Modular Blockchains and Celestia with Nader Dabit
Nader Dabit explains Celestia’s modular blockchain model, data availability sampling, sovereign chains, developer options, and the 2022 roadmap.
Episode Description
Nader Dabit explains Celestia’s modular blockchain model, data availability sampling, sovereign chains, developer options, and the 2022 roadmap.
Episode Summary
In this July 2022 QuickNode Twitter Space, Nader Dabit introduces Celestia and explains why he moved from developer advocacy at AWS and The Graph toward modular blockchain infrastructure. He contrasts monolithic chains such as Ethereum and Solana with a stack that separates execution, settlement, data availability, and consensus, arguing that specialization can improve scalability, cost consistency, experimentation, and application sovereignty. He describes data availability sampling as a way for light clients to approach full-node security while allowing block sizes to grow, and discusses Cosmos SDK, alternative execution environments, and the relationship between Celestia and Ethereum’s evolving roadmap. The conversation also examines app chains, cross-chain messaging, Solana compatibility, user experience, testnet access, and projected 2022–2023 milestones. Dabit emphasizes that Celestia itself does not provide cross-chain communication and that developers may have several deployment choices depending on their needs.
Speakers
- Noah Hein
- Anthony Campolo
- Nader Dabit
Chapters
00:00:00 - Opening and Nader’s Background
Noah Hein and Nader Dabit begin with a brief exchange about Nader’s travel before introducing the episode’s subject. Noah asks for a concise background and a high-level explanation of Celestia, establishing that the discussion will connect Nader’s career in developer advocacy with the technical and practical motivations behind modular blockchains.
Nader describes moving from frontend and React Native development into AWS, then into Web3 through work with Edge & Node and The Graph. He says he wanted to improve accessibility and scalability, and that Celestia appealed to him because its team and protocol aligned with those goals. This opening frames the project as both a technical response to blockchain limitations and a career choice rooted in developer access.
00:03:04 - Scalability Costs and the Case for Modularity
Nader explains that his interest intensified as he studied the limits of rollups and other scaling approaches, including trade-offs visible in systems such as Solana. He points to the Yuga Labs Otherside land sale as a warning: transaction costs reached tens or nearly hundreds of dollars, including on systems expected to make applications more accessible. For him, unpredictable or high fees undermine Web3 use cases that require broad participation and dependable costs.
He presents modularity as a major architectural shift rather than a minor optimization. Nader says the existing approaches did not appear likely to deliver the required accessibility soon enough, which led him to contact Celestia’s developer-relations leadership and join the project. His reasoning connects technical architecture directly to the everyday economic conditions developers need in order to build usable applications.
00:05:25 - Monolithic Versus Modular Blockchains
Noah asks how modular systems differ from monolithic chains, using Ethereum and Solana as examples of networks that combine many functions even when Solana adds substantial parallelism. Nader answers that the core modular thesis is to separate blockchain functions into specialized layers rather than embedding everything in one layer. He identifies execution, settlement, data availability, and consensus as the main functions being separated.
He describes rollups as an early modular step because execution is moved away from the base layer and transactions are later posted back to it. The broader idea, he says, is for a base layer to provide data availability and consensus while developers choose or create execution and settlement environments. This arrangement preserves room for different virtual machines and performance models instead of forcing every application into one shared execution design.
00:09:38 - Sovereignty, Governance, and Decentralization
Nader argues that modularity can make transactions cheaper and more predictable while enabling sovereign blockchains. On a conventional shared settlement layer, a major application remains subject to the rules and social consensus of the entire network. He uses the possibility of a large DeFi treasury being hacked to illustrate the concern: unlike Ethereum’s earlier DAO incident, a future Ethereum-wide fork to recover one application’s funds would be difficult to achieve.
A sovereign application chain could give its community more authority over its own state and governance response. Nader references major DeFi projects moving toward app-chain models in Cosmos as an example of this motivation. Noah recognizes that appeal, then asks how independent application chains can remain decentralized instead of relying on only one or two nodes.
00:17:28 - Data Availability Sampling and Light Clients
Nader distinguishes traditional technology scaling, often measured in transactions or reads per second, from blockchain scaling, which must also account for the cost of verifying data. Full nodes download and execute the entire chain, while light clients typically retrieve block headers and therefore historically received weaker security guarantees. A network cannot simply enlarge blocks without considering how many people can realistically validate them.
Celestia’s key contribution, as Nader describes it, is data availability sampling. Light clients can sample portions of block data and obtain security guarantees closer to those of full nodes without downloading and executing everything. He says this allows block sizes to grow as more light clients participate, creating a more linear scaling model. Noah summarizes the idea as expanding the validator population’s practical verification capacity, not merely increasing a transactions-per-second headline.
00:22:30 - Cosmos SDK and Flexible Execution Environments
Nader explains that the Celestia node is built with the Cosmos SDK, but says this does not restrict the execution environments that can be deployed above it. He mentions possibilities including Solana’s Sealevel runtime, the EVM, and Fuel’s Rust-oriented environment and Sway language. The point is that Celestia supplies data availability and consensus while other teams experiment with how applications execute.
He sees this separation as especially valuable for developers who need behavior not available in the standard EVM. A team could modify or fork a virtual machine and deploy a sovereign chain with its own execution rules, rather than waiting for a shared base layer to adopt them. Nader also identifies Fuel with Celestia as an exciting prospective combination in the 2022 ecosystem, while acknowledging that the names and stack were still developing.
00:25:43 - From Shared Hosting to Sovereign Applications
Nader uses the history of web infrastructure to explain the move from shared blockchains toward application-specific environments. Bitcoin required a new chain and validator set for substantially different behavior, while Ethereum made it easier to deploy programs onto shared security. He compares the next stage to cloud virtual machines: developers can retain convenient infrastructure while gaining a more independent environment.
Under this model, a project could continue using a shared chain, deploy an application-specific rollup, or eventually operate a sovereign chain with greater control. Nader presents this as additive rather than a replacement for existing systems, especially for DAOs and DeFi applications. He expects less direct composability between separate chains at first, but says cross-chain messaging projects such as Nomad could provide communication between otherwise independent environments.
