Celestia

Celestia is a modular blockchain network whose goal is to build a scalable data availability layer, enabling the next generation of scalable blockchain architectures - modular blockchains. Celestia scales by decoupling execution from consensus and introducing a new primitive, data availability sampling.

The former entails that Celestia is only responsible for ordering transactions and guaranteeing their data availability; this is similar to reducing consensus to atomic broadcast.

The latter provides an efficient solution to the data availability problem by only requiring resource-limited light nodes to sample a small number of random chunks from each block to verify data availability.

Interestingly, more light nodes that participate in sampling increases the amount of data that the network can safely handle, enabling the block size to increase without equally increasing the cost to verify the chain.

The meaning of Celestia

They’ve chosen the name Celestia which means “heavenly” or “of the sky”. Celestia does not just sound nice, it has a deeper meaning that is symbolic of the underlying protocol we are building.

Like the sky, Celestia is open, expansive and unbounded. Celestia is a universal consensus network that gives as much freedom as possible for developers and communities to build their own custom blockchains. Celestia also acts as a shared security layer to enable these individual chains to connect and interoperate with each other in the same way that stars cluster and connect to form constellations.

Data availability proofs power Celestia by ensuring that the chain is transparent and auditable by anyone. The more users there are requesting these proofs, the more security and throughput the chain will have. Celestia users are like stars which create a small amount of light on their own, but the more stars there are, the brighter the night sky becomes.

Celestia’s vision also aligns with that of Cosmos. They too see value in lowering the barrier for people to deploy their own blockchains and envision a future of heterogeneous, interconnected blockchains. They will leverage infrastructure from the Cosmos ecosystem and contribute some infrastructure of their own to help push this vision closer to reality.

Celestia is the missing piece of the Cosmos architecture. It provides a shared security layer for blockchains communicating with each other using IBC, unlocking limitless potential.