Unchained

How Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin Inspired Key Parts of Celestia - Ep. 672

Listen Later

Mustafa Al-Bassam was a teenage hacktivist who outsmarted a US government contractor, shamed the Westboro Baptist Church, hacked Sony a record number of times, and eventually got arrested—though his 80 transgressions got halved for a funny reason. 

At the Modular Summit in Brussels, Laura had a fireside chat with Mustafa to discuss how he went from his teenage years as the head of LulzSec and member of Anonymous to founding Celestia, a project aiming to solve key issues in blockchain scalability by going with a modular approach. 

He also discussed data availability sampling, why he believes Celestia has achieved significant product-market fit since its launch, and the three key components of Celestia’s road map.

Show highlights:

  • 00:00 Intro
  • 01:47 Mustafa’s origin story and how he became a developer who ended up hacking FBI affiliates and Fox News
  • 05:32 How he hacked a military contractor to the US Department of Defense and Sony
  • 09:16 Why Mustafa was arrested at the age of 16
  • 11:14 What about Bitcoin attracted his attention and got him interested in the industry
  • 15:22 Why he founded Celestia, after doing a PhD in scaling blockchains and understanding the problems of sharding
  • 21:16 What data availability sampling is and why it is important
  • 23:52 Why Mustafa believes that Celestia has had “extreme product market fit” since the launch
  • 26:16 What’s next for Celestia and why Mustafa is so excited about the possibilities that increased block size can enable
  • 29:36 How Celestia is working with zero knowledge accounts for defragmenting liquidity in rollups and access liquidity even within the Cosmos ecosystem
  • 30:57 What the endgame for Celestia and the overall industry looks like, according to Mustafa
  • 37:36 Q&A with the audience
  • 44:44 Crypto News Recap


    • Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com

    Thank you to our sponsors!
    • iTrustCapital
    • Polkadot
    • PlayFi Labs
      • Guest
      • Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia Labs.
      • Previous appearance on Unchained: Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups
        • Links
        • Previous coverage of Unchained on modular blockchains:
        • Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
        • What Are Modular Blockchains? A Beginner's Guide

          • Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

          ...more
          View all episodesView all episodes
          Download on the App Store
          UnchainedBy Laura Shin