00:30:18 - Ethereum’s Roadmap and the Modular Direction
Noah restates the model as many application chains running their own infrastructure while using communication protocols analogous to familiar network protocols. Nader agrees that this direction is broader than Celestia, noting movement from Ethereum, Avalanche, and other ecosystems. He highlights Ethereum’s roadmap as a significant signal because it was moving toward separating execution and incorporating data availability sampling after the proof-of-stake transition.
The exchange clarifies that modularity is not presented as a Celestia-only architecture. Different ecosystems may supply parts of the stack, and developers may combine them according to their requirements. Nader’s forecast remains explicitly tied to the 2022 context: he describes a direction already visible in roadmaps, but not a fully realized production environment, with implementation timelines dependent on major upgrades and the maturity of supporting projects.
00:32:05 - Testnet Access and Near-Term Milestones
Anthony Campolo asks whether Celestia is only a waitlisted concept or something developers could already try. Nader corrects that impression, saying a live testnet was available, nodes could be started, and the network had an incentivized testnet. He places a mainnet launch around the end of 2022 or beginning of 2023, while inviting Anthony to identify the website waitlist that may have caused confusion.
Asked about the next six months, Nader says the ecosystem is still early and needs greater maturity across multiple teams. He mentions Polygon’s Avail and Ethereum’s longer roadmap as parallel developments. He expects developer-facing execution environments within weeks or about a month, while estimating that genuinely production-ready applications would more likely appear in the first, second, or third quarter of 2023.
00:35:55 - A Solana Developer’s Entry Point
An audience member who identifies as a Solana developer asks how existing Solana builders could use Celestia. Nader says settlement layers should become available on testnet in the following months, creating an entry point for deploying Solana’s Sealevel runtime on Celestia. Developers could then use familiar languages, tools, and SDKs while deploying applications through a rollup or settlement layer based on Sealevel.
The audience member asks whether such an application would remain composable with Solana applications. Nader gives a qualified answer: not automatically, at least not at that stage. Cross-chain messaging infrastructure such as Nomad would be needed, and its availability and maturity were still future matters. Noah speculates that a major Solana DeFi component such as Serum could help bootstrap an ecosystem, but clearly marks that suggestion as his own rather than an established plan.
00:38:53 - Why Move a Working Solana App?
The audience member presses on the practical reason to move a functioning Solana dapp to Celestia. Nader says there is no universal reason: if an application has users, works well, and has no scalability or reliability concerns, rebuilding it may not make sense. The choice depends on a project’s priorities, including how it evaluates decentralization and whether it is concerned about the stability of the Solana network.
He contrasts Solana’s performance and wallet experience with the possibility of a more decentralized or independently governed deployment. When asked about connecting Solana and Ethereum liquidity through Celestia, Nader stresses that Celestia’s data availability layer does not itself create cross-chain communication. Separate messaging protocols would be required, and he places that broader interoperability vision in the longer-term future.
00:42:15 - The Limits of a Single Layer One
Nader explains why he expects modular architectures to matter at broader scale. Even a highly performant chain such as Solana cannot be expected to process every transaction generated by global Web3 adoption, and a popular application could overwhelm current networks during a short burst of demand. He frames this as a physical and architectural limit rather than a criticism of one particular chain.
The proposed answer is to distribute execution across many environments while sharing or coordinating other layers as appropriate. The audience’s question about cross-chain applications therefore has two separate parts: modularity can make specialized chains possible, but communication among them still requires dedicated protocols. Nader says the industry is gradually recognizing that a single monolithic layer one cannot provide all future capacity, though the 2022 implementations remained early.
00:45:06 - What Users Need to Know
A second audience participant, describing themselves as a scientific and blockchain communicator, asks whether ordinary users need to understand the modular architecture. Nader says they should not have to manage the underlying details. If wallet experience improves so users no longer need to switch networks or understand RPC endpoints, they could transact through familiar interfaces such as MetaMask and mainly notice faster, inexpensive transactions.
For developers, however, modularity creates several deployment choices. Nader lists using a shared rollup, deploying an application-specific rollup through a settlement layer, combining Ethereum settlement with Celestia data availability and consensus, running a sovereign chain or rollup, or providing a settlement layer for others. He presents these options as expanded flexibility and specialization, not as a requirement that every project abandon shared environments.
00:49:24 - DAOs, Governance, and Blockchain Literacy
The audience participant connects sovereign application chains with DAOs and other digital organizations, arguing that communities could retain more control over their own systems and respond directly to incidents. Noah broadens the point to blockchain literacy, saying that ordinary users should be protected from the space’s complexity and risks rather than expected to understand every infrastructure layer.
He compares this with conventional financial systems, where most people use services without knowing how their underlying networks operate. The desired outcome is a usable front end while specialized builders handle the infrastructure. Nader’s earlier deployment choices support that division of labor: modularity may be technically intricate for developers, but the intended user benefit is simpler access, lower costs, and fewer operational decisions.
00:51:22 - Scalability, Sovereignty, and Developer Flexibility
Responding to an audience question, Nader brings together three themes of the discussion: scalability, sovereignty, and flexibility. He explains that data availability sampling can support larger blocks and more linear scaling, while sovereign chains let communities control their own execution and settlement choices instead of inheriting every property of a shared network.
He also emphasizes the developer experience of choosing or modifying execution environments. Teams can pursue different programming models instead of accepting one chain’s constraints. Nader discusses difficulties developers encounter in the Solana ecosystem and identifies Anchor as a helpful framework, while noting that the surrounding tooling still presents challenges. The audience follow-up is unclear in the transcript, and he asks for more information to investigate it.
00:55:36 - Resources, Early Development, and Closing
Noah thanks the participants and points listeners toward Nader’s educational material, while Nader says he is pinning a thread with related posts, interviews, and resources. He characterizes Celestia and modular blockchain infrastructure as very early, with the network and developer ecosystem still being built. He reiterates his expectation of a mainnet around the beginning of the following year and describes the opportunity to participate while the ecosystem is still developing.
Nader encourages listeners interested in the technology to follow the project’s progress and future incentive programs, without claiming that a mature production network already existed. Noah closes by thanking Nader and the audience, including those who asked questions, and Nader returns the thanks. The session ends with their final thanks and a farewell to the listeners.
Episode Links
Transcript
This automatic transcript retains the original timestamps and wording apart from clear name corrections. It may contain transcription errors or turns that combine speakers.
00:00:00 - Nader Dabit
I was in Barcelona, and then I'm going to Paris and I'm back home right now.
00:00:04 - Noah Hein
Wow, what a what a machine. You're always traveling so much. I'm always trying to. To catch you when you're at home a little bit.
00:00:12 - Nader Dabit
Yeah. It's pretty nice to be home for, for, I guess. Really? Only a week. But I'll be I'll be back for a few weeks after, I think after Paris, maybe, like, not as much travel for a while, which is going to be cool just to catch up on work and, you know, enjoy being home, I guess a little less stressful.
00:00:32 - Noah Hein
Yeah, it's always something that people don't talk about doing, like Deborah stuff super often. It's like trying to keep on the like regular work and other meetings that you try to attend while traveling so much. It's definitely a bit of a juggling act. but it seems we've we've got a couple of people in here right now so we can go ahead and just like launch into it.
00:00:52 - Noah Hein
And as people come in, hopefully they'll they'll just kind of get up to speed on the context. But, I'd love to hear a little bit about. First, if you could give everyone here like a really quick intro to yourself and a little bit about like, what is Celestia after that? Kind of like from a 10,000 foot view.
00:01:12 - Nader Dabit
Yeah. So my name is Nader. I'm a developer advocate. I've been in doing devel for a little over four years now, three years plus at AWS. And then I got into the blockchain space about a year ago and was working with Edge and Node and the graph protocol. Before that I was a just regular engineer doing either mobile development or front end development for about six years and worked in different areas like just a front end developer with JavaScript on the web. And then I specialized in mobile development for about two years, building mobile apps with React Native. And then at the first job I had was at Amazon Web Services. So it got really, you know, involved with cloud computing for a few years.
00:01:59 - Nader Dabit
And that was really great. And then when I started learning about Web3, I decided I wanted to work in this space almost immediately. And I just started looking for work and took the first opportunity that I could get and worked with Edge and Node and the group, like I mentioned, for, for, for a little over a year. And then, started kind of really understanding the space and the challenges, and I started keeping an eye out and looking for kind of like the next thing. And what I wanted to do was to kind of work, I guess, with the team or in, in a protocol or with the protocol or just work period towards improving accessibility. And, and, and I would say improving scalability or being able to work on something that kind of enabled those things. And, yeah, just been keeping an eye out for, for a team or protocol where I feel like my own values align with the values of the founders and the team. And I discovered Celestia. a couple of different ways.
00:03:04 - Nader Dabit
One was a couple of the people that I used to work with at Edge Node, and the graph ended up moving and leaving to go work there. that was the first time I'd heard of them. And, you know, throughout the course of the last few months that I was at the graph, I was doing a little more research and trying to understand, you know, the challenges that we were currently seeing around some of the problems with scalability as we were approaching it currently with roll ups and with other approaches to ones like Solana with, you know, various trade offs with centralization and decentralization, I guess you could say. And I think the thing that really pushed me over to realizing that I wanted to kind of try to focus on this full time was when we saw that Yuga Labs Sport Ape Yacht Club. When they did that land sale and we saw that Rollups and El TOS were now having transaction costs that were, you know, in the tens or in maybe in the, you know, almost hundreds of dollars per transaction.
00:04:12 - Nader Dabit
which kind of was a really, really big red flag for me, and that we have all of these use cases around Web3 that need accessibility and constant costs to be something that is in place for those use cases to kind of be built upon. But we weren't we we aren't there. And even I don't think that we were we were going to be there anytime soon with some of the current ways that, blockchains are architected. And I think that the approach that is being innovated, not only, I guess by Celestia, but the whole paradigm of modular is actually the first real paradigm shift or breakthrough and enabling accessibility. So, you know, at that point I decided I kind of want to try to work for Celestia. So I reached out when I was in Amsterdam to the Devereaux lead there, and just asked them if they had any opportunities on their team. And yeah, one thing led to another and I was able to start working there.
00:05:25 - Noah Hein
Very cool. I would be interested. I heard you say something about, you know, like modular blockchains and how the current blockchains are architected.
00:05:33 - Noah Hein
Would you be able to explain some of the differences, not only for someone that's like familiar with Ethereum, but also like, what is this approach whenever you talk about like in comparison to like Solana, because you see like, this term like monolithic versus modular, it's like both Solana and Ethereum are what I would consider like rather monolithic blockchains than that they do everything. but, you know, Solana has a lot of like, parallelism built in. And I just saw, I think, like some of the, some of the people over at meta are working on another blockchain that also appears to be monolithic, using the language move, which also looks to be like a very highly parallelized, chain. What is the difference between something like that versus Celestia?
00:06:19 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance and a lot of, I would say trade offs between pretty much everything. So just with that in taken into consideration the core thesis of the modular blockchain movement. And this isn't actually only Celestia. In fact, the entire Ethereum roadmap has been influenced by the work that the Celestia has done.
00:06:42 - Nader Dabit
and now you see Ethereum actually moving. almost directly into the same direction that Celestia is actually building, with one major difference that I'll talk about in just a moment, but the entire thesis is that instead of having all of the different mechanisms that enable a blockchain to function being built into the layer one, instead you decouple all of those different layers into specialized layers that perform one of the different functions of a blockchain. And those functions are typically execution, settlement, data availability, and consensus. So when we look at execution, that's been the first modular, I would say approach that we started seeing when we started seeing rollups, and that they took the execution away from the layer one and started putting them on a separate layer and then batching the transactions back to the layer one and then the The next, I guess, you know, innovation or next. Not innovation, but like the next evolution of what happened. beyond that was the, the core idea of like, what if we don't need the L1 to kind of do like any of these things? What if all we all we need is for the quote unquote L1 and then L1? The name term itself might be kind of like, you know, an outdated term sometime soon.
00:08:10 - Nader Dabit
But let's say, what if all we needed was the L1 to provide data availability and consensus, and then we allowed people to experiment and innovate at the virtual machine level at the, you know, with different VMs and different execution layers as well as different settlement layers. And then we can just combine and kind of like I would say, build upon all of these different layers as opposed to kind of making them all be working together. And I think that's kind of the core of what Celestia is. All Celestia offers is data availability and consensus, and then people can build and deploy different virtual machines like Solana, sea level, or like the EVM or fuel, which is a blockchain that's being built specifically for execution environment. I'm sorry for, I would say modular change like Celestia and the future of Ethereum. So you can kind of like take the parallelism that you mentioned of Solana, you know, and kind of like deploy that, you know, as its own separate execution environment. And then there's another. So in addition to what, like the one of the main things that I'm interested in is how a lot of these new innovations are kind of making it to where the transaction costs are lower and more consistent.
00:09:38 - Nader Dabit
And also the blockchains are more scalable, enabling more transactions per second. It also enables this idea of sovereign blockchains that we haven't really seen before. Because if you want to deploy a blockchain application today, you are really deploying, you know, to an existing settlement layer that you're sharing with every other application. So if you deploy a DeFi application to Ethereum and you grow to $100 billion or some, you know, crazy number like we've been we've seen in the past, and then you have some massive hack where like, let's say all of your treasury is drained for for whatever reason, you could never actually re regain that money if the attacker doesn't decide to give it back to you. the the initial Dao hack that happened on Ethereum was able to be recouped because they decided to do a hard fork, but, and recoup that money or recoup those funds. But with all of the applications that we see today. Like that's just not going to happen. Like, there's probably no amount of money where you could convince the entire Ethereum community, to fork to regain some hacked funds because we've just seen it happen so many times, and that's just never happened.
00:10:56 - Nader Dabit
But what if you had control over not only the application, but the entire chain itself? So if you had an entire community that decided and reached social consensus that they could fork the, you know, current state of the chain to recoup that money, then that would actually make a lot of sense. And therefore you start you started seeing major DeFi protocols. And, like a few weeks ago, we saw did move away from the Ethereum ecosystem into cosmos because they wanted to have this this idea of an app chain where they could have full control and be able to kind of, have that possibility in the future, if something like that did happen.
00:11:40 - Noah Hein
Yeah, I would be interested to hear like about, like on the infrastructure side, how, like the how that kind of model impacts decentralization because you think about like, it sounds like a much better world where like, if there is some big hack, you know, it sounds a lot better to say, oh, yeah, let's fork just ave versus forking all of Ethereum.
00:12:02 - Noah Hein
That sounds like much more plausible, and definitely like you could get a lot more of the community behind that. And it's not going to be impacting everyone else. So that sounds nice, but how do you end up running that in a decentralized way, where it's not just like 1 or 2 nodes that are running of a like. Is there anything that Celestia is doing to like increase interoperability between, you know, node?
00:17:28 - Nader Dabit
That enabled Celestia to kind of do what it does, and it's a very technical and nuanced discussion. But to kind of try to distill what's happening is that when you think about scalability and the traditional tech world or the traditional tech definition, it's often just described as how much throughput or how many transactions per second can a network or an application or, you know, or a back end handle. And most of the time it's it's discussed in terms of, oh, like, you know, we have these really, really robust databases and APIs and infrastructures like AWS and stuff that can really handle massive throughput.
00:18:11 - Nader Dabit
And you might hear something like DynamoDB can handle, you know, millions of transactions per second, millions of reads, millions of writes per second. But when we talk about blockchains, Ends. You have to also take into consideration the. It's more of like a calculation between the transactions that the network can handle. Divided by the cost for a user to verify that data. Is that I guess to verify that data? so because that's kind of what makes a blockchain decentralized, is that you are not trusting just a single database to give you the right data. You have this network that is verifying that data and kind of like giving you that, that I guess guarantee that the data is, is actually distributed across this network and that data is correct. So. So with the with with that in mind that we're not talking about just transactions per second, but we're kind of like talking about the calculation or kind of dividing, like the transaction per second by the number of people in the network that are verifying that.
00:19:28 - Nader Dabit
You then have to answer the question, how do we achieve more? How do we enable more people to kind of like validate this, this data? So when we think of validation, we typically think of users running nodes. And you typically have two types of nodes. You have a full node. And then you have like a light node, often referred to like a light client. the full node actually downloads and executes all the transactions of the entire chain. And then therefore they know what the current state is because they've actually downloaded and executed everything. Whereas the light client typically only downloads the block headers and therefore it has a less it's a less trusted source of truth almost you can think of. So When we think of kind of like users running a light client, we typically assume that it's not. And it actually is not the same level of trust, for instance, in Ethereum as like someone running a full net. But the breakthrough in with Celestia is that they've created this implementation of something known as data availability sampling, that enables Lite clients to have almost the same security guarantees as a full node.
00:20:50 - Nader Dabit
and also the algorithm that they put in place for that enables the network to scale with more usage. So the more, transactions that are happening and the more light clients that are running, the more the, the the larger the blocks can can be. And therefore you have kind of this more linear, linear, linear scalability, that happens organically through the network that you don't. You just don't. You just didn't have before. you know, Celestia innovated and kind of like, enabled this and not only, again, is Celestia implementing this, but you're also actually seeing the Ethereum roadmap has also now added data availability sampling to its scalability roadmap. So after we see the proof of stake, the next thing that they're working on is something called sharding, which is essentially what a selection is doing, but it's just a completely different name.
00:21:56 - Noah Hein
So it's very cool. So I guess, if, if I'm understanding that correctly, like, instead of just like, ratcheting up, you know, transactions per second, you know, to get say, say, oh yeah, cool.
00:22:09 - Noah Hein
Where we have way more transactions per second. but you all are working on, bringing in more like, clients that will be able to, you know, kind of pseudo verify. All of these blocks. And so blocks can become larger instead of just increasing the number of transactions. Is that like a rough synopsis?
00:22:28 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, I think so.
00:22:30 - Noah Hein
Very cool. And so I'd be curious, like if, you know, like Celestia is built off of, like, what are the building blocks there? Is that like part of cosmos? Is it built on top of cosmos? Could you, like, talk a little bit about that and why you think Celestia chose that particular ecosystem?
00:22:51 - Nader Dabit
Yes. So cosmos SDK, is what the Celestia node was built with, but there is no, I would say, limitation to the types of execution environments. And, and, you know, applications, I guess you could say that can be Deployed to Cilicia so you can again, you could even deploy something like Solana sea level.
00:23:20 - Nader Dabit
You can deploy, the EVM fuel is a new execution environment that enables parallelism that is written in rust, that allows developers to write pseudo rust. It's almost like, to me, just an order of magnitude nicer programming language, which is called sway and development developer experience than Solana. but, you know, also Solana ish in the sense that you're, you're like writing rust. but yeah, I think I think to me, like the most exciting stack of the future is going to be fuel with Solana. I'm sorry, fuel with Celestia. These names are kind of like starting to confuse me a little bit, but yeah. So like, but yeah, there's no limitations. So I think one of the most exciting things about where we're headed and not again. And I'm not only just speaking about Celestria, I just the whole modularity, the, the new paradigm of modularity is that we're going to have a lot more experimentation at the virtual machine level, because what if I wanted to build out an application that needed specific things that are not built into the Ethereum virtual Machine? I could just fork the EVM, make my changes, and deploy my own sovereign chain to something like Celestia or Ethereum in the future.
00:24:42 - Nader Dabit
And then I have like full control over, you know, modifying different things within the VM.
00:24:53 - Noah Hein
Very cool. So it becomes a lot more instead of, a lot more, composability, I guess even like down to like the programming layer people talk a lot about, like composability among smart contracts and being able to build on top of each other. Do you think, like, does Celestia enable People are still that? Or do you think, like every single application will be kind of like building its own? is there like a sense of interoperability between or. I guess not interoperability. Interoperability? Sorry. like communication between these different app chains? Or is that like, could you kind of you're saying like there's the execution layer and then so let's just providing like data availability and consensus, could you just like, help me map that kind of mental model a little bit like on how apps would talk to each other?
00:25:43 - Nader Dabit
Yeah. I mean, I guess going back to the beginning of your question, before we kind of go into that one, one of the ways I would also kind of frame the evolution of kind of like how we're where we're going here and some of the, the trade offs and benefits of it would be kind of how in the past with, I would say, the traditional tech stack we had, early on, if you wanted to deploy an application you typically had.
00:26:09 - Nader Dabit
This was like a long time ago. You had to have a server, a physical server to deploy it to. And then we started seeing, these managed services types of things where you would have like a cPanel and you would be able to use something like some type of shared hosting, maybe like GoDaddy or some of these other ones, and you would have the ability to deploy a application, but you would be sharing that hosting with everyone else. And, if you can compare that to how blockchains have kind of evolved. The earliest blockchain was Bitcoin. And if you wanted to deploy another blockchain that did something slightly different, you couldn't just use Bitcoin to to obviously deploy that, you would need to fork Bitcoin or create a brand new blockchain from scratch. You would have to bootstrap validators and you would have to kind of, you know, build this entire ecosystem. And it was very challenging. But when Ethereum came out, the innovation there was that you have this shared blockchain or this shared computer almost that everyone could use.
00:27:12 - Nader Dabit
And you didn't have to kind of bootstrap an entire network, or you didn't have to kind of create this entire security from the ground up. You could actually share that security with everyone else, and all you needed to do was write a program and deploy it. what we've seen happen in the traditional tech world beyond shared hosting, is that we now have cloud computing, and we have virtual machines, and virtual machines allow anyone to kind of just SSH into a completely new environment, a fresh environment, and do whatever they want. They have like some pre-configured things that that enable them to build applications, but they're not limited in what they can do. They they have full control over it. And I think that's where we're moving to with the in the blockchain space, where if I want to build out a new a new chain or a new application. Let's say I want to build out a new application I have. I have the flexibility to say, okay, maybe I don't care, and I want to deploy to a shared environment like like Ethereum or something like that, or maybe like a roll up, but you also have the ability to you will have the ability to just as easily deploy your own roll up with your own application as the only application on that roll up, and then you have a lot more control and a lot more sovereignty.
00:28:34 - Nader Dabit
Again, this is really would be really important for DAOs and DeFi applications. and essentially, like we're just going to be having more, I would say opportunity, more flexibility and more options. And I think, like, again, getting away from the whole maximalist, maximalist like type of mindset that you often see, like in the blockchain space, I think more opportunities and more flexibility and more ways to build are always a good thing, and you're never seeing an expression of value. Like when you see these these types of innovations, it's never like, okay, we're we're going to take away the ability to do something. Instead we're just being additive. And this is like a massively additive type of paradigm that we're kind of moving into. Like you're still going to be able to do all the things that we were able to do before, but now you just have more, more options. But going back to the the question around composability, I think that early on it's going to be you're going to see, I would say, less composability directly communicating between different things.
00:29:43 - Nader Dabit
But we have a lot of we see a lot of innovation happening right now around cross-chain communication. So if you look at Nomad, Dot, XYZ and a few of the other teams that are out there, they're really actually already focused on building and solving the challenges of like, cross-chain communication. So I think that, you know, modular along with, cross-chain protocols like Nomad will kind of enable the sorts of use cases that you, that you kind of alluded to.
00:30:18 - Noah Hein
Yeah. I think you, you spoke to something there that is pretty interesting and, just made me think a little bit about how things are architected currently as like you said, Ethereum and like Solana, like most of the blockchains now, are essentially like one really large platform that we all agree to, like, hey, these are the base level rules and we all have to build on top of it. And in exchange for those constraints, we all get to essentially like play programming Legos with each other. the kind of future that it sounds like you're, you're describing would be like all of these different applications can be their own chains, which essentially, if you're thinking, in traditional like servers and software, that this is like a server.
00:31:00 - Noah Hein
Like it's an app and that's all it is. But we now have the ability for. To build that entirely open. And everyone can kind of help run the infrastructure for that. And then you have these kind of cross chain communication protocols that sound something similar to like IDB or UDP, or like HTTP protocols that allow all of these different apps to talk to each other. Is that the kind of future that you see the space moving into?
00:31:25 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. See, I see that happening. I mean, it's and again, it's not just with Celestia, but you literally see Ethereum, and even avalanche and a lot of these other chains kind of starting to move in this direction. But Ethereum has already flipped their entire roadmap to be literally in this direction. And I think that's a really great signal that, that like because they are obviously, you know, a A beacon for kind of like a lot of people in the community. For what? You know, what's happening. So to see them moving in this direction is really cool.
00:32:05 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I do our talking. You reminded me a lot of avalanche because they have a similar kind of model of decoupling a lot of the pieces of their chain. I was curious, looking at the website, it looks like this isn't necessarily live yet. You can, like, join a waitlist, though. Like someone wants to kind of play around with this. That's something they can do.
00:32:26 - Nader Dabit
Yeah. So well, actually no it is. There is a live testnet. You can actually build upon it. There's no there's no waitlist or anything. I'm not sure what that waitlist is for or if, if maybe. Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing which waitlist that you're seeing there, but, you can go to our docs, you can actually spin up a node and you can interact with it. Today we have an incentivized testnet and then an actual mainnet launch scheduled either at the end of this year, at the beginning of 2023.
00:32:58 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Yeah, I'm pulling up the website that I was just looking at.
00:33:06 - Noah Hein
And so I'd be curious, like, is there any, like.
00:33:12 - Anthony Campolo
Who.
00:33:13 - Noah Hein
Or what do you see, like the next major innovations, like what are the the blockers for Celestia right now that you see in your mind online? Is it just you need more people building on it? Like what is the main goal you think for Celestia in the next like six months?
00:33:28 - Nader Dabit
I think there are really many blockers. I think that we're just starting to see kind of this early evolution like into this, but like it's still early and in this new paradigm, I guess you could say. So therefore, you know, all of the people that are kind of building towards it are also fairly early. So I think what we're going to see is just more, maturity between what we're doing along with some of the other people in this space. So you even see, you know, polygon is building their own version of this called avail the Ethereum roadmap. You know how long Ethereum often takes to make updates. So as Ethereum finishes the the proof of stake merge and they start working towards modularity and enabling data availability sampling.
00:34:15 - Nader Dabit
Like I don't know how long that's going to take. I think it's just going to take time. I mean, I think that we are definitely finally like solving some of the scalability issues here, and I think that's extremely important and exciting. and it will probably take some time, but I think you'll start seeing some actual developer facing execution environment stuff within the next month from us. so like if you want to actually start writing code as a developer, writing an app, you'll be able to do that on the testnet here in the next few weeks or maybe month, you can already start running the node and, you know, playing around with that. And we have people building out different things within the ecosystem already. But I think like for maybe real production ready applications, you'll probably start seeing this happen for the first, second or third quarter of next year.
00:35:10 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I found that it said run a node on testnet, join the waitlist, and then build on our developer beta showing the waitlist. So it sounds like if you want to mess around with testnet, you can do that.
00:35:21 - Anthony Campolo
But then they have these couple other things that you can kind of check out.
00:35:24 - Nader Dabit
Okay. Yeah. Let me I might have to check that out. Maybe they need updating even maybe that that waitlist should be done. So I'll check it out.
00:35:33 - Anthony Campolo
It looks like we have someone up to ask a question.
00:35:40 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, that sounds good.
00:35:42 - Anthony Campolo
Manage it. Feel free to unmute and ask a question if you got a chance. If you're AFK right now, then we'll get back to you.
00:35:55 - Noah Hein
Oh, yo.
00:35:55 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
Hey, can you hear me?
00:35:57 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:35:58 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
Oh, sweet, sweet, sweet. thanks for having me up. my question is. Okay. As a Solana developer, how can I like. So, I guess, like. Yeah, as a developer, how can I leverage Celestia? Like, once, you know, like, once you can start, like, actually using Celestia.
00:36:20 - Nader Dabit
we're probably going to see some, settlement layers that are built and deployed, and available for developers to start using on Celestia, probably in the next few months, like on testnet.
00:36:35 - Nader Dabit
And at that point, we will probably be helping and working towards enabling people to deploy the, the, Solana. What is it, sea level Runtime on on Celestia via that settlement layer. So as a developer, that's kind of the entry point that I would probably see is that you'll be able to, you know, essentially write and use all of the existing languages, tools, SDKs and things that you already understand and know. You'll be able to to deploy applications, you know, on Celestia using someone or your own rollup that's been kind of deployed using a C level.
00:37:23 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
That's nuts. So if I like so if I deploy like I deploy a DApp using sea level that's on Celestia, it's still able to interact with like other DApps and it's still like this. I still keep that composability on Solana.
00:37:43 - Nader Dabit
I would say probably you probably would not be able to interact with other doubts as it stands today on Solana until we see Nomad or something like that be available and out of whatever data or whatever that they're currently in.
00:37:59 - Nader Dabit
So I would say probably not right now, but possibly beginning of next year or something like that.
00:38:07 - Noah Hein
Yeah. And for Solana specifically, I think you would probably first see something like a serum would probably be like the first kind of thing that you'd want to move over there. And then people could, you know, if I'm understanding Nadia's interpretation of this correctly, like people could then take essentially serum and start building stuff on top of that, because you essentially have your own app layer at that point. And I know that's how. At least that's how I think a lot of like DeFi on Solana happens is all through, like the serum order book. And that's how like Solana keeps a lot of liquidity between the different apps. I imagine that's probably something how you would see that kind of ecosystem like bootstrapped over to something like Celestia, although that's a bit more speculative on my part.
00:38:53 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
Okay. okay. I'm like so confused a little bit. I mean, like, okay, so as a developer, what, like as okay, say I'm like, the founder of like, a dapp on Solana, right? Like, why would I want to come over to Celestia? Maybe, maybe that answer that.
00:39:16 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
You guys answer that already. But like, like, why would I want to bring like, the DApp that's also composable in Solana and like, you know, bring the sea level over and like, build on Celestia.
00:39:28 - Nader Dabit
Yeah. I mean, I guess it depends on, you know, if everything is working fine and your application is is doing well and you have users and you don't have any issues around scalability or anything like that, then you might not want to. To to do anything. I guess you could say. I think that it depends also around, you know, how you view decentralization. So I think a lot of people that, like how performance Solana is and they enjoy the UX of something like Phantom Wallet and things like that. but they want to have a more, like decentralized network. Or they might think that, or they might be worried about the stability of the Solana network, for whatever reason, might choose to instead build on Celestia in the future. But if you have a DApp that's working and that you have users and it's growing and I don't, I don't think I would move or rebuild anything.
00:40:29 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
Oh, okay. Sorry. Go ahead.
00:40:33 - Nader Dabit
No, that's that's about it.
00:40:35 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
No. I'm just. Yeah. So I guess yeah I haven't, I've just been listening to, like, a lot of YouTube videos on Celestia, like in my spare time, but like, I'm I still don't really have the full picture. I understand that it's like all about data availability, but I thought, like, I guess I got like, like one piece that I'm kind of confused on is like, Celestia will allow for, like more like for like all L, like all L ones to kind of like interact more or is it just like the IBC ones? Because like, you know, like it would be cool to connect like liquidity on Solana with like liquidity on Ethereum. If, you know, Ethereum has like a roll up that's on Celestia. yeah. Sorry.
00:41:22 - Nader Dabit
No, no, I think I think that like, we're still it's still very early. I mean, Celestia isn't even in main net.
00:41:30 - Nader Dabit
So I think that this is more of like a long term type of like vision and long term, where the entire entire not only, again, Celestia is headed, but maybe the entire industry has had headed. I think you've even heard about some people within the Solana ecosystem. Talk about like El twos on top of Solana, which is kind of like, you know, evolving towards, I would say like this whole modular approach. So, I mean, you know, you're asking about, though, if you wanted to transact tokens across from Solana into Celestia, is that kind of your question?
00:42:15 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
I, I know, I think my question is more more around like making like, like, is Celestia going to make it like more easier for like cross-chain interactions? Right. Because like, I'm still not like so sure on the whole like, oh everything's going to be multi chain type of thing because like, it's like right now it's still like really shitty and I think. Like, oh, this. Like this, this.
00:42:43 - Audience member (Speaker 4)
Does Celestia make cross-chain applications more easier because it has like this data availability layer and it allows anyone to create like any type of unique and fully sovereign chain on top.
00:42:55 - Nader Dabit
No, I don't think it makes it easier for cross-chain communication. I think that you're going to need to have pros that are separate, completely separate from Solana to make that I mean, from Celestial or Solana or from any of these like quote unquote layer ones to make that possible. And again, it's like a huge focus. There's even someone kind of put together the quote unquote, like modular stack. And part of that was something like Nomad, which is kind of this cross-chain messaging solution that will will enable that. That's completely separate from kind of what we're doing. But I think like when but if we're moving into this paradigm of modularity and I think, like everyone's come to the realization that, like, you can't scale an L1 to handle what we think of the future of Web3 to be, which will be hopefully tens or hundreds of millions of or even billions of people transacting across a network.
00:43:53 - Nader Dabit
We can't do all of these transactions across a single network, right? Like just physics says, that's impossible. Like, yeah, Solana is actually highly scalable. It's going to handle more transactions per second than, you know, most other chains today. but like what happens when we actually scale to like, global, you know, adoption of like, Web3, or even when something, some application becomes popular for a few hours and networks, like as they exist today completely go down. So I think, like what we're headed. did you know towards this? Kind of like solving that solution. Like where? Where everyone's essentially not everyone, but obviously. But but I think most people have come to the realization that, it's due to the law of physics, impossible to scale an L1 to kind of a monolithic L1 to kind of handle the usage that we need for true, like global adoption and kind of like this is, an approach to solving that. And again, that's kind of also what I believe.
00:45:06 - Noah Hein
Cool. thanks for all of the questions. Let's go ahead and move on to, Madam Cult Leader. That's, you're up on the space. Let's see what your question.
00:45:16 - Audience member (Speaker 5)
Okay. so my question. So someone I'm going to position myself as, like, scientific communicator, blockchain communicator, like educator, whatnot. And I think what I'm trying to, like, understand is how much of this does the everyday user even need to know about? Like. It seems like from my analysis, it's like this is a very back end. Like something maybe developers need to know about. But for your average user on like we'll call the quote unquote front end of Web3, they're not going to be really concerned about like how data is being parsed on the back end should be kind of just like accept that. Or should we try to really educate people on this, like paradigm shift?
00:45:55 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, I don't think that the average user is going to know or needs to do anything. And hopefully the as long as wallet UX improves to the point where people don't need to to continue switching and, you know, understanding RPC endpoints and all this stuff within their wallet, they're still going to transact on Celestia through MetaMask.
00:46:17 - Nader Dabit
They're not going to know anything's different. The only thing that they'll hopefully notice is that the transaction is less than, you know, a penny. And it's extremely fast. That should be that's that's kind of the goal there, and that's kind of the only thing that a user would need to know if you're a developer. On the other hand, you now have like five different ways to build applications, like in the past. If you're a blockchain developer, for the most part, you're a smart contract developer and you're like, okay, I'm going to write the smart contract and I'm going to deploy it to a monolithic L1 like Solana or Ethereum. And that's kind of like what I know how to do, and that's what I do. But with modularity, you now have like five different ways that you can deploy. You can deploy a smart contract to a rollup, which is going to be kind of like in the past, how we might deploy to an L1. You're now going to be deploying to rollups.
00:47:07 - Nader Dabit
this rollup can be a rollup that someone else's deploy to make publicly accessible for you to share. Just like how, Ethereum is shared. so that's one way you can do you can you can interact in the modular world. Another way is that you can deploy your own chain or roll up to a settlement layer that's running on a modular chain like Celestia. So Ethereum has an enshrined settlement layer, but Celestia and Polygon do not. So if you want to use someone else's settlement layer, you can actually deploy your own roll up and slash app chain. Similar to how died has done with protocol, you can deploy a roll up with both Ethereum and Celestia being used together, so you can use Ethereum as the settlement layer. Since Ethereum has a settlement layer like built in, and then you can use Celestia as the data availability and consensus layer. therefore, you're able to kind of, still leverage some of the stuff that like I think that was mentioned earlier around, this this would be, I guess, important if you want to kind of like share application tokens across people, other people that are interacting on Ethereum.
00:48:30 - Nader Dabit
then you have the ability to deploy a sovereign chain or a sovereign roll up to Celestia. And this is kind of like the idea of instead of sharing the settlement layer and having to worry about, if you did have some type of hack or something on a massive DeFi protocol being unable to recover those funds through a community consensus fork, you could actually do that if you have your own sovereign chain. And then finally, you could actually just deploy your own settlement layer for other developers to build rollups on. So, like there's five different ways that you can kind of like build in this way. And I think it just opens the door up to a lot more experimentation, a lot more specialization, because we're not kind of limited to being able to only focus on, you know, doing one thing, but we have the ability to do a lot more.
00:49:24 - Audience member (Speaker 5)
Awesome. The only last thing I'll say is that I think I'm really excited for the idea of like DAOs or orgs or whatever, kind of like, you know, digital construction we want to go with, they can then like, like you said, have a DeFi application that is its own sovereign thing.
00:49:39 - Audience member (Speaker 5)
It's almost like the way I was thinking of it in my mind is almost like the L threes, but it's like almost, you know, that paradigm is kind of falling apart as we kind of explore the different ways we can like build this stuff. So that's what I'm excited for, because then the community has even more sovereign control over like like you said, if there's a hack, they can roll back the transactions and that's like super dope and higher control.
00:50:06 - Noah Hein
And I love that question. And like you think about like the kind of blockchain literacy that you want users to have. And like right now I wouldn't recommend like blockchain or Web3 to really any of my friends or family just due to like, how nefarious the space can be and how easy it is to just like, like fall and trap traps and like like if you don't don't know how to be dangerous. It's just like playing with like one, 1 or 2 very simple sublevels. But, but I think talk, talk about like the first place in the financial industry that we do and like how many people that that third party every day about like like this network work and know about how that works plugged into like at the end of the day, you just want people to be able to get uses it.
00:50:54 - Noah Hein
And then this business is the one that I really, really care about. Like these details. And hopefully if we do a good job of this infinite that, that we created, and benefiting the users that extract value information from, from I just like like the endgame layer there. So I wrote that exact question for coming on up. And now we've Eldridge. You know, you know. Come on. That's the question.
00:51:22 - Audience member (Speaker 6)
Hello? Hello, hello. I just had a question about. This is the best for our ability. And our property is just not going to work with me.
00:51:38 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, yeah, there's a handful of different, I would say not not gold, but, outcomes that come kind of kind of like building in this, this way. So I mentioned and you just mentioned scale scalability. So scale scalability is enabled by this little linear, a linear linear linear scaling of how the clients that, that actually provide almost the same, same guarantee enable the block block size increase. then you have to stop.
00:52:17 - Nader Dabit
That's another big one that I've covered already. Already? Sovereignty is the ability to kind of kind of deploy your own change and share the settlement with the rest of that network, which is out there today. you know, flexibility, I think is another flexibility in that as well as well as different, different layers. So, so if you have the ability to kind of kind of build and change things and update things that work well, well, your, your application or your, your use case, you don't you don't actually have to kind of kind of inherit the that, that infrastructure that, that long one. So, so if you're building on you, you essentially you're, you're kind of stuck with the, you know, you know, implementation of writing, their implementation, writing, which I like on a what and how like performance that network in their in their career. And I have to say, even within the even the Solana own, you know, people within that community and the developer relations people compared to the class because because it's that bad out of an experience.
00:53:34 - Nader Dabit
And it's not a good experience because like, like, you know, there's a lot, a lot of even, you know, not less. Well, well kind of kind of a lot. And I'm a developer in two years and, you know, you know, I do not like writing online. one of the things that I have that that's been really, really great, has been the anchor frame framework would make a lot better, but still not a lot, a lot of fun anyway, anyway. But but what if you can still, you know, build, you know, you know, and all these things, like watch a certain execution and that's kind of like one thing that I think, I think is going to make a huge we're going to we're going to a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of implementation improvements there. yeah.
00:54:21 - Audience member (Speaker 6)
Okay. on that topic, I guess the program was great. It's it's pretty pretty nice and easy here, right? Right. And.
00:54:32 - Audience member (Speaker 6)
Right, right. Including the programs. And then, then along with that. And then another question about, like, timelines. You guys are aware of becoming common ground states because. Because they're they're just like, like science advisory services without using any sense. So basically there's only, basically sustaining the trust on individual content without relying on the data.
00:55:04 - Nader Dabit
No, no, no, no, but I'll definitely need to take a look. Is there any way that you can And we are going to check that out.
00:55:14 - Audience member (Speaker 6)
Yeah. That was that was really, really, really super easy to start because they were like, okay, conventional version 1.1 here. And then, then give them the power to control that app. So yeah. Yeah I'll pull up something, see what you like.
00:55:36 - Noah Hein
Like yeah. Yeah. Thanks for all the questions and for people that are interested and would like to read, read the specifically you can go go ahead and say is the name there. It's pretty pretty cool. So it's a nice programming language, that you wrap up there like like any place else you'd like to look like.
00:55:56 - Noah Hein
You're going to learn more and more about that. I shudder to think we're going to learn more and more.
00:56:04 - Nader Dabit
Yeah, yeah. Let me just pin, a tweet here, quick? We're not, we're not. There we go. I'm just just scared at the top of the thread that goes through some of some of the things that I had. Maybe what you want to share. I'm happy to be here for a few weeks. Around and around, around around. Not only on blockchain in general. And, there's a there's a link in the bottom in particular that I want to check out that are a lot more than anything that we have here. So very, very rare to see here. Yeah. I'll link to like ten different different blog blog posts and podcast interviews. Founders. So yeah, yeah. One thing I think that will like underscored that this technology is still very, very it's still very, very it's, it's it's something it's an infinite process. Just just realized, could could be, could could work like, like very early.
00:57:02 - Nader Dabit
not not too long. Yeah. Like like maybe. Maybe when? The last couple of years. and even work, work towards building it out. And we're finally getting along our main network in the beginning of next, next year. probably a half maybe. However long it takes to finish the proof of proof. And then then I'll be able to go out there. So, so, you know, you know, I still feel like there is, there is, there is, there is an actual network. Network today. But I always think that like getting it in early on, really, really powerful technologies will result in very, very, you know, you know, large like benefits. If they if they don't, we're all so, so, so, so, you know, you know, if you're, you're interested in being a leading, cutting edge of the future of your website. I personally think that's where we're going to be. And, you know, as soon as the different incentive network come out, you can often.
00:58:04 - Nader Dabit
take pictures and build relationships within the community and get good opportunities, things like that. So just keep it. Keep an eye on you know what we're doing. Who is your dream team? Building out the ethereal version of people. And if you follow, like downtown, you'll be kept up to date with everything going. Going on. Anything.
00:58:29 - Noah Hein
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on and for joining us. I hope you'll learn a thing or two too. I definitely did, and I appreciate everyone. The one who came up and I asked them about anything. Thanks for joining one of the first steps up and up and speaking. I know, I know a lot of people maybe, maybe nervous to shows that come on stage and ask questions.
00:58:54 - Nader Dabit
Thank you for having us.
00:58:58 - Noah Hein
I had a wonderful day, everybody.