNB Chain (BNB) or Solana (SOL) — has a monolithic, rather than modular, structure. In a monolithic blockchain, all of the key layers (execution, consensus and data availability) are tightly integrated and highly dependent on each other. In other words, everything is stacked under the same hood.

Modular blockchains separate the execution layer from the other two lower layers. As a result, such chains offer several features that can be difficult — and sometimes downright impossible — to implement on traditional, monolithic platforms. 

The key benefits of modular blockchains such as Celestia include the following.

1. Execution engine independence. Thanks to the autonomous execution layer, a wide variety of networks or DApps with their own distinct execution engines can be easily ported into and out of a modular platform.

2. Lower hardware requirements. Running network nodes on modular chains requires lighter hardware specifications than monolithic chain nodes' requirements.

3. Ability to launch sovereign rollups. Sovereign rollups allow for more flexibility in DApp creation because they function like Layer 1 blockchains on which developers can create and run their own consensus and execution layers.

4. Better scalability. Since apps such as rollups operate independently of each other on the execution layer, scaling an individual DApp becomes easy. Other DApps on the network won’t be negatively affected when a particular app is rapidly scaled up.

5. More flexible security mechanism. The shared security provided by a modular chain doesn’t require bootstrapping a new set of validator nodes every time a protocol such as a rollup is added to the chain. The same set of validators ensures consensus and security for all of the networks, apps and protocols linked to the modular platform.

What Is TIA?

TIA is Celestia’s native cryptocurrency. The token can be used by rollup developers to pay for access to the underlying data availability layer. It can also be used for paying gas fees on the network. Other vital functions of the TIA token include staking and governance. Notably, unlike some blockchains, staking is separate from governance in Celestia. In order to participate in governance, you simply have to be a TIA holder. You can stake TIA to be a validator or delegator and earn rewards for securing the network.

Celestia (TIA) Tokenomics

TIA’s initially allocated total supply is 1 billion, of which around 141 million are currently in circulation. TIA isn’t a supply-capped token. It has an annual inflation rate that starts at 8% in the first year, but decreases by 10% each succeeding year until it reaches 1.5%.

The initial supply of 1 billion has been distributed as follows:

• 20% to the public, including 6% for the project’s much-publicized Genesis Drop

• 26.8% to R&D and ecosystem development

• 19.7% to Series A and B early backers

• 15.9% to seed early backers

• 17.6% to the initial core contributor team

Celestia Crypto Price Prediction

As of Nov 14, 2023, the TIA token is trading at $5.32, which is 8.76% lower than its all-time high of $5.90 achieved on Nov 13, 2023, and over 150% higher than its all-time low of $2.08 on Oct 31, 2023 – the day of the crypto’s launch.

TIA’s long-term price outlook is largely bullish.DigitalCoinPrice forecasts the token will trade at $19.18 by 2025 and $56.38 by 2030. CoinCodex is a bit more reserved in its estimates, but still expects TIA to climb as high as $11.59 by 2025 and $13.01 by 2030.

Is Celestia a Good Investment?

Despite making its first steps in the crypto market, TIA is already shaping up as a potentially good investment asset. The key factors in favor of the coin are as follows:

1. Celestia’s innovative modular design may lead to a strong inflow of new protocols, primarily rollups, to the platform. To make rollup developers' work easier, Celestia even offers a modular rollup development framework called Rollkit.

2. The autonomous execution layer could also attract other DApps and networks, in addition to rollups. These platforms will certainly appreciate the benefit of retaining their own execution engine properties while being able to utilize Celestia’s consensus and security mechanisms.

How to Buy Celestia (TIA)

You can buy TIA on Bybit, both on the Spot market and as a USDT Perpetual contract. In order to execute your trade, you’ll first need to deposit USDT into your Spot account or Unified Trading Account. The Bybit Unified Trading Account is an all-in-one flexible account that allows Bybit users to consolidate all of their Bybit Spot and derivative assets.

A USDT Perpetual contract on Bybit allows traders to open long and short positions using USDT as the margin, with no expiration dates. The default margin mode is Cross Margin with 10x leverage, but you can change your margin mode and leverage multiplier at any time — even during an open position — as long as you have enough balance. The position mode is automatically set to one-way, which only allows for either a short or long position, but you can also opt for a hedge mode, whereby you can hold both positions for one contract.

Closing Thoughts

Traditional monolithic designs have long been the default model for blockchain architectures. With the arrival of Celestia, we can now expect a tectonic shift in the way blockchains and rollups are structured and operate. Launched just two weeks ago, Celestia is the first platform that offers blockchain developers complete flexibility on the execution layer.

Building and deploying rollups has just become much easier and more efficient — and a new revolution in blockchain technology is underway.

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