What is Celestia, and how does it work?

Key Takeaway

Celestia has brought a lot of novelty to the blockchain industry. It is based on a modular architecture, focusing on solving the problem of scalability and presenting a different approach to the aspect of data availability. Learn the details of how Celestia works - an infrastructure for building and maintaining your own blockchain. This guide will help you understand exactly what it is and what problems it solves.

Celestia, i.e. modular blockchain

Let's start by explaining the concept of modularity. Blockchain's work is based on several fundamental activities, which include data availability, consensus, execution, and settlement. In the case of traditional networks like Bitcoin, all of the above activities are performed within a single, integrated system. Such blockchains are referred to as monolithic. An alternative is a modular architecture, where network functions are broken up into separate activities, allowing for better flexibility and scalability.

How does Celestia work and what problem does it solve?

Celestia is a database that provides data availability and consensus. It works on the basis of the Tendermint Proof-of-Stake algorithm, but it should be emphasized that it is only used to rank transactions, not to check or agree on their correctness itself. These tasks rest with the projects that upload the data. Celestia, on the other hand, only checks their completeness.

The cryptocurrency driving the blockchain is $TIA, intended to cover fees by developers, as the gas used by rollups, staking, and management functions. Its supply is 1 billion coins, with inflation of 8% in the first year. With each subsequent year, inflation will decrease by 10%, until it reaches 1.5%.

Celestia's data accessibility

Blockchain is transparent and secure thanks to data availability. It's the certainty that a network participant can download transaction data at any time to verify a block. In traditional blockchain, the problem is the need to download the full data to do so. This negatively affects scalability and decentralization.

Celestia comes with a solution, called Data Availability Sampling (DAS). It relies on light nodes to check data availability based on samples, instead of an entire block. This is allowed by the 2-Dimensional Reed-Solomon coding scheme. The efficiency of this method is 99.999%. This method allows for improved scalability - the greater the number of light nodes, the greater the security and ability to increase the size of the entire network. Within the data availability (DA) layer, there are such layers as Full Storage storing all data; the Light Node described above, and the Bridge Node connecting the DA network to the consensus network.

In the context of Celestia's operation, it is also worth mentioning Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMT), which, simply put, allow higher layers to download only the data that interests them. In practice, this means that a project can fetch the transaction info that matters to it, ignoring the data of another project. This can occur because the mentioned info is stored in a single space. There is then no need for bridging.

Summarizing

Celestia is a new approach to blockchain operation. It opens a new chapter in which blockchains will be able to be built using light nodes. The developers of the network are consistently working on its development, announcing the implementation of the next steps for the project. Without a doubt, Celestia is worth watching from both the technical and market news side.