NB: Since the recording of this podcast LazyLedger changed their name to Celestia.

Celestia is a scalable general-purpose data availability layer for decentralized apps and trust-minimized sidechains. It is a minimal, viable blockchain which does time stamping and block ordering.

Think back to Bitcoin in the early days, before Ethereum. Layer-2 systems were being built on top of Bitcoin and were leveraging Bitcoin’s consensus layer. This is what Celestia is doing, although it is purpose built and scalable for the exact use case. The implementation details are a lot more complex, and the vision is to create a modular pluggable Layer-1 that does nothing but consensus and data availability. It is designed for people who want to create their blockchain without consensus.

The project is yet to be launched, however we had Ismail Khoffi, Co-Founder and CTO, and Mustafa Al-Bassam, Co-Founder and CEO on the show to give us a deep technical overview and vision of Celestia.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Ismail and Mustafa's backgrounds, and how they got into the crypto space
• How Ismail and Mustafa met and created Celestia
• The Data Availability paper which was co-written with Vitalik and introduction to Celestia
• The purpose and function of Celestia
• How data availability works and the advantages and disadvantages to their ledger
• The purpose of Celestia
• How transaction fees work
• The interoperability aspect
• Honest validators on the block
• Non-interactive proofs on Celestia
• The interaction between Celestia and Cosmos SDK
• How will Celestia compete with other Layer One's, in particular Filecoin
• When the ledger will be launched

Episode links:

• Celestia website
• Celestia blog
• GitHub
• Celestia Twitter
• Ismail on Twitter
• Mustafa on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Algorand: To learn more about Algorand and how it’s unique design makes it easy for developers to build sophisticated applications. - https://algorand.com/epicenter

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/